Review of Jude Roys Oboh’s Cocaine Hoppers

Jude Roys Oboh’s Cocaine Hoppers (2021) can be summarily described as a most authoritative work in recent times that clinically x-rays the Nigerian international cocaine trafficking business with a combination of a scholarly empirical approach alongside an embedded street-wise reportorial style.

Before now, or before encountering the book, the much many knew about the menace of cocaine and other kinds of drug trafficking is the unceasing news of arrests of Nigerian drug couriers at airports at home and abroad by anti-drug law enforcement agencies; the sentencing and execution of drug traffickers at home and abroad by the criminal justice systems of countries, and the successful raids by anti-drug law enforcement agents on drug laden warehouses or marijuana farms, in addition to the arrests of some minions and barons.

We are living witnesses to the menace of drug abuse in our society as it effects the youthful population and fuels all kinds of associated crimes. Surrounding all this peripheral knowledge of the phenomena of drug trafficking in our society is the unverified generalized perception of the involvement of our society’s elites in drug trafficking, which the Oboh referred to as “the myth of elite involvement’.

What the author has done in Cocaine Hoppers is to transform two decades of field research in Nigeria and across all renowned centers where Nigerians are involved in the illicit drug trade, distilled that into the requirements of an academic inquiry to give us an insightful book that lays bare – the intricacies, modus operand, the practitioners, the sociology, the politics and the economics of the Nigerian international cocaine trafficking industry.

The book as stated by the author broadly seeks to provide answers to the following questions:

What is the role of Nigeria and Nigerians in the international cocaine trade? What are the mechanisms behind the success of Nigerians in the global cocaine trade? What is the involvement of Nigerians in its primary cocaine export country (Brazil) and in destination countries globally, including the United States, United Kingdom, Indonesia and China and how can this involvement be explained?

Copious answers were provided in the nine chapters of the book to the above research questions and many more derived from the author’s interviews of over 250 persons involved in the trade at the environment where they transact their businesses and the scouring of secondary data, institutional reports, media publications and academic theories in the fields of criminology, sociology and economics that seeks to explain the motivation behind the crimes (pg 274).

Cocaine Hoppers is a recommended read for all and sundry interested in unraveling the dark world of Nigerian international cocaine trafficking as a subject of study or for the mere seeking of enlightenment.