When the first edition of Driven by Drugs appeared in 2002, Russell Crandall's study took its place as one of three essential books in English on Andean cocaine and US drug-control policy. The others were Gugliotta and Leen's Kings of Cocaine (1989) and Lee and Clawson's The Andean Cocaine Industry (1998). The great virtue of Driven by Drugs was that Crandall well situated his story within the historical context of US–Colombian relations; he also paid crucial attention to the issue of violence in Colombia.

Crandall, who has been appointed a special adviser on Colombia in the US Department of Defense, has now published a second edition of his book, commendably undertaken with the assistance of one of his students, Akilah Jenga. The new edition brings the story to the mid-point of the second presidential term of Álvaro Uribe Vélez. The structure of the book is largely the same as before. A brief introduction sets out the spare analytical framework. US drug policy is an “intermestic” issue; that is, one that takes into account the international drug situation and the politics in Washington that shape US responses to the global drug trade. The chapter on US–Colombian relations during the twentieth century shows how the war on drugs, essentially begun in the early 1980s, continued US domination of the bilateral relationship as it had evolved in the Cold War. Crandall then turns to violence in Colombia, arguing that its roots go back to at least the 1930s. Thus the rise of leftist rebel groups and right-wing paramilitary forces that fiercely contended since the early 1990s for predominance in the cocaine business must be understood as a central aspect of modern Colombian history. This chapter also considers Bogotá's peace initiatives of the 1980s and early 1990s in an effort to stem guerrilla and drug-related violence.

The heart of the book, chapters four through seven, surveys US drug policy and the actions of Colombia's government during the administrations of the detested Ernesto Samper, the ineffectual Andrés Pastrana, and the popular ally Uribe, who warrants two short chapters. Readers unfamiliar with the narrative of the bilateral relationship will learn that drug control fared better under Samper than perhaps at any other time, largely a result of coercion by the administration of President Bill Clinton, whose representatives sought to bypass Samper and engage more pliable officials like the head of the National Police, José Rosso Serrano. Plan Colombia, the costly antidrug initiative begun late in the Clinton years, showed the very real limits of drug control in Colombia because of the interplay of drugs and violence. At length, Uribe acted to bring the paramilitaries to respectability with an amnesty program that isolated leftist guerrillas, who were identified as terrorists after 11 September 2001. There is a brief conclusion in the final chapter that reiterates a theme that recurs at several places throughout the book: the failure of the US intermestic approach to drugs appreciably to transform the conditions that have given rise to the trade and its associated consequences.

Unfortunately, for those acquainted with the subject of Crandall's book, the new edition will be something of a disappointment. For example, the story of the eclipse of the Medellín and Cali cartels is nearly devoid of drama, as is the struggle – a civil war really – against the leftist guerrillas and the paramilitaries. Also, in the years since the first edition, several books relevant to a new edition have appeared. They are pertinent to issues that Crandall virtually omits in both editions: drugs, state power, and the fate of democracy. Among these studies are Kirk's More Terrible than Death (2003), Dudley's Walking Ghosts (2004), and Youngers and Rosin's edited volume Drugs and Democracy in Latin America (2005). He does not reference them. Absent, too, is the ongoing chasm between Colombia's political parties; important figures in the Liberal Party hoped that Pastrana would fail, thus necessitating greater US involvement in Colombian affairs. In a sense, that outcome did partly obtain in the late Pastrana and Uribe years. Regarding what these matters tell us about US objectives and stability in Colombia, Crandall is silent. Nor does he consider the production of opium, some of which came about as a result of US coffee policy that devastated growers in Colombia. (He also does not usefully address drug consumption in the United States.) Had Driven by Drugs been better conceived, it would have made a lasting contribution. In its present incarnation, it does not.