Are Amy Winehouse and other drug-taking celebrities making West Africa the “coke coast”?
The UN official in charge of drugs and crime, Antonio Maria Costa, blames celebrities who openly take drugs (in particular Amy Winehouse) for glamorizing cocaine and thus helping to turn West Africa’s former “gold coast” into a “coke coast.” Drugs from Latin America are smuggled to Europe via poorly policed West African countries. Costa draws a historical analogy: once Europe devastated West Africa with the slave trade and now it devastates West Africa with the drugs trade. For more, see here.
