Black Unicorn's talk at Saturday's meeting

[Bill Stewart]

In Part One of "Squeezing the Jello" we covered the basics of the production
of Cocaine HCl. We touched on the economic incentives to produce cocaine,
down to the level of the peasant farmer. We also introduced some of the
major players in the Medellin and Cali Cartels based in Columbia, examined
their development into the "godfathers of cocaine" and discussed the
challenges they faced in producing a market and distribution network for
cocaine in the United States. We examined the evolution of the cocaine
market and the increasing challenges to the transportation and logistic
segments of international narcotics trafficking starting primarily in the
Reagan era. We discovered the first hints of the adaptive nature of cocaine
smuggling and the narcotics trafficking empires, now risen in power and
influence both in Latin America and in the United States. Finally, we
discussed the increasing technological and military involvement in the "war
on drugs" and the changes in the cocaine trade, including the fall of the
great cartels, that followed those developments. We ended with a
description of the status quo of the cocaine trade today.

In Part Two, we will review some of the things we learned in Part One. We
will examine the cocaine trade again with an emphasis on its economic
impacts and changes over the last three decades. We will go over the major
players in the trade and their eventual fates. We will transition to the
current state of affairs in the cocaine trade and draw some conclusions
about the effectiveness of enforcement efforts given the evolved and
advanced nature of the international narcotics trade. Finally, we will
examine in detail the fates of the large players in the trade, the missteps
they may have made and how the trade has evolved. The talk will end with
some predications about the direction of the cocaine trade, the prospects
for stopping the import of cocaine into the United States and the lessons we
might learn about underground economies from the more than three decades of
experience the international narcotics smuggling trade has given us.
Methods we might use to apply these lessons to cypherpunky projects will be
outlined and some related and future projects will be introduced to the
group.

See you there.