This dissertation project examines the shifting commodity landscape—from lobsters to cocaine on the Miskito Coast of Honduras. This commodity-based, extractive economy fits within a long political economic history on the coast extending back to the 17th century colonial era to more recent neoliberal initiatives in the form of the USAID-sponsored Global Fish Alliance and Spiny Lobster Initiative in Honduras and the U.S. “War on Drugs.” The Miskito are entangled by regulations that threaten to permanently close the lobster dive industry exposing an economic vacuum of opportunity on this desolate coast in the transnational traffic of cocaine. This ethnography makes two contributions: Biopolitical regulations, designed to promote lobster conservation over the cultural survival of the Miskito, serve as a form of Foucauldian governmentality and biopolitical control, driving indigenous laborers into the underground economy of illicit cocaine traffic, fueling a militarized and violent anti-drug war. This extractive, commodity-based economy forces Miskito buzos, divers, into deeper and more dangerous waters to extract lobsters at a diminishing rate of return. The costs of deep-water diving are inscribed on the male Miskito body in the form of decompression sickness, or the “bends,” which include neurological damage and paralysis. While most buzos understand a neurological explanation for decompression sickness, a complementary and parallel understanding circulates on the coast. Locally understood as liwa mairin siknis, divers explain decompression sickness as a curse from the mermaid goddess for the over-extraction of her lobster resources. The second contribution recognizes that the political economy of lobster extraction is not isolated from that of Miskito cultural interpretation. Liwa mairin, the mermaid goddess responsible for spiny lobster and natural resource conservation, is not siphoned from the cash economy or transnational market transactions. Culture seeps into the political economy as politics seeps into the cultural domain.