A photographer has spent the best part of a decade documenting the War on Drugs — looking at where cocaine comes from and where it ends up.
Consumption and production of cocaine have never been higher, despite more than 50 years of the War on Drugs. For many Europeans and North Americans, cocaine is a party drug. For many Latin Americans, it’s a source of bloodshed, violence, corruption, and death.
Danish photographer Mads Nissen’s new reportage book, Sangre Blanca, is the most significant exploration of the cocaine industry via the medium of photojournalism to date.
It delves into the murky depths of the cocaine trade, examining the human consequences along its journey—from the neglected countryside of Colombia to cartel lands of Mexico, to (c)raving consumers on a European dancefloor. The publication, with photos taken between 2016 and 2025, takes us across countries and continents over almost a decade.
Illegal drugs now constitute the world’s largest black market, bringing in corruption, underdevelopment, and extraordinarily high murder rates, particularly in South and Central America. Entire societies and nations are being destabilized. Despite decades of war and countless efforts to stop it, Colombia remains at the epicentre of the business. No country produces more cocaine (approximately two-thirds, according to UNODC), and no country has suffered more. From Colombia, cocaine travels by land, sea, and air to reach buyers, mainly in the U.S. and Europe. At every stop, the cocaine business both gives and takes.
In Mexico, a key transit hub, the lucrative trade has empowered narco-cartels so immensely that many levels of society seem entangled in their influence. Meanwhile, their heavily armed cartels spread terror and instability, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes. In Europe, cocaine use is becoming increasingly socially acceptable. The continent has now become the largest market in the world, driving demand even higher. From a safe distance from the dirty business, European consumers can conveniently place orders online and have cocaine delivered to their doorsteps within an hour.
“Sangre Blanca is my attempt to link a globalized, violent and confusing world. Over years of work across 10 countries, I met people on every side of the cocaine trade and I realized how they all, in their own ways, are trying to break free—free from poverty, hopelessness, or meaninglessness; from violence, or from the noise inside their own minds,” Nissen says.
“I was driven by a need to understand the system that connects us — the links between the world’s most violent cities and Europe’s hunger for intensity or instant pleasure. I witnessed a booming industry alongside a failing strategy, where the blame and the cost are largely offloaded onto already fragile communities. I came to realize that there is no such thing as pure cocaine. It is always soaked in blood.”
Nissen’s book is a collaboration with Colombian artist Juan Arreaza, whose paintings weave another visual voice and layer into the work. In his expressive oil paintings, Arreaza draws on his observations of nightlife across Europe and the United States, where young people party on the very substance that is devastating his homeland. And using chemicals sourced from cocaine laboratories, Arreaza portrays a gallery of powerful and historical figures who shaped the drug trade and its wars.
Sagre Blanca, which translates to “White Blood” in English, is published by Gost and available here.
