Notes

Introduction

1 Dan Baum, ‘Legalise It All: how to win the war on drugs’’, Harper’s, April 2016.

2 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, The New Press, New York, 2010.

3 Norman Ohler, Blitzed: drugs in Nazi Germany, Penguin Books, London, 2017, p. 24.

4 Matt Kennard, ‘Is there a drugs war in Latin America?’, Alborada, 20 December 2017.

5 Then DEA head Michele M. Leonhart stepped down from her post in 2015 after failing to adequately manage the scandal that saw DEA agents using prostitutes paid for by drug cartels in Colombia. She was a staunch opponent of cannabis legalisation, and stated publicly that ‘all illegal drugs are bad”’.

6 Ginger Thompson, ‘Who holds the DEA accountable when its missions cost lives?’, ProPublica, 19 June 2017.

7 Kate Linthicum, ‘Meth and murder: A new kind of drug war has made Tijuana one of the deadliest places on Earth’, The Los Angeles Times, 30 January 2019.

8 ‘Trial of El Chapo highlights failure of US war on drugs, but will US ever be held to account?’, Democracy Now!, 5 February 2019.

9 Deborah Bonello, ‘In El Chapo’s Mexico, fentanyl is the new boom drug’, Vice, 18 February 2019.

10 Jessica Loudis, ‘In Mexico, the cartels do not exist’: a Q&A with Oswaldo Zavala, The Nation, 22 April 2019.

11 ‘El Chapo is behind bars but drugs still flow from Mexico’, The New York Times, 13 February 2019.

12 Ginger Thompson, ‘“There’s no real fight against drugs”’, The Atlantic, 20 July 2015; Washington’s plan in Mexico was based around the kingpin strategy, decapitating cartel leaders, and yet this led to the fragmentation of the drug business and internal power vacuums. Drug production and trafficking was not affected. See Deborah Bonello, ‘El Chapo is on trial. So business for his cartel is booming’, Ozy, 12 November 2018.

13 Nick Miroff, ‘The staggering cost of Colombia’s war with FARC rebels, explained in numbers’, The Washington Post, 24 August 2016.

14 Natalio Cosoy, ‘Has Plan Colombia really worked?’, BBC News, 4 February 2016.

15 Jana Winter, ‘Trump says border wall will stop drugs. Here’s what a DEA intel report says’, Foreign Policy, 29 August 2017.

16 Seth Freed Wessler, ‘The Coast Guard’s “floating Guantanamos”’, The New York Times, 20 November 2017.

17 Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA complicity in the global drug-trade, Lawrence Hill Books, 2003, p. 461.

18 Ibid, pp. 16–17.

19 Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the former president of Brazil and chair of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, Cesar Gaviria, the former president of Colombia and Ernesto Zedillo, the former president of Mexico, wrote in 2016 that the war on drugs was an “unmitigated disaster” and the criminalisation of drugs must end. See Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Cesar Gaviria and Ernesto Zedillo, ‘Three leaders from Latin America call for decriminalising drug use’, The Los Angeles Times, 11 March 2016.

20 Maia Szalavitz, ‘Why we should say someone is a “person with an addiction”, not an addict’, NPR, 11 June 2017.

21 Joel Wolfram, ‘Don’t call people “addicts”, Penn researchers say’, WHYY, 13 August 2018.

22 Steven Cohen, ‘What “Narcos” gets wrong about the war on drugs’, The New Republic, 30 October 2015.

23 Jon Lee Anderson, ‘The afterlife of Pablo Escobar’, The New Yorker, 5 March 2018.

Chapter One: Honduras

1 Alongside Berta on the night of her death, activist Gustavo Castro Soto was present and shot, sustaining injuries. He survived and returned to his native Mexico, pursuing justice for his murdered friend.

2 Copinh reacted to Mejia’s arrest by accusing the Honduran government of dragging its feet over the investigation (a common complaint I heard during my time in Honduras). ‘The arrest is thanks to the work and pressure by national and international organisations’, it wrote. ‘No thanks is due to the attorney general’s office, who have tried everything possible to cover up the truth in this case.’

3 Nina Lakhani, ‘Berta Caceres murder: ex-Honduran military intelligence officer arrested’, The Guardian, 2 March 2018.

4 According to the Mexico Citizens’ Council for Public Security annual survey in 2017 of the 50 most violent cities globally, 42 were in Latin America and two in Honduras. See Christopher Woody, ‘These were the most violent cities in the world in 2017’, Business Insider, 6 March 2018.

5 ‘Events of 2017, Honduras’, Human Rights Watch World Report, 2018. Copinh and the Caceres family launched legal proceedings against FMO in the Netherlands in May 2018 for disregarding human-rights concerns over the dam before Berta’s murder. One hope of the action was to pressure European banks and companies not to ignore human rights in the future when funding projects.

6 In 2015, a Honduran journalist exposed that millions of dollars of public funds for the health care system were transferred to the National Party for the re-election of President Hernandez, but nobody senior was fired or investigated. See Alexander Main, ‘An anti-corruption charade in Honduras’, The New York Times, 15 February 2016.

7 US Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in June 2018 that asylum seekers would no longer gain entry into the US by claiming fears of gang violence or domestic abuse. It was a decision that would affect many people fleeing Central America.

8 Before the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Buzzfeed reported that many of the clothes sold under his name were sewn in Honduras by workers who received a pittance. See Karla Zabludovsky and Daniel Wagner, ‘Meet the workers who sewed Donald Trump clothing for a few dollars a day’, Buzzfeed News, 22 July 2016.

9 Official figures of gang members vary widely, from the US government claiming 36,000, to the UN saying 12,000 and the Honduran police alleging 25,000. See Elyssa Pachico, ‘The problem with counting gang members in Honduras’, Insight Crime, 17 February 2016.

10 In Tegucigalpa, I visited one of its most dangerous neighbourhoods, Flor Del Campo (Flower of the Field), and met an outspoken citizen, Juan Hernandez, to understand what a ‘war tax’ and government-sponsored violence meant. He told me that, ‘We always live in a state of terror. It’s like your life is hanging by a thread.’ A few days before we spoke, in a house where women explained how they were often unable to walk the streets due to extreme violence, a massacre had occurred outside a nearby school and innocent people were killed. Hernandez said that he didn’t know anybody who wasn’t considering leaving the country. ‘In this area, 70 per cent of businesses closed down because of it [war tax]. I had a business plan but it stayed just a plan because of the war tax … People flee their homes and never come back, fearing for their lives.’

