• The number of people murdered in Mexico in 2010 would reach more than twenty thousand, or about five times the figure recorded across all of Western Europe.

• confronted with the narcotics industry’s awesome supply side. And the more I wrote about el narcotráfico, the more I came to realize what it most closely resembled: a global, highly organized business.

• Time and again, the most ruthless outlaws described to me the same mundane problems that blight the lives of other entrepreneurs: managing personnel, navigating government regulations, finding reliable suppliers, and dealing with competitors.

• cocaine intercepted in Colombia is sometimes estimated. In reality, drugs, like beef, have to go through a long value-adding chain before they reach their final “street price.” A gram of marijuana might fetch $3 in a Mexico City nightclub, or $5 in an American college dorm. But hidden in a warehouse in Tijuana—yet to be smuggled across the border, divided into retail-size quantities, and furtively marketed to consumers—it is worth much less.

• Mexican cartels have expanded on a franchise basis, with the same success as McDonald’s.

• This book is a business manual for drug lords. But it is also a blueprint for how to defeat them.

• Cocaine is consumed in every country on earth, but virtually every speck of it starts its life in one of three countries in South America: Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru. The drug, which can be snorted as powder or smoked in the form of crystals of “crack” cocaine, is made from the coca plant, a hardy bush that is most at home in the foothills of the Andes. I have come to Bolivia to see for myself how coca is grown, and to find out more about the economics at the very start of the cocaine business’s long, violent, and fabulously profitable supply chain.

• But Bolivia has a lighter regime than other South American countries when it comes to coca. The leaf has been consumed in the Andes since long before Europeans arrived in the Americas. Some people like to brew it in tea, whereas others simply chew the leaves in handfuls (Bolivian peasants can often be seen with one bulging cheek, sucking on a wad of leaves as they go about their business).

• When Colombia redoubled its efforts and drove the farmers out, the coca terraces reappeared in Peru. Western observers call this the “balloon effect”: if you squeeze in one place, it bulges up somewhere else. Latin Americans have an earthier name for the same phenomenon—the “cockroach effect.” Just like cockroaches, you can chase drug traffickers out of one room, but they soon take up residence somewhere else in the house.

• In the United States, a gram of pure cocaine today costs about $180. (A typical gram bought on the street costs about half that, because it is only about 50 percent pure.)

• Since the 1990s, the number of people regularly using cocaine in the United States has held pretty steady at between about 1.5 million and 2 million people. Recently there has been a significant dip in US consumption, but most of that has been made up for by much higher demand in Europe.

• Critics of retailers such as Walmart accuse them of being “monopsonies”—that is, dominant buyers of certain products. (Just as the word monopoly is derived from the Greek for “single seller,” monopsony means “single buyer.”)

• (Brazil is now the world’s second-biggest market for cocaine, after the United States, and the biggest bar none for crack.)

• To make that much cocaine, one needs somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 kilograms of dried coca leaves. Based on price data from Colombia obtained by Gallego and Rico, that would cost about $385. Once this is converted into a kilo of cocaine, it can sell in Colombia for $800. According to figures pulled together by Beau Kilmer and Peter Reuter at the RAND Corporation, an American think tank, that same kilo is worth $2,200 by the time it is exported from Colombia, and it has climbed to $14,500 by the time it is imported to the United States. After being transferred to a midlevel dealer, its price climbs to $19,500. Finally, it is sold by street-level dealers for $78,000.

• It would mean that a kilogram of pure cocaine sold at the retail level in the United States would cost an extra $770—that is, $122,770, rather than $122,000. That would mean that one pure gram would cost $122.77 rather than $122: a rise of 77 cents. In sum, by trebling the price of cocaine’s raw ingredient in South America—something no policy has yet gotten close to achieving—the best-case scenario is that cocaine’s retail price in the United States would rise by 0.6 percent.

• In reality, it is more like the art market, in which the tiny cost of the raw materials is insignificant compared with the high price of the finished product. Attempts to raise the price of cocaine by forcing up the cost of coca leaves is a bit like trying to drive up the price of art by raising the cost of paint. Gerhard Richter, whose canvases sell for up to $46 million, would not lose sleep if the price of the oil paints used in his works of art doubled, or even quintupled. And in the same way, as long as counternarcotics agencies focus their fire on the earliest, lowest-value stages in the cocaine supply chain, the drug cartels need not worry too much about their bottom lines.

• When you fly into the city, it is hard to tell where Juárez ends and El Paso, in Texas, begins.

• The drug trade in Juárez had long been controlled by the Carrillo Fuentes Organization, often called simply the Juárez cartel. In the 1990s, the gang was run by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as the “Lord of the Skies” because of the fleet of aircraft he kept to import Colombian cocaine. In a plot twist straight out of a bad gangster film, Amado died in 1997 in Mexico City while undergoing plastic surgery to disguise his appearance.

