The cocaine trade has enormous social and ecological consequences on both global and local scales. The production of cocaine involves large scale deforestation and pollution as a result of the discarding of the reagents used to process from leaf to final product. Western governments have been pursuing the so-called war on drugs for many years at a cost of billions of dollars. But how successful has this approach been? Is a hard line approach the only solution? In this forum we will discuss this and alternative approaches to tackling the problem.