11 Sibylla Brodzinsky, ‘Inside San Pedro Sula: the most violent city in the world’, The Guardian, 16 May 2013. Honduran police said that the murder rate in 2017 declined by more than 25 per cent to 42.8 killings per 100,000 people but countless activists I spoke to questioned the accuracy of these statistics. A relation of Berta Caceres, freelance film producer Silvio Carrillo, wrote in The New York Times that US ambassador James Nealon admitted in a meeting that Honduran officials manipulated crime figures. See Silvio Carrillo, ‘An idealist’s martyrdom fails to move Honduras’, The New York Times, 2 March 2017. Many women’s rights groups said that authorities were focused on narco-trafficking and organised crime while ignoring the wave of killings engulfing civilians, especially women. Sara Tome, programme director at the Centre for Women’s Studies Tegucigalpa told the BBC News in July 2017 that, ‘we are angry about the constant indifference in the justice system’.

12 Eating foreign junk food for the middle class in Honduras was a sign of success that they could buy their child an American hamburger. I saw similar trends in China of economic advancement intimately tied to consuming the most garish signs of American capitalism. Later in the Honduran trip I visited a petrol station to buy water, but could only find Coke, Pepsi, and any number of sugary drinks. It felt as if Honduras imported the worst aspects of US culture, such as its fatty and unhealthy fast food, and locals were given few culinary choices that inevitably worsened their health.

13 ‘Where did banana republics get their name?’, The Economist, 21 November 2013.

14 John Ewing, a US minister in Tegucigalpa, sent a letter in 1914 to the US State Department and explained the power of the United Fruit Company: ‘In order to obtain these concessions and privileges and to secure their undisturbed enjoyment, it [the United Fruit Company] has seen fit to enter actively into the internal policies of these countries, and it has pursued this course so systematically and regularly until it now has its ramifications in every department of the government and is a most important factor in all political movements and actions.’ See Dawn Paley, Drug War Capitalism, AK Press, 2014, p. 195.

15 Jane Hunter, ‘Israel funded, armed and trained the Contras in co-ordination with Washington’, Washington Report On Middle East Affairs, January 1987, pp. 4–5. https://www.wrmea.org/1987-january/israeli-arms-sales-to-central-america-an-overview.html.

16 Battalion 316 was a death squad that disappeared, tortured, and murdered Honduran opponents of regime head General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez. Its existence was denied for years by both Honduran and US officials (even though the CIA had given the Contras an ‘assassination manual’ to further its goals). At least 184 people were killed by Battalion 316, with many others murdered by other forces in the 1980s and 1990s, and yet its victims still search for justice. See ‘Honduras seeks to revive cases from the 1980s dirty war’, Reuters, 8 January 2008.

17 A former Honduran politician, Efrain Diaz Arrivillaga, told The Baltimore Sun in 1995 that, ‘their [the US government] attitude was one of tolerance and silence. They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed.’ See Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson, ‘A carefully crafted deception’, The Baltimore Sun, 18 June 1995.

18 The former president of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras (CODEH), Ramon Custodio Lopez, wrote that drugs in Honduras slowly strangled his country in ways that had never been undone: ‘… Before it [Honduras] was simply a stop-over [for drugs], next came the stage of consumption as part of the new habits of the nouveau riche of high society, but later it became dollar payments for services rendered [and then] payments in kind because there was already an internal market for coca[ine] and we have advanced in the area of money laundering and narco politics.’ See Thelma Mejia, ‘Unfinished business: the military and drugs in Honduras’, TNI, 1 December 1997.

19 Andrew Marshall, ‘CIA turned a deliberate blind eye to Contras’ drug-smuggling’, The Independent, 7 November 1998.

20 Robert Parry, ‘CIA’s drug confession’, Consortium News, 11 October 1998.

21 One drug-delivery effort from Honduras to Miami in 1981 was called an ‘initial trial run’ because the Contras claimed that they had to become drug-traffickers ‘in order to feed and clothe their cadres’. The CIA did nothing to stop these activities and even encouraged them, sometimes hiring Contras whom they knew were dealing drugs. There were literally hundreds of allegations against Contra officials and nearly 1,000 CIA cables sent back to Washington that outlined the Contras’ illegalities. At times, according to the 1998 CIA report, the agency instructed the DEA to avoid inquiring into Contra authorities. See Walter Pincus, ‘CIA ignored tips alleging Contra drug links, report says’, The Washington Post, 3 November 1998.

22 Gary Webb found that a CIA-sponsored Contra group called the FDN had ties with San Francisco drug-traffickers, and after cocaine was sold to a dealer in South Central Los Angeles, the millions of dollars from those transactions were funnelled to the US-backed war against the Sandinistas. Webb showed that poor African-Americans, the community most negatively affected by crack cocaine, were collateral damage in Washington’s pursuit of geo-political goals in Central America. Webb wrote that President Reagan feared ‘another Cuba taking root in their backyard, another clique of Communists who would spread their noxious seeds of dissent and discord throughout the region.’ For these revelations, Webb was smeared by many in the mainstream media; he lost his job, and eventually committed suicide in 2004. See Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: the CIA, the Contras and the crack cocaine explosion, Seven Stories Press, 2014. p. 69.

23 A succession of the Honduran elite had been charged and jailed for drug-trafficking in Honduras and the US; it’s common for Honduran election campaigns to be paid for with drug money and their leaders beholden to traffickers. See Brendan Pierson, ‘Son of ex-Honduran president gets 24 years for US drug charge’, Reuters, 6 September 2017.

24 ‘Open and Shut: The case of the Honduran coup’, Wikileaks State Department cable, 24 July 2009. After finishing his term as ambassador in 2008, Charles Ford became diplomatic attaché for the US Southern Command in Miami, the body tasked to fight the drug war in Latin America.

25 ‘11 Latin American dictators’, School of the Americas Watch, http://www.soaw.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=840.