• The Sinaloa and Juárez gangs soon began to quarrel. In 2004, Rodolfo, the youngest of the Carrillo Fuentes brothers of Juárez, was murdered outside a cinema in Sinaloa. El Chapo was widely suspected of having ordered the hit. Later that year, El Chapo’s brother, Arturo, was killed in prison, in what may have been retaliation. Four relatively calm years passed before one of El Chapo’s sons, Édgar Guzmán, was shot dead outside a shopping center in Sinaloa.

• Consider the case of a proposed merger between General Electric (GE) and Honeywell in 2000. To the horror of its competitors, GE announced that it intended to acquire Honeywell, a giant technology firm that manufactures everything from burglar alarms to helicopter parts. America’s competition authorities gave the deal the go-ahead. But GE’s rivals were not going to settle for that, so they went elsewhere, to the European competition authorities. Examining the same facts, the European commissioners reached a different conclusion: the deal was not in the interests of competition, they found, noting that Honeywell’s jet-engine business, when combined with GE’s own portfolio, could create a monopoly in some markets. GE’s rivals were thus able to block the decision of one regulator by appealing to another.

• A nationwide opinion poll carried out by the Reforma newspaper found that only 53 percent of respondents approved of his arrest, with 28 percent saying they actively disapproved.1 Mexican drug traffickers are celebrated in narcocorridos, bouncy trombone-and-accordion ballads that tell of their exploits and their skill in outwitting the police.

• The little giant’s imprisonment did not last long: in July 2015, little more than a year after his capture, the Mexican government announced that he had slipped through their fingers yet again. Closed-circuit TV (CCTV) footage of the kingpin’s prison cell, later released by red-faced officials, shows Shorty pacing around before walking around the corner into his personal bathroom—and never coming back. Prison wardens discovered a hole in the bottom of his shower, leading to a professionally built, mile-long tunnel, complete with primitive ventilation pipes and a motorbike mounted on rails, used to move earth and rubble.

• legalized lying” is how H. G. Wells described the advertising business; “the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket”

• Not everyone thinks that the do-gooding is worth it. Many shareholders wonder what spending on philanthropic ventures—protecting the environment, feeding the poor, saving the whale—really does to improve the value of a company.

• “Donated by Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano,” followed by a quote from Psalms. Lazcano, also known as “The Executioner,” was the leader of the Zetas cartel and reportedly enjoyed feeding his victims to pet lions and tigers. (He met a more ordinary end, shot dead by marines in 2012.)

• Where the state is weak, people find unorthodox and sometimes extralegal ways of solving problems that ought to be fixed by public authorities. One of the first signs of state failure is when people begin to take the law into their own hands. In the weak, chaotic countries of Central America, for instance, the local newspapers are full of stories of towns that have rounded up local thieves or rapists and given them a public beating, or worse.

• Herschel Grossman, an American economist, created a model of mafia-provided public services and found that in some cases, competition between the state and the mob could result in public services that were better than those offered when the state alone provided them.

• For businesspeople who want to make a bit of extra money and don’t mind breaking competition rules, organized criminal gangs thus provide a useful service in enforcing contracts. The evidence is that they charge quite reasonable prices for doing so: witnesses say that the New York mafia’s fee for fixing prices in the concrete industry was only 2 percent of the contract price; in Sicily, the construction industry reportedly paid 5 percent to the mafia (of which it kept 3 percent and used the remaining 2 percent to pay bribes to politicians).

• Buy cocaine in Europe or the United States and it is an uncomfortable certainty that you have helped to pay for someone to be tortured to death in a place like Reynosa.

• When it comes to corruption in the public sector, Honduras has a track record that few can rival. It was the original “banana republic,” so called because its politicians were so easily bribed and bossed around by the foreign fruit companies that arrived in the nineteenth century. The president of the day was ousted in 1974 after it emerged that he had accepted $1.25 million from the United Fruit Company in return for lowering certain export tariffs.

• Jack Welch, a former head of General Electric, has mused that it would be handy for a firm to have its factories on giant barges, so that they could be floated around the world, docking in whichever country offered the best economic conditions at the time.

• Even before the age of offshoring, the narcotics trade was an early standard-bearer of globalization, with prim Victorians enthusiastically trading drugs along with tea and spices as world trade opened up in the nineteenth century. Britain twice went to war with China to keep the international opium trade alive.

• Take the “Global Competitiveness Report.” The first section on its scorecard is devoted to assessing the strength of public institutions. For ordinary firms, strong state institutions—courts of law, police forces, parliaments, and so on—are a desirable thing in a host country. Business is slowed down if firms keep being bothered for bribes every time they apply for planning permission; enforcing contracts is made impossible if rival companies can secretly persuade judges to rule in their favor. For cartels it is just the opposite: countries with weak institutions make ideal places to set up shop.

• places where criminal companies ought to feel more at home are Guatemala and Honduras, which both score below three points, on average. Guatemala stands out for having among the least-trusted politicians in the world, and Honduran businesses report that they incur huge costs from crime and violence. A Mexican cartel looking for an offshore base would be well advised to try these two countries first.

