Beyond Addiction: The Environmental Cost of the Drug Trade

Drugs are illegal for a reason. That’s what conventional wisdom tells us, even as we acknowledge moral gray areas like marijuana legalization and widespread prescription drug usage.

The thing is, those reasons are more complicated than most of us might have guessed. Besides the obvious personal and societal harm that drug abuse and trafficking can cause, these are hardly the only factors at work. As it turns out, the environment might be another all-too-silent victim of our collective fascination with narcotics.

Below I’ll lay out just how it is that the drug trade has come to impact the natural world in countries …read more