26 Jake Johnson, ‘How Pentagon officials may have encouraged a 2009 coup in Honduras’, The Intercept, 30 August 2017.

27 Stephen Zunes, ‘The US role in the Honduras coup and subsequent violence’, National Catholic Reporter, 14 March 2016.

28 Mark Weisbrot, ‘Hard Choices: Hillary Clinton admits role in Honduran coup aftermath’, Al Jazeera America, 29 September 2014. Clinton emails released in 2015 shone more light on her actions after the 2009 coup. Despite the Obama White House claiming that aid had been suspended after the coup, Clinton ensured that more than $1 million continued to the new regime. She turned to a lobbyist friend of her family, Lanny Davis, to establish contact with the coup leader, Roberto Micheletti, and he publicly blamed overthrown president Manuel Zelaya for his downfall. See Bill Conroy, ‘Emails show Clinton disobeyed Obama policy and continued funding for Honduras coup regime’, The Narcosphere, 5 July 2015. Zelaya told Democracy Now! in 2015 that he blamed Clinton for being ‘very weak in the face of pressures from groups that hold power in the United States, the most extremist right-wing sectors of the U.S. government, known as the hawks of Washington.’ See ‘Clinton and the coup: amid protests in Honduras, ex-President on Hillary’s role in his 2009 ouster’, Democracy Now!, 28 July 2015. During the 2016 presidential election campaign, Clinton was asked by the New York Daily News about her role in the coup. She claimed that the regime ‘followed the law’ by ousting Zelaya, and that ‘I think in retrospect we managed a very difficult situation without bloodshed’. She argued that cutting US aid to Honduras would have ‘punished the Honduran people’ and that was why she believed it was unwise to call the events in 2009 a coup.

29 Nikolas Kozloff and Bill Weinberg, ‘Honduras and the political uses of the drug war’, North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), 20 April 2010.

30 Alan Yuhas, ‘Former Latin American leaders urge world to end war on drugs “disaster”’, The Guardian, 12 March 2016.

31 The Nation revealed in 2016 that secretary of state Hillary Clinton had spent tens of millions of dollars in 2012 on a little-known propaganda program called ‘Honduras Convive’ that was aimed at winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Honduran people. It involved working with private contractors, including one owned by Australian David Kilcullen — a self-described counter-insurgency expert who contributed to the failed US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and now runs a for-profit contracting business — to build closer ties between police and the community. The unstated goal of the program was to back a regime friendly to US business and strategic interests. See Tim Shorrock, ‘How Hillary Clinton militarised US policy in Honduras’, The Nation, 5 April 2016.

32 In December 2009, the country’s top anti-drug official, Julian Aristides Gonzalez Irias, was murdered with the collusion of high-level police commanders and drug-traffickers. It was reportedly because this official had stopped cartel plans to work with police and steal 143 kilograms of cocaine from a rival. A cover-up ensued, and nobody senior was ever held to account for the killing. See Elizabeth Malkin and Alberto Arce, ‘Files suggest Honduran police leaders ordered killing of antidrug officials’, The New York Times, 15 April 2016.

33 Thom Shanker, ‘Lessons of Iraq help US fight a drug war in Honduras’, The New York Times, 5 May 2012.

34 Janine Jackson, ‘NYT claims US opposed Honduran coup it actually supported’, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 18 August 2017; and Adam Johnson, ‘Omitting the US role in Honduran activist’s death’, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, April 2016.

35 Damien Cave and Charlie Savage, ‘US rethinks a drug war after deaths in Honduras’, The New York Times, 12 October 2012.

36 ‘Honduras profile’, Insight Crime, 10 November 2017.

37 Mo Hume, ‘Why the murder rate in Honduras is twice as high as anywhere else’, The Conversation, 26 November 2014. One former congressman and police commissioner in charge of drug investigations, Alfredo Landaverde, claimed that one out of every ten members of Congress was a drug-trafficker. He was murdered in 2011.

38 Danielle Mackay, ‘Drugs, dams and power: the murder of Honduran activist Berta Caceres’, The Intercept, 12 March 2016.

39 Joel Brinkley, ‘Violence in Honduras has US fingerprints on it’, The Kansas City Star, 28 June 2013.

40 The Hernandez regime bought sophisticated cyber tools to monitor computers and mobile phones from a notorious arms dealer, Ori Zeller, in 2014. Zeller, a former member of the Israeli special forces, had a long history of working with extremist groups and right-wing paramilitary forces in Colombia. See Lee Fang, ‘Former AK-47 dealer goes cyber, supplied surveillance tools to Honduras government’, The Intercept, 27 July 2015. The UK sold surveillance equipment to the Honduras regime just before the disputed 2017 election. See Nina Lakhani, ‘UK sold spyware to Honduras just before crackdown on election protestors’, The Guardian, 8 February 2018.

41 The Honduran regime paid the leading US PR firm Ketchum US$421,333 in 2015 to burnish its image. See Sarah Lazare, ‘Meet the corporate PR firm hired to sell a murderous foreign regime to the American public’, Alternet, 15 April 2016. In 2016, the Honduras ambassador in the US hired Washington, DC, based–PR firm Curley Company for US$40,000 and two months of work.

42 Israel has a long history of supporting, arming and training right-wing dictatorships in South America, Central America and Africa: see http://dailysketcher.blogspot.com/2009/09/honduras-israeli-connection.html and https://www.wrmea.org/1987-january/israeli-arms-sales-to-central-america-an-overview.html.

43 When nearly 50,000 unaccompanied children crossed into the US from Central America in 2014, Obama pushed Mexico to stop the flow, paying them $86 million for the job. See Nicholas Kristof, ‘Obama’s death sentence for young refugees’, The New York Times, 25 June 2016.

44 Congressman Hank Johnson was joined by a number of other Congressmen and women in demanding accountability for US aid, justice for Berta Caceres, and an investigation into whether the US-trained Honduran security forces, Fusina, were involved in her murder. See John James Conyers Junior, Keith Ellison, Hank Johnson, Marcy Kaptur, Jan Schakowsky and Jose E. Serrano, ‘America’s funding of Honduran security forces puts blood on our hands’, The Guardian, 8 July 2016.

45 Tracy Wilkinson, ‘Congress and the State Department at odds over $55 million in aid to Honduras’, the Los Angeles Times, 25 October 2016. After the conclusion of the Berta Caceres trial in late 2018, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar pledged to pursue justice to the ‘highest strata of the Honduran elite.’

46 Trump started sending back tens of thousands of Hondurans who had been living legally for years in the US in 2018 despite US diplomats claiming the move would further destabilise Central America. See Nick Miroff, Seung Min Kim and Joshua Partlow, ‘US embassy cables warned against expelling 300,000 immigrants. Trump officials did it anyway’, The Washington Post, 8 May 2018. During a visit to Washington, DC, in October 2018, President Hernandez expressed reservations with Trump’s separation of children from their parents after they entered the US. ‘I cannot go back to Honduras without an answer’, he said.

