Like the snowblind binge it describes, “Cocaine Cowboys” is a brain-rattling, exhausting experience: Part cultural epitaph, part outlaw celebration, and so chockfull of chattering heads that after two hours, you feel a bit as if you’ve been in an interrogation room.

All appropriate, though. The documentary wants to generate a contact high. It revisits the high-flying days of Miami during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the cocaine trade exploded, drug-related multiple homicide was a daily event, and so much dirty money flowed into the local banks that the Miami branch of the Federal Reserve had a $6 billion surplus.

This is the colorful, ruthless backdrop that inspired “Miami Vice” and Brian DePalma’s “Scarface,” and, as is meticulously detailed, the basis for the city’s transformation from a retiree’s shuffleboard Shangri La to the swinging South Beach scene of today. The bold skyline that arose nearly overnight, as veteran Miami Herald reporter Edna Buchanan observes, is etched in blood.

Florida-based filmmakers Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman never shrink from the splatter, while making deft use of the most conventional documentary resources — the static-camera interview and the vintage video clip — to evoke a kind of giddy nostalgia for a party that started innocently (if illegally) enough and went brutally (and inevitably, given the feckless role played by law enforcement) out of control.

They got lucky on several counts. The pair won the cooperation of two pioneer traffickers, Jon Roberts and Mickey Munday, who not only relish the recounting of their own stories but had conveniently served their time in federal prison. The fimmakers also had access to a staggeringly huge archive of news footage from the period, which allows them to cut between interviews about busts and street wars with actual video clips of the events and their aftermath.

Set to a twangy soundtrack by Jan Hammer, the composer of the original “Miami Vice” theme, these intensively edited sequences buzz with cold, cruel facts that often are at odds with the congenial nature of the drug runners. When these men speak, they sound less like criminals than free-spirited entrepreneurs who simply took advantage of some unlikely connections — to the now-notorious Colombian drug cartels — and their own crafty wiles in eluding the law, to make a fortune. Even now, they sound amazed at how quickly their cottage industry mushroomed into an epidemic.

The reason for that had as much to do with cocaine’s addictive properties as with the rapacious greed of the cartels and their kingpins in Florida. The worst was actually a queenpin: Griselda Blanco, also known as “La Madrina,” the Black Widow. The Colombian gang boss declared open war on her competition and is credited by authorities with single-handedly making Miami the murder capital of America. Blanco, who was briefly jailed but walked free and now is unaccounted for, is painted as a pathological killer with no concern for collateral damage of any sort. She was a one-woman hurricane of death, who commanded a small, fearfully loyal crew of assassins. Chief among them is Jorge “Rivi” Ayala, whose presence — natty even in his green prison jumpsuit — is what gives “Cocaine Cowboys” its authentic dramatic punch.

Ayala is unrepentant, other than regretting the accidental murder of a rival’s child. Yet he is so matter-of-fact in his recollections of extraordinary bloodshed that you sense a kind of pride: He was born to kill, and killing is what he did better than anyone else. His instinct for survival is what first bound him to the Black Widow — he was pressed into her service after he inadvertently screwed up one of her hits in a nightclub — and, in the end, it’s what leaves him alive to tell her story.

Ayala’s monologues, rich in tragic detail and gallows humor, are as bone-chilling as any crimson-stained passage of Shakespeare. His is the harsh poetry of amoral instinct, the fatal wound that cuts short the joyride.