>>Beautiful city, but something about it seems to attract the shadiest businesses.
>Attracted to the shadiness that was there to begin with.
Why not quote myself here?
See my other post about the pre-drug culture.
During the 1960's "drug culture" which coincided with the Vietnam War, increasingly large numbers of young people started rebelliously smoking cannabis which had always been available clandestinely in the bigger cities even after it had been taxed and criminalized since 1937.
Not so much in South Florida since there weren't nearly as many natives younger than 30, but northern influence was still strong along with affluent west coast surfers who sometimes outnumbered locals while visiting the disappointingly small waves of the nicely warm ocean.
Also in Vietnam many Americans stationed in the theatre were exposed to religious and medical cultures which had an unbroken history of traditional cannabis consumption, plus drugs like opiates.
In 1968 & 1969 pop music festivals began to proliferate, not even culminating at Woodstock, and were promoted and attended by the same culture who had become wary of toxic drugs through experience, but cannabis demand was ever growing.
Enterprising Califonia "hippies" had been smuggling as much cannabis as they could from traditional growing areas in Mexico like Acapulco and Michoacan, and this led to many more Mexican farmers getting involved in cannabis but adopting more hemp-like strains that could be cultivated at larger scale under poorer conditions.
Traditional hashish had been found in the middle east and Indian subcontinent, and was being smuggled from overseas, and about this time the Rastafarians of Jamaica began to be approaching limited recognition as a religious culture traditionally involved with cannabis, and under what was considered ideal growing conditions. Similar to Mexico, growth increased (but much faster) to meet demand, this time for the eastern US where the trend was a bit behind the west coast.
Mafia-type organizations were very strong distributors up north and prospered bigly along the whole supply chain before goods even arrived in South Florida. The average shipment from Jamaica was at least 4 or 5 tons per vessel on a "banana boat".
In 1974 English pop musician Eric Clapton visited Jamaica, and released a pop version of a song from local Rastafarian artist Bob Marley & the Wailers, recorded while Clapton was in Miami. This rapidly brought the Rasta culture to widespread recognition across the US.
By this time it was known locally that 4 to 6 of the 5-ton Jamaican cannabis vessels were simultaneously arriving to different obscure Florida ports per month, and it took a number of years before a few individual vessels were apprehended per year. This allowed organized crime to develop a very resilient, more vertical supply chain, from growth incentive given to farmers, until final distribution.
The DEA had also been newly formed, not admitting that its strategic purpose was to cut off Jamican supply as if it was an island, since that would be considered unsurmountable until the agency developed some clandestine strength of its own.
After a few more years apprehensions began to make a serious dent from Jamaica, and a much more ancient, traditional cannabis culture was located in Columbia which could be tapped by the same organized crime approach and smuggled in alternative ways. It's really not that far of a distance from Columbia to Miami by air, and the cannabis strains were more potent and sold for higher retail prices so it seemed like it did become economically sustainable for the air smugglers to begin with.
But if you're criminalized anyway, and you're going to fly from Columbia to Miami with contraband, there's a lot more money for every toxic kilo of cocaine that you bring instead of relatively harmless cannabis. Columbians were already traditionally growing the coca too, they just needed to be convinced to grow more. Much more it turns out.
And that's how the DEA started popularizing more cocaine to US consumers than they had ever dreamed of.
In 1977 Clapton then released his pop song "Cocaine".
Since then he unsurprisingly admitted to being affected by toxic substances.
By the early 1980's cocaine had risen from insignifigance to the biggest Florida industry in billions of dollars by many measures.