47 Silvio Carrillo, ‘America’s blind eye to Honduras’s tyrant’, The New York Times, 19 December 2017.

48 President Hernandez had been invited to Israel to attend the country’s independence celebrations in 2018, but he cancelled after human-rights groups complained. President Trump threatened to cut off aid to Honduras in an April 2018 tweet after he accused Honduras and other Central American nations of allowing a caravan of Honduran migrants to move through Mexico towards the US. Trump continued this public pressure on Honduras when another caravan made its way towards the US in late 2018. The vast bulk of the refugees in the caravan were from Honduras.

49 Garance Burke, Martha Mendoza, and Christopher Sherman, ‘Amid corruption concerns, Gen. Kelly made allies in Honduras’, Associated Press, 12 April 2018.

50 Nina Lakhani, ‘Berta Caceres’s name was on Honduran military hitlist, says former soldier’, The Guardian, 21 June 2016.

51 A leading activist in Honduras explained to me how the hit list worked on those being targeted: ‘The list just starts circulating on social media, and I doubt anyone knows the origin of it. It was all over Facebook. The US embassy has been asking for the list, but no one shares it with them (or even journalists really) because people know that it won’t be taken seriously. The list is very real to people for various reasons … Most of the people on the list have received death threats or denounced previous incidents of violence against them; and a lot of death threats in Honduras are delivered in an indirect manner, like through neighbours or distant friends telling people to be careful.’

52 There is no trust between peasant farmers and the government. Vitalino Alvarez told me that the head of the Xatruch Taskforce, a military unit designed to help the police in the area resolve land conflicts and battle crime, was an impediment to peace. Army Colonel German Alfaro Escalante ‘won’t accept that land grabbing is the heart of the problem’, Alvarez told me. ‘He blames drugs as the key issue, but he accuses campesinos of drug-trafficking, which is false.’ Escalante had a history of denigrating peasant leaders, including Alvarez, as far back as 2013, accusing them of ‘damaging the image of the Honduran state’ by unfairly targeting the Xatruch Taskforce.

53 Nina Lakhani, ‘Honduras and the dirty war fuelled by the west’s drive for clean energy’, The Guardian, 7 January 2014. In 2017, peasants sued the World Bank for financing Dinant and accused the private sector lending arm of ‘knowingly profiting from the financing of murder’.

54 Dana Frank, ‘Wikileaks Honduras: US linked to brutal businessman’, The Nation, 21 October 2011.

55 Sara Blaskey and Norman Stockwell, ‘Miguel Facusse is dead: what does that mean for the people of Honduras?’, The Tico Times, 25 June 2015.

56 Tracy Wilkinson, ‘In Honduras, a controversial businessman responds to critics’, the Los Angeles Times, 21 December 2012.

57 Frank, ‘Wikileaks Honduras’.

58 Historian Dana Frank from the University of California in Santa Cruz revealed that four months before the 2009 coup, a right-wing newspaper in Honduras reported that 1,400 kilos of cocaine had been found in the Aguan on a landing strip owned by Facusse. Dana Frank, ‘Wikileaks Honduras: US linked to brutal businessman’, The Nation, 21 October 2011.

59 Joseph Goldstein and Benjamin Weiser, ‘After 78 killings, a Honduran drug lord partners with the US,’ The New York Times, 7 October 2017. In 2017, prominent Honduran businessman Yani Rosenthal was sentenced in the US to three years in prison for money laundering after colluding with the Los Cachiros drug cartel.

60 Over the coming days, Guillermo would explain the Garifuna to me, showing that they were highly educated and successful in many professions. The first Honduran to successfully complete medicine at Harvard was a Garifuna man, and he returned after his degree to open a clinic in his home country.

61 Mattathias Schwartz, ‘DEA says Hondurans opened fire during a drug raid. A video suggests otherwise’, The New York Times, 23 October 2017.

62 The official review into the 2012 massacre, issued in 2017 by the inspectors-general of the Departments of State and Justice dismissed DEA claims that the Honduran police were properly vetted or trained. See Annie Bird and Alexander Main, ‘The deadly results of a DEA-backed raid in Honduras’, The New York Times, 2 July 2017.

63 Roatan was a tourist mecca for foreigners and rich Hondurans to holiday on beautiful white, sandy beaches. One end of the island, West Bay, was where many of the hotels and resorts were located, almost a world away from Honduras, with signs only in English and few local faces except for those working in the hotels. At the other end of Roatan, at French Harbour, where many locals resided, the roads were uneven, homes were decaying, and poverty was highly visible. Drunk men lay on the side of the road. Clara Woods lived in this part of town, where wooden homes were all covered in fading paint.

64 Karen Spring, ‘Killing in the name of the war on drugs’, Scoop, 3 February 2015.

65 On principle, I didn’t pay people for interviews, but occasionally I felt it was appropriate to give some financial support and help those in need. I helped Clara Woods buy food for her children and family for three weeks.

66 ‘Made in the US: the real history of the MS-13 gang Trump talked about in State of the Union’, Democracy Now!, 31 January 2018. US President Donald Trump routinely attacks the MS-13 gang, calling them ‘animals’. They’re an undoubtedly violent gang that commits horrible abuses, but their history is largely ignored. Founded in Los Angeles in the 1980s by refugees fleeing the US-backed dirty war in El Salvador, lack of opportunities in the US pushed many to join gangs. In the decades since, successive US presidents have deported many of them to Central America. Now, with violence again consuming Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras — often caused by US foreign policy — many are fleeing to the US, where President Trump demonises them as murderers and a threat to security. During the Obama years, countless refugees from Central America were sent back to their deaths. The Guardian found that many undocumented migrants fleeing gang violence from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were deported and killed soon after their arrival home. See Sibylla Brodzinsky and Ed Pilkington, ‘US government deporting Central American migrants to their deaths’, The Guardian, 12 October 2015.

67 Michael Lohmuller, ‘Police theft of $1.3 million is mark of Honduran corruption’, Insight Crime, 17 February 2015. I was shown a list by a Washington, DC–based think tank, The Washington Office on Latin America, of the many abuses committed by the Honduran military and Tigres since 2014. The crimes involved kidnapping, robbery, violence, and murder.

68 Lee Fang and Danielle Mackay, ‘The President of Honduras is deploying US-trained forces against election protestors’, The Intercept, 3 December 2017.

