Colombia's Narcotics Nightmare is a history of that Andean nation's illegal drug trade and of the extreme violence that it generated. The book first describes how during the late 1960s narcotics traffickers from the United States convinced Colombians, who had no previous involvement in illegal-drug export, to grow marijuana for them. Early in the 1970s the foreign, mostly American, traffickers began requesting cocaine. The book's focus is the criminality and violence that the illegal drug trade brought to Colombia and how that social upset was ended in the early 2000s. At the work's center are three chapters detailing the Medellin and Cali cocaine cartels' war against the Colombian state, the revolutionary guerrillas' war against the Colombian state, and the war that paramilitary groups conducted against the guerrillas. The book's concluding, sixth, chapter describes how Colombia's government brought the drug-money-financed violence to an end between 2002 and 2008. The work's Conclusion assesses the progress and prospects of Colombia since the end of the violence and civil war that claimed the lives of some 300,000 Colombian nationals between 1975 and 2008.