• The first franchising “royalties” were literally paid to monarchs. Franchises, whose name comes from the French word franche, meaning “free” or “exempt,” were granted by medieval kings, who would give a person the right to carry out some service or other—building a road, organizing a market, collecting taxes—and in return levy a fee.

• The benefits to both parties are similar to those that accrue to franchiser and franchisee in the ordinary business world. For the franchising company, it means rapid, self-financing growth.

• Rather than being a mere employee, a cog in a vast machine, a Zeta franchisee has responsibility for wringing the most money possible out of the particular patch that he has been given. With this responsibility comes what Peter Drucker, perhaps the most influential of all management gurus, described as the “managerial attitude”—more important than pay or skill, he argued, this attitude “makes the individual see his job, his work, and his product the way a manager sees them, that is, in relation to the group and the product as a whole.”

• hangings. A gruesome murder carried out by the Zetas in northern Mexico hardens the image of its franchises all over the world, just as an advertising campaign by McDonald’s at the World Cup in Brazil strengthens the appeal of its outlets everywhere else.

• Murdering Zapata broke a serious unwritten rule of Mexico’s cartels: never kill Americans, and especially not American cops. In spite of the endemic violence in the country and the high level of involvement of American agents in Mexican affairs, Zapata is believed to have been the first American law-enforcement official to die in the line of duty in Mexico since 1985.

• Just as a single blunder in a restaurant kitchen can tarnish a company’s global brand, a single dire mistake by a group of Zetas affiliates triggered devastating strikes against the cartel’s top leadership. Licensing your brand comes with serious risks attached.

• In its terror campaign against the Colombian state, the Medellín cartel brought down a passenger airliner, killing 107 people onboard. Organizations like these represented an existential threat to the state itself. The same is not true of networks of thugs like the Zetas, for all the violence they cause.

• I ask the friendly, bearded young man behind the counter if he has any legal highs for sale. “Well, they’re not ‘highs,’ because they’re not for human consumption,” he says, his freckled young face completely inscrutable. “But”—and he raises an eyebrow very slightly—“I do have some aromatherapy incense, if you would like to see that.” I ask to examine a selection, and he brings out five packets of what he says are the most popular ones (“I can’t actually recommend any, obviously”) from under the counter.

• Kiwis grow and smoke masses of it—in fact, according to the United Nations, no country in the world smokes more marijuana per person than New Zealand, where one in seven adults claims to have gotten stoned in the past year. But it isn’t only pot: New Zealand also has the second-highest consumption of amphetamines,1 which are made locally, in small laboratories dotted all over the islands. Despite its tiny population, New Zealand shuts down more crystal-meth labs each year than any country in the world apart from the United States and Ukraine.

• Bitcoin’s value is ludicrously volatile: its price shot up from less than $15 at the beginning of 2013 to nearly $1,000 in November of that year, before falling back to $300 by the end of 2014. But online shoppers can live with this because, like TOR, Bitcoin provides them with a cloak of anonymity.

• Perhaps strangest of all, one vendor is hawking sachets of “synthetic clean urine,” aimed at people who need help passing a drug test. For true realism, the vendor, CleanU, also sells an accessory called the ScreenyWeeny, “the world’s best fake penis, with Push&Piss technology.” The Weeny comes in five colors, from NordicWhite to LatinoBrown. Reviews are generally positive.

• And it does indeed seem that the quality of the drugs sold online is pretty high. A study of synthetic cannabis products in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology found that “chemicals obtained from online vendors were of comparable purity to those from traditional research chemical suppliers.”

• A greater effort to publicize the acts of violence in supplier countries that are funded by consumers in the rich world might help to increase the taboo around illegal drugs—particularly cocaine—making them less likely to be offered to family or friends.

• Diversification mania reached its peak in 1977, when Coca-Cola attempted to enter the wine industry, with the acquisition of Taylor Wines. Perhaps unsurprisingly, no one much liked the idea of Château Coke, and the idea flopped.

• “We had great hopes for Obama. We expected there would be a big reform to help migrants,” she says. But it was “todo lo contrario”—exactly the opposite.

• Estimates of exactly how much money the Mexican cartels make from different drugs vary widely, but everyone agrees that cocaine and marijuana make up the lion’s share of their drug income. Depending on whose estimate you trust, the proportion of total drug income accounted for by cocaine and marijuana alone is probably somewhere between 74 percent (based on a midpoint estimate by the RAND Corporation) and 90 percent (according to a slightly dubious calculation by the US Office of National Drug Control).

• Cocaine, it found, was slightly safer, with a ratio of fifteen to one.

• For heroin, the ratio between an effective dose and a deadly one is just six to one.

• Mexico is now the world’s third-biggest poppy grower, after Afghanistan and Myanmar.

• Put together, sex and drugs are worth more to Britain than agriculture.

• saw ‘variety of ways’ I god damned near puked. And