69 The Wall Street Journal was given access to the Tigres in 2016, but the result was an overly rosy picture of their capabilities. The Tigres were framed as playing an essential role in reducing ‘illegal’ immigration from Honduras to the US. See Michael M. Phillips, ‘US Special Forces take on street violence that drives illegal immigration’, The Wall Street Journal, 22 February 2016.

70 The effectiveness of US-sponsored propaganda trips in Honduras was clear after Pulitzer Prize-winning author Sonia Nazario wrote a glowing report in The New York Times about the US programs for civilians in San Pedro Sula and urged Washington to send even more money. There was no mention of the 2009 coup, but copious amounts of praise for how the US was supposedly reducing crime and violence. See Sonia Nazario, ‘How the most dangerous place on earth got safer’, The New York Times, 11 August 2016.

71 I asked the US ambassador, James Nealon, and Eric Turner about the allegation that US-backed security forces had both been complicit in the killing of Berta Caceres and carried a hit list with her name and others on it. They said they hadn’t seen the hit list and that I should give them the list if I saw it, so they could check its veracity. I did not do so.

72 Jake Johnson, ‘Informants claim drug-traffickers sought assistance of US-backed Honduran security minister’, The Intercept, 26 November 2017.

73 The US embassy in Honduras proudly announced in May 2018 that, ‘Honduran national Sergio Neftali Mejia-Duarte was sentenced today to life in prison for his involvement in a large-scale international narcotics transportation organization.’ Honduran politician Fredy Najera Montoya pleaded guilty in a US court in December 2018 to running a drug-trafficking operation. He used landing strips on his property to land planes from Colombia laden with cocaine and then moved the drugs to the Guatemalan border.

74 Former Honduran army captain Santos Rodriguez Orellana publicly accused the DEA of alleging his involvement in a 2016 plot financed by Tony Hernandez to assassinate the US ambassador, James Nealon. He denied it. See Gerardo Reyes and Juan Cooper, ‘From hero to villain: the saga of a Honduran army captain caught in a drug war’, Univision News, 22 November 2017.

75 Nina Lakhani, ‘Honduras and the dirty war fuelled by the West’s drive for clean energy’, The Guardian, 7 January 2014.

Chapter Two: Guinea-Bissau

1 For centuries, many Muslim locals practised the Sunni strain of Sufism. The CIA World Factbook in 2018 stated there were about 40 per cent Muslims, 22 per cent Christians, 15 per cent Animists, and 18 per cent unspecified. See Anna Pujol Mazzini, ‘Sufi West Africa braces amid rise of fundamentalism’, Ozy, 3 July 2018. US intelligence reports released in 2018 said that terror groups such as Al-Qaeda and Boko Haram were using Guinea-Bissau as a safe refuge. See Anna Pujol Mazzini, ‘Islamist terrorist groups are turning their attention to West Africa’, The Washington Post, 3 July 2018.

2 Grant Ferrett and Ed Vulliamy, ‘How a tiny West African country became the world’s first narco state’, The Guardian, 9 March 2008.

3 Alexander Smoltczyk, ‘Guinea-Bissau a “drug-trafficker’s dream”’, Spiegel Online, 8 March 2013.

4 Raggie Johansen, ‘Guinea-Bissau: new hub for cocaine trafficking’, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Issue 5, May 2008.

5 Ibid.

6 Geoffrey York, ‘Coup in Guinea-Bissau shines a light on powerful West African drug-trade’, The Globe and Mail, 13 April 2012.

7 Adam Nossiter, ‘Leader ousted, nation is now a drug haven’, The New York Times, 1 November 2012.

8 Adam Nossiter, ‘Six years after murder, Guinea-Bissau autocrat makes a posthumous comeback’, The New York Times, 12 August 2015.

9 ‘Guinea-Bissau’s President and “biggest drug dealer”’, The National, 7 March 2009.

10 Toby Green, ‘Introduction’, in Patrick Chabal and Toby Green (eds), Guinea-Bissau: micro-state to ‘narco-state’, Hurst and Company London, 2016, p. 5.

11 Ferrett and Vulliamy, ‘West African country became the world’s first narco state’.

12 David Lewis, ‘Special report: West Africa’s alarming growth industry — meth’, Reuters, 24 July 2015.

13 Charlotte Alfred, ‘Recovering addicts battle Kenya’s exploding heroin problem’, Huffington Post, 12 December 2015. Most Europe-bound heroin still took the so-called Balkan-route via Iran and south-east Europe, but East Africa was increasingly targeted by drug-smugglers. The UN estimated in 2016 that up to 70,000 kilograms of Afghan heroin was being smuggled annually via Africa to Europe. See Alexandra Fisher, ‘Africa’s heroin highway to the West’, The Daily Beast, 5 November 2016.

14 The head of UNODC, Yury Fedotov, told the UN Security Council in May 2018 that since the establishment of the Transnational Crime Unit (TCU) in 2009, it had investigated ‘70 cases of drug-trafficking, with 113 persons prosecuted and 71 kg of cocaine and 1,353 kg of marihuana seized’. He lamented that UNODC’s funding in Guinea-Bissau was ‘drastically reduced’ in 2017.

15 In September 2018, the West African Commission on Drugs released a report that called for the decriminalisation of all drugs for personal use to allow law enforcement to focus on organised crime, high-level corruption. and the most serious drug offences.

16 Ferrett and Vulliamy, ‘West African country became the world’s first narco state’.

17 Joanne Csete and Constanza Sanchez, ‘Telling the story of drugs in West Africa: The newest front in a losing war?’, Global Drug Policy Observatory, November 2013.

18 Alonso Soto, ‘Cocaine smugglers may cash in on Guinea-Bissau politics feud’, Bloomberg, 9 December 2018.

19 Anna Pujol Mazzini, ‘He’s on a mission from God to tackle drugs in Africa’s first narco-state’, Ozy, 12 July 2018.

20 Hassoum Ceesay, ‘Guinea-Bissau: the narco-state and the impact on institutions in Guinea-Bissau’, in Chabal and Green (eds), Guinea-Bissau, p. 220.

21 Green, ‘Introduction’, p. 5.

22 Mark Shaw wrote in the Journal of Modern African Studies that the term ‘narco-state’ was inappropriate for Guinea-Bissau and instead called the key political and military figures behind drug-trafficking part of an ‘elite protection network’. He went on: ‘In Guinea-Bissau, that network did not act on its own, but relied on a series of “entrepreneurs” who operated as an interface between traffickers and the elite. While the military as an institution is often said to be in charge of trafficking, exclusive control by high-ranking military personnel within the elite network only occurred relatively late. Senior soldiers’ attempts to provide more than just protection, and to enter the drug market themselves, led to the network’s undoing.’ See Mark Shaw, ‘Drug-trafficking in Guinea-Bissau, 1998–2014: the evolution of an elite protection network’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 10 August 2015.

