‘Ariel Albeiro Muñoz, 19, collecting coca leaves near the village of Pueblo Nuevo, Colombia, 2026’ by Mads Nissen
“The War on Drugs has been raging for more than 50 years,” says award-winning photojournalist Mads Nissen. “I wanted to question whether it is working – and if so, for whom.”
Danish-born Nissen spent almost a decade up to 2025 documenting the cocaine trade and those involved in it, from farmers in the coca fields of Colombia to revellers on the dance floors of Europe via the drugs cartels of Mexico.
The result is a series and book, Sangre Blanca, exploring the impact of international cocaine consumption, with Nissen’s subjects including producers, smugglers and members of criminal and law enforcement organisations.
The book comes as cocaine production has reached record highs, with Colombia providing about 70% of the world’s supply. An estimated 25 million people used cocaine in 2023, up from 17 million in 2013, according to the United Nations World Drug Report 2025.
“Sangre Blanca is my attempt to link a globalised, violent and confusing world,” says Nissen, who lives in Copenhagen, Denmark, with his Colombian wife and their three children.
“Over years of work across ten countries, I met people on every side of the cocaine trade and I realised 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.
“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 realise that there is no such thing as pure cocaine. It is always soaked in blood.”
Nissen has receive the main prize at World Press Photo three times for a series exploring Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis, and single images showing an embrace during the Covid-19 pandemic and a Russian gay couple.
Here, he shares images from Sangre Blanca.
Surrounded by friends, family and the entire community, Gerson Acosta is carried to his final resting place. At 35 years old, Acosta was already a governor and a respected Indigenous leader, known for standing up to armed groups attempting to take control of the Kite Kiwe ancestral territory. His defiance came at a high cost – he had received multiple death threats from a local paramilitary faction, a successor group of the far-right, drug-trafficking organisation AUC. On 19 April 2017 Acosta was shot at close range outside his home. As the bullets were fired he managed to tell his 12-year-old son Daybi to run and escape. Timbío, Cauca, Colombia, 2026.
Diney Alexandra takes a nap out of boredom at her father’s laboratory as the processing continues around her. It takes roughly 700kg of coca leaves along with substances such as cement, ammonium, sulfuric acid,sodium permanganate, caustic soda and large quantities of petrol to produce a single kilo of coca paste. Theaim is to extract and isolate the leaf’s most desired and valuable component, the cocaine alkaloid. Antioquia and Cauca, Colombia, 2026.
It’s a high-value target, but time is running out. Major Herrera and his police unit have only 15 minutes to attack, secure, collect evidence and set up explosives at this rare second-phase cocaine laboratory, capable of producing up to 500kg in just a week. The officers fear that a counterattack or mass-mobilisation of locals couldhappen at any moment. Despite being well-trained and heavily armed, the police force can easily be outnumbered, or caught by surprise if the ELN guerrillas launch an assault from the dense jungle, 2026.
At the overcrowded detention centre inside the Kennedy Police Station in Bogotá, Colombia, most of the detainees are held for involvement in small-scale drug dealing, turf wars or street robberies committed to support their own addiction, 2026.
Blue smoke signals the landing site for a military helicopter on an eradicated coca plantation in Catatumbo, Colombia, 2026.
All images by Mads Nissen from Sangre Blanca, published by GOST.
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