Cocaine Cowboys

Prohibit a substance and its price will rise; with big profits available beyond the protection of the law, violence will follow. Concentrate the trade for an entire country through one city and an economic boom will combine with a murder epidemic. This was what happened to Miami with cocaine in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a story told exhilaratingly in Billy Corbern's fast-moving documentary 'Cocaine Cowboys'. It's a gripping tale, and the sheer quantity of money and death in it is truly horrifying. And yet, there's also a sense in which this film leaves a slightly sour taste in the mouth, as essentially it's a platform for a pair of major smugglers and one psychopathic killer to wax lyrical about the good old days, relatively free of moral condemnation. Still, it's an amazing story, one that seems more fit to video games than to real life, and its epilogue was the construction of much of the modern city with the proceeds from the trade.