23 In 2016, Inspector Edgar Ribeiro of the Portuguese judicial police told a gathering in Bissau that Guinea-Bissau was not a ‘narco-state’ ‘although West Africa serves as a circulation platform for drugs from Latin America to Europe’. The Guinea-Bissau economy ‘does not live from the production and sale of drugs’, he said.

24 In the 2016 Global Index for Peace, Guinea-Bissau was rated as the most violent nation in the Portuguese-speaking world. The index considered around 20 indicators, including public safety, police violence, homicide rates, social justice, and terrorism.

25 Smoltczyk, ‘Guinea-Bissau a “drug-trafficker’s dream”’.

26 African-American political activists who had worked with black liberation movements, some accused of murder in the 1970s, hid in Guinea-Bissau for years.

27 David Lewis and Richard Valdmanis, ‘Special report: how US drug sting targeted West African military chiefs’, Reuters, 24 July 2013.

28 Emma Farage and Fernando Pereira, ‘Guinea-Bissau sidelines top brass in bid to end coups’, Reuters, 19 May 2015.

29 Lewis and Valdmanis, ‘Special report’.

30 Ibid.

31 ‘“Narco-terrorist” deported from US “freely living in Portugal”’, Portugal Resident, 14 December 2015.

32 Dan Browning, ‘Narco terrorist convict deported from Minnesota but where is he?’, Star Tribune, 10 December 2015.

33 Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, ‘Godfather for hire’, The New Yorker, 30 July 2018.

34 Glenn Greenwald, ‘Why does the FBI have to manufacture its own plots if terrorism and ISIS are such grave threats?’, The Intercept, 26 February 2015.

35 In 2010, the US Treasury Department declared both Na Tchuto and the air force chief of staff, Ibraima Papa Camara, as drug kingpins.

36 Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, ‘The sting: an American drugs bust in West Africa’, The Guardian, 17 March 2015.

37 ‘Catch me if you can: Exxon complicit in corrupt Liberian oil sector’, Global Witness, 29 March 2018.

38 Nick Turse, ‘The US military’s drug of choice’, TomDispatch, 8 February 2018.

39 Charlie Savage and Thom Shanker, ‘US drug war expands to Africa, a newer hub for cartels’, The New York Times, 21 July 2012.

40 Ginger Thompson, ‘Trafficking in terror’, The New Yorker, 14 December 2015.

41 Ibid.

42 Benedict Carey, ‘The chains of mental illness in West Africa’, The New York Times, 11 October 2015.

43 Sofia Christiansen, ‘West Africa’s addiction to hard drugs is on the rise’, VOA, 19 July 2018.

Chapter Three: The Philippines

1 ‘Aquino says PDEA killed only three drug suspects in his first 100 days’, GMA News Online, 9 January 2018.

2 The Duterte-backed Davao death squads were accused of killing at least 1,700 criminals during his time as mayor, although during the 2016 election campaign Duterte said the number killed was 700. US state department cables released by Wikileaks confirmed that Washington had long viewed Duterte as complicit in the Davao horrors. A Human Rights Watch report in 2009, ‘You Can Die at Any Time’, found that police gave vigilante groups lists of people to be targeted. In December 2016, Duterte said that when he was mayor of Davao he would ride around on his motorcycle ‘looking for trouble’, and would kill suspected criminals. He later admitted that he’d killed ‘about three’ people. Despite knowing about the abuses during Duterte’s rule in Davao, IBM partnered with the city in 2012 to provide surveillance technology to law enforcement. George Joseph, ‘Inside the video surveillance program IBM built for Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte’, The Intercept, 20 March 2019.

3 A 2016 Reuters report found that the Duterte government had done little to address the massive influx of drugs coming from China, and had not gone after the drug lords running the trafficking. John Chalmers, ‘Meth gangs of China play star role in Philippines drug crisis’, Reuters, 16 December 2016.

4 During the Duterte era, jails had experienced huge overcrowding. I visited the facility in Quezon City. It had a 700-person capacity, but when I went there, there were 3,299 inmates; 72 per cent of them were inside for drug offences, mostly serving one to five years, while 50 per cent were shabu users before they arrived. The warden, Ermilito Moral, told me that there was a comprehensive rehabilitation program for inmates that included singing the national anthem, behavioural attitude changes, singing, dancing, massage therapy lessons, learning to cut hair, cosmetics, sewing, handicrafts, making perfume, barista training, and religious lessons. A guard walked me into the prison, and there were bodies everywhere, slammed up against each other on various floors: talking, sitting, standing, lying, and sleeping.

5 During the 2016 election campaign, Duterte joked that he ‘should have been first’ in the 1989 rape of an Australian missionary in Davao, and accused his daughter of being a ‘drama queen’ after she said that she had been raped. After Duterte won office, he threatened his son Paolo with death if allegations of drug-trafficking against him were true. Paolo was cleared of trafficking after a government investigation concluded in 2018. Duterte’s daughter, Sara, has served as mayor of Davao City.

6 Few political opponents of Duterte spoke out strongly against his rule; they were scared. I met two of them. Representative Gary Alejano told me that he supported Duterte in his ambition to ‘stamp out illegal drugs’ in the Philippines, but opposed how it was implemented ‘through elimination and killing suspects’. Senator Antonio Trillanes was a former navy officer who staged a failed coup in 2003. He said that he backed the idea of a war on drugs, but thought that the Duterte form of ‘summary executions’ aimed to instil fear in the population. Duterte aimed to arrest Trillanes in late 2018 for his role in the failed 2003 coup. One of Duterte’s fiercest critics, Senator Leila De Lima, was thrown in jail by the president in February 2017 over allegations that she had facilitated drug-trafficking while justice secretary. She denied the allegations.

7 Davey Alba, ‘Connecting hate: how Duterte used Facebook to fuel the Philippine drug war’, Buzzfeed News, 4 September 2018.

8 Nicole Curato, We need to talk about Rod. A Duterte reader: critical essays on Rodrigo Duterte’s early presidency (edited by Nicole Curato), Bughaw, 2017, p. 5.

9 Duterte occasionally mentioned the so-called rich man’s drug, cocaine, and claimed that Mexican and South American cartels were bringing in the drug, but his government seemed to care little about stopping the influx.

