Word.ws English Dictionary

cocaine cowboy

cocaine cowboy noun: a cocaine smuggler or dealer whose activities are likely to lead them into violent confrontations.

Noun

cocaine cowboy (plural cocaine cowboys)

  1. (slang) A cocaine smuggler or dealer whose activities are likely to lead them into violent confrontations.
    • 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
    • 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

Examples of cocaine cowboy in a sentence

  • 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:

Forms of cocaine cowboy

pluralcocaine cowboys

Questions about cocaine cowboy

What does cocaine cowboy mean?
Cocaine cowboy means a cocaine smuggler or dealer whose activities are likely to lead them into violent confrontations.
How do you use cocaine cowboy in a sentence?
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.
What part of speech is cocaine cowboy?
Cocaine cowboy is a noun.
What is the plural of cocaine cowboy?
The plural of cocaine cowboy is cocaine cowboys.

Words near cocaine cowboy in the dictionary

  1. cocaine
  2. cocaine addict
  3. cocaine addicts
  4. cocaine base
  5. cocaine bugs
  6. cocaine cowboy
  7. cocaine cowboys
  8. cocaine decor
  9. cocaine paste
  10. cocaine pastes
  11. cocained

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cocaine cowboy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “cocaine cowboy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cocaine_cowboy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.