cocaine cowboy

plural cocaine cowboys

1. slangA cocaine smuggler or dealer whose activities are likely to lead them into violent confrontations.

   The country's leaders worry that the lack of economic incentives will turn more of its citizens into cocaine cowboys.

   1991, North American International Business, Vol. 4, Iss. 1-6, p. 55

   4 more examples

   It has shown up repeatedly in cocaine cowboy shootouts in public places and in the execution of whole families, including infants.

   1986, Steven Wisotsky, Breaking the Impasse in the War on Drugs, page 110

   Shoulder to shoulder were cocaine cowboys, thousand-dollar-a-night call girls, arms merchants, DEA agents, spies, squint-eyed bankers, and beribboned Panamanian military thugs.

   2004, Chuck Pfarrer, Warrior Soul: The Memoir Of A Navy Seal, page 118

   It was in Kansas City that he first smoked cocaine, and came close becoming either a cocaine cowboy or a bucket of fishbait as a result.

   2011, Danny Rolling, Sondra London, The Making of a Serial Killer, page 117

   They can ride a bus 150 miles south to Culiacán, Sinaloa, make a manda (religious promise) to narcosantón Jesús Malverde, the patron saint of drug dealers, and become cocaine cowboys.

   2021, John Annerino, Dead in Their Tracks: Crossing America's Desert Borderlands, page 33