10 The legacy of the American presence in the Philippines continues to this day. In April 2018, the Trump administration agreed to return a set of church bells that had been captured during a bloody encounter between American forces and locals in 1901. The Philippines and Duterte had pushed for the bell’s return for years. See Richard C. Paddock, ‘US set to return Philippine bells that once tolled to mark a massacre’, The New York Times, 13 April 2018.

11 Jason Ditz, ‘The Philippines: remembering a forgotten occupation’, Huffington Post, 18 June 2013.

12 Pankaj Mishra, ‘How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war’, The Guardian, 10 November 2017.

13 Adele Webb, ‘Hide the looking glass’, in Curato (ed.), A Duterte reader, p. 134.

14 Stanley Karnow, ‘Reagan and the Philippines: setting Marcos adrift’, The New York Times, 19 March 1989.

15 Brennan Weiss, ‘Duterte’s death squads were born in America’s cold war’, Foreign Policy, 10 July 2017.

16 Webb, ‘Hide the looking glass’.

17 Israel and the Philippines improved their relationship, despite Duterte comparing himself to Hitler, and the former sold military equipment and weapons to the Asian nation. Duterte visited Israel in September 2018, and weapons deals were on the agenda. I attended a protest rally with Israelis in Jerusalem who opposed their government’s close ties with Duterte. Britain’s international trade secretary, Liam Fox, visited Manila in April 2017 and pledged to build a better relationship between the two countries based on ‘a foundation of shared values and shared interests’. Australia’s top intelligence chief, Nick Warner, was photographed in 2017 posing alongside Duterte with a clenched fist, the Filipino leader’s signature move.

18 Walden Bello, ‘Rodrigo Duterte: a fascist original’, in Curato (ed.), A Duterte reader, p. 78.

19 Megha Rajagopalan, ‘How US dollars are helping the Philippines’ bloody drug war’, Buzzfeed News, 28 November 2016. In 2017, the US Senate introduced a bill to restrict military aid to the Philippines and better support the Filipino human-rights community. Washington had planned to send US$5 million to Philippines law enforcement in 2016, and 26,000 assault rifles to the police.

20 Webb, ‘Hide the looking glass’.

21 Nicole Curato, ‘The Philippines beyond the dark spell’, Asia Global Online, 8 March 2018.

22 Although many international human-rights group opposed Duterte’s drug war, internet game companies produced countless games that allowed players to kill drug suspects in the Philippines.

23 Alfred McCoy, ‘Philippine populism: local violence and global context in the rise of a Filipino strongman, Surveillance in the global turn to authoritarianism’, Surveillance and Society, vol. 15, no. 3/4, 2017.

24 Police whistle-blowers claimed that officials and police colluded to switch off security cameras and street lights in areas where killings would take place, and planted guns on dead suspects. See Manuel Mogato and Clare Baldwin, ‘Special report: Police describe kill rewards, staged crime scenes in Duterte’s drug war’, Reuters, 18 April 2017. Another Reuters investigation in June 2017 found that police sent dead bodies to hospitals to remove incriminating evidence at crime scenes to obscure the fact that they were killing suspects on the spot. See Clare Baldwin and Andrew R.C. Marshall, ‘Philippines police use hospitals to hide drug war killings’, Reuters, 29 June 2017.

25 Kate Lamb, ‘Philippines secret death squads: officer claims police teams behind wave of killings’, The Guardian, 4 October 2016.

26 Despite some lawyers’ belief that courts in the Philippines were moderately independent, other lawyers pursued different tactics, namely pursuing Duterte in the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands. One lawyer, Jude Josue Sabio, asked the ICC in 2017 to adjudicate on the killing of more than 9,400 people from his time as mayor of Davao City and as president. The ICC announced in February 2018 that it was making preliminary investigations into whether Duterte’s drug war fell under its jurisdiction. Duterte said that any ICC investigators who came to the Philippines should be fed to the crocodiles. It didn’t take long after this outburst for Duterte to announce that the Philippines was withdrawing from the ICC. The president potentially opened himself up to ICC prosecution by admitting in September 2018 that his government had committed extra-judicial killings. The belief in a strong judiciary, expressed to me by some local lawyers, was shattered when the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines, Maria Lourdes Sereno, was removed from her position in 2018 after clashing with Duterte.

27 Churches were one of the few spaces that challenged Duterte. A leading archbishop said in 2017 that the Roman Catholic Church would protect police who came forward to give testimony about their involvement in the drug war. The Baclaran redemptorist church, a Catholic institution in metro Manila, openly challenged the violence unleashed during the Marcos era and Duterte period. There were statues and artwork in a garden adjacent to the church that resisted political repression. The ‘Desaparacidos’, the disappeared, was a mural that featured the Marcos period and beyond. Lady Justice stood next to her child, holding an image of her father, and behind them were panels listing hundreds of missing and killed citizens from 1971 to 2000. There were no mentions of Duterte’s drug war victims, but there was space for more panels. In a different place on the mural were small pointed criticisms of the drug war with painted images of extra-judicial killings and the infamous viral image of Jennelyn Olaires cradling her husband, Michael Siaron, a pedicab driver and alleged drug pusher, who was shot and killed in Pasay City in 2016 during the drug war. The Baclaran church helped many victims of the drug war. I interviewed one of them, ‘Cynthia’, who used to deal drugs after pressure from gangsters. After her neighbours were killed during the Duterte drug war, she stopped, went into hiding with her children, and was given support and financial aid by the church to rehabilitate her life. She still feared being killed.

28 T.J. Burgonio, ‘Offering drug surrenderers a different kind of redemption’, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 5 March 2017.

29 In April 2018, the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) released a list of barangay leaders it claimed were involved in illegal drugs. Over 200 people were listed, though the PDEA admitted that the evidence was largely gathered from police and intelligence sources. If innocent people were placed on the list, and their lives threatened or ended by the drug war, the process seemed flawed and open to abuse.

30 Within three months of Duterte taking power in 2016, 700,000 Filipinos had reportedly ‘surrendered’ to authorities as drug users or pushers. I obtained a copy of the form given by police to people who had surrendered. There was only one option to mark on the page, as a drug ‘pusher/user’, and the individual pledged to waive all legal liabilities against the state.

