LET IT SNOW

In the wake of Netflix’s hit series

Narcos, which in its first season chronicled the birth of the Colombian cocaine trade and rise and fall of Pablo Escobar, there has been a flurry of shows about drug trafficking.

Narcos is in its fourth season. El Chapo (Netflix), the story of Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaqin Guzman, who has exported more than 500 tonnes of coke to the US, is in its third season.

Queen of the South (on Hotstar here), based on the novel by Arturo PerezReverte, is in its third season. Ozarks (Netflix) is gearing up for season two.

The Cocaine Coast (Netflix), about the coke business in Spain in the 1980s, just dropped. Then there’s John Singleton’s Snowfall (Hotstar), the story of how cocaine came to the black ghettos of the US, now entering its second term.

All these shows dabble in criticism of the CIA’s involvement in the drug business, which it used as a conduit for funneling money to the Contra rebels fighting the communist regime in Nicaragua. But at bottom they tend to be xenophobic, rather than selfcritical. That’s most evident in Ozarks, which pits a city liberal-turned-cartel money launderer against the “immigrating” Mexican cartel, along with a wily, homegrown Hillbilly heroin trafficker who’s a loose stand in for the Trump era “deplorables”. But the same undercurrent runs through them all.

Snowfall is unique in its focus on the black neighbourhoods that were both the worst damaged by the trade and the most influenced by it culturally. The series suffers from the sameness of story arc that troubles all these post-Scarface drug empire stories. But it makes for interesting nostalgic viewing if you remember N.W.A. and

Boyz n the Hood (1991).