It went from a poor fishermen's village to the poorest village for decades. It really destroyed the economy and lives of the place, there are no jobs there whatsoever and you are advised against going there without protection (which is unheard off in the rest of Portugal).
That's fair. It's unfortunate that The Guardian's editorial has been slipping. The TLDR is that half a ton of cocaine is 453 kilos, which at a conservative estimate of 20k/kilo is (according to Quora wholesale values so take w a grain of salt) $11M street value of product if not more. So you take that and put it side by side by the economic day to day flow of the Azores. What do you get? For a 20k gdp/capita across a 250k population well...it's a lot. I dunno if it would result in narcocapital, and i dunno enough to comment but that's a gigantic shipment with an equally gigantic potential outcome.
but the effect wasn't primarily economical! After reading the headline I also assumed that the story would be about the economic changes resulting from the infusion of such a 'valuable' resource i.e. I assumed the islanders would become smugglers/distributors themselves with the accompanying violence and risk such an occupation usually carries. The police quickly found and isolated the gang that lost the cocaine so there wasn't the usual violence from the owners coming to reclaim their product. Also the article says the islanders sold the found cocaine locally AND the street value plummeted:
> Before Quinci’s cocaine had washed up on shore... the flow of drugs was usually small and predictable. Often when the police made a seizure, they would make such a dent in the drug supply that local prices would skyrocket. But now police faced an unprecedented situation. As well as the 500kg of cocaine they had seized in the previous two weeks, Lopes thought that at least another 200kg were still unaccounted for... that summer, [the village] became a hub for the sale of the missing cocaine. “People from all over the island came here to buy drugs,”... A product so valuable in the rest of the world was rendered almost worthless through abundance. “They had gold, but they didn’t know how to work with it,”... Other Azoreans “were selling beer glasses full of pure cocaine”... Each one of these “copos”, which were about a third of a pint, contained about 150g and cost €20 (£17) – many hundreds of times cheaper than what it would cost in London today... [a] man had apparently paid a friend 300g of cocaine just to charge his phone...
The effects were mostly cultural and affected mostly public health. There were some economic capital accumulated (used to "build coffee shops") but I thought the article did a good job with the subverted expectations and providing an overview of some long term effects
