By Cocaine Hoppers (2021) by Jude Roys Oboh is the most authoritative publication in recent times that clinically x-rays the Nigerian worldwide cocaine trafficking enterprise using a combination of a scholarly empirical technique and an integrated street-wise reportorial style.
Before now, or before coming across the book, the only thing many people knew about the menace of cocaine and other types of drug trafficking was the constant news of anti-drug law enforcement agencies arresting Nigerian drug couriers at airports at home and abroad; criminal justice systems of countries sentencing and executing drug traffickers at home and abroad; and successful raids by anti-drug law enforcement agents on drug-laden warehouses or marijuana farms.
We are living witnesses to the scourge of drug usage in our culture, which affects our kids and fuels all manner of linked crimes. Around all of this tangential knowledge about the phenomena of drug trafficking in our society is the unsubstantiated generalized idea of our society’s elites’ involvement in drug trafficking, which the Oboh referred to as “the myth of elite involvement.”
What Jude Roys Oboh has done in Cocaine Hoppers is to distill two decades of field research in Nigeria and across all renowned centers where Nigerians are involved in the illicit drug trade into the requirements of an academic inquiry, resulting in an insightful book that lays bare – the intricacies, modus operandi, practitioners, sociology, the politics and economics of Nigeria’s international cocaine trafficking sector.
According to the author, the book aims to provide general solutions to the following questions:
What is Nigeria’s and Nigerians’ role in the international cocaine trade? What are the mechanisms underlying Nigerians’ success in the global cocaine trade? What is Nigerian engagement in its principal cocaine export country (Brazil) and in global destination countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Indonesia, and China, and how can this involvement be explained?
The author’s interviews with over 250 people involved in the trade at the environment where they transact their businesses, as well as the scouring of secondary data, institutional reports, media publications, and academic theories in the fields of criminology, sociology, and economics that seek to explain the motivation behind the crimes, provided numerous answers in the book’s nine chapters (pg 274).
Cocaine Hoppers is a must-read for anyone interested in delving into the dark realm of Nigerian international cocaine trafficking as a subject of study or for the sake of enlightenment.