31 Jodee A. Agoncillo and Mariejo S. Ramos, ‘Rehab or rubout’, Philippines Daily Inquirer, 9 October 2016.

32 Steve Stecklow, ‘Inside Facebook’s Myanmar operation’, Reuters, 15 August 2018. Facebook commissioned an independent report into its behaviour in Myanmar, and admitted some fault. Released in late 2018, Facebook was ‘being used to foment division and incite offline violence,’ but the company claimed it was taking action to address the problem. Critics were rightly sceptical.

33 Megha Rajagopolan, ‘The country’s democracy has fallen apart — and it played out to millions on Facebook’, Buzzfeed News, 21 January 2018.

34 Lauren Etter, Vernon Silver, and Sarah Frier, ‘How Facebook’s political unit enables the dark art of political propaganda’, Bloomberg, 21 December 2017.

35 The parent company of Cambridge Analytica, exposed as assisting Donald Trump and Brexit in their successful campaigns through data harvesting on Facebook, boasted of helping Duterte win the 2016 election. Strategic Communications Laboratories, or SCL Group, placed on its website, since deleted, that the general public viewed Duterte ‘as a strong, no-nonsense man of action, who would appeal to the true values of the voters’.

36 Etter, Silver, and Frier, ‘Facebook’s political unit’.

37 Alba, ‘Connecting hate’.

38 ‘Rappler boss condemns “patriotic trolling” on social media’, ABS-CBN News, 30 January 2018.

39 I attended an opposition Liberal Party event, where the mood was both defiant and deflated. Duterte had so dominated the political scene since his 2016 election win that political parties struggled to gain support. I was told that the Liberal Party only had around 1,000 signed-up members. A female doctor in her thirties, Yves, spoke to a roaring crowd: ‘I shouldn’t be here, I’m a doctor. I have to take a stand against he who can’t be named [Duterte]. Many people are asleep. He is like Voldemort in Harry Potter. We must make people patriotic and against what’s happening.’

40 Duterte acknowledged that his campaign in 2016 paid social-media followers to back him, but claimed that this stopped after he won.

41 Duterte’s comments about his foreign policy were contradictory. At times, he said he wanted to ‘break up’ with the US and become closer to China, including backing its moves in the South China Sea, but Washington still gave huge amounts of aid annually.

42 I interviewed one of the communist rebels opposing the Duterte government by phone on a scratchy line. They were based in the Southern Tagalog region. I spoke briefly to Jaime ‘Ka Diego’ Padilla, spokesman of the New People’s Army’s Melito Glor regional command in the Southern Tagalog region of the Philippines and Comrade Kathryn, Office of the Regional Spokesperson. They were at war with the government, had been for decades, and lived in a remote area. I later obtained answers to my questions, via email, on what they saw as the similarities between Duterte’s drug war and the violent government-backed vigilante groups that killed alleged communists in the 1970s. Comrade Kathryn told me that, ‘Both administrations used paramilitaries and vigilantes against the people. The only difference is that now Duterte uses advanced military weapons and support gained from the imperialist US to attack the revolutionary movement.’ In February 2018, Duterte encouraged the army to shoot female rebels in the vagina.

43 Jeremy Scahill, Alex Emmons, and Ryan Grim, ‘Trump called Rodrigo Duterte to congratulate him on his murderous drug war: “You are doing an amazing job”’, The Intercept, 24 May 2017.

44 Aurora Almendral, ‘In Duterte’s Philippines, having a beer can now land you in jail’, The New York Times, 21 July 2018.

Chapter Four: The United States

1 Michelle Alexander (author of The New Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness, The New Press, New York, 2012) in a public conversation with Asha Bandele of the Drug Policy Alliance, 6 March 2014.

2 Thomas Fuller, ‘Now for the hard part: getting Californians to buy legal weed’, The New York Times, 2 January 2019.

3 Julia Barajas, ‘A California conundrum: how to crack down on illicit sales without echoing the war on drugs?’, Cannabis Wire, 4 February 2019.

4 Adam Drury, ‘Cannabis activists give joints to Washington lawmakers during rally’, High Times, 29 March 2018.

5 California is the world’s fifth-biggest economy, and its legal marijuana industry was full of potential for businesses and users, as well as risks for smaller players who weren’t interested or able to embrace big-scale growing. From 1 January 2018, when cannabis became legal in California, thousands of local growers were no longer legally allowed to run their businesses because they didn’t want to get licences. Early reports suggested that the result was mediocre weed products being sold at legitimate shops. There were even marijuana shortages due to the lack of enough licensed businesses. See Chris Roberts, ‘California’s cannabis industry is facing a crisis of capitalism’, The Observer, 19 March 2018. Illegal cannabis businesses were still booming, months after the drug became legal in California. The black market remained more profitable.

6 Tim Dickinson, ‘The real drug czar’, Rolling Stone, 20 June 2013.

7 Amanda Chicago Lewis, ‘How black people are being shut out of America’s weed boom’, Buzzfeed News, 16 March 2016.

8 Christopher Ingraham, ‘Marijuana raids are more deadly than the drug itself’, The Washington Post, 20 March 2017.

9 DC police announced in September 2018 that they would change how they treated citizens who were caught smoking marijuana in public. It remained illegal, but arrests would be ‘non-custodial’. This still meant that an individual would receive a criminal conviction.

10 The legal cannabis industry was predominantly male-dominated, with the major companies having few female managers.

11 Amanda Chicago Lewis, ‘The case for drug war “reparations”’, Vice News, 10 March 2017.

12 Matt Ferner, ‘San Francisco to dismiss or reduce thousands of past marijuana convictions’, Huffington Post, 2 January 2018.

13 The country’s most prominent anti-marijuana lobby group, Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), was increasingly successful in raising money in the Trump era to stop or at least slow down the commercialisation of cannabis. See Isaac Fornarola, ‘An anti-cannabis crusader ramps up for the mid-terms — and beyond’, Cannabis Wire, 3 October 2018.

14 Thomas Pellechia, ‘Legal cannabis industry poised by big growth in North America and around the world’, Forbes, 1 March 2018.

15 Max Berlinger, ‘High Times has some glossy new competition’, The New York Times, 9 January 2019.

16 Jamie Doward, ‘Legal marijuana cuts violence says US study, as medical-use laws see crime fall’, The Guardian, 14 January 2018.

17 Dickinson, ‘The real drug czar’.

18 Benjamin Mueller, ‘It wasn’t a crime to carry marijuana. Until the police found a loophole’, The New York Times, 2 August 2018.

19 Ibid.

20 Baltimore took a different approach to law enforcement after years of arresting huge numbers of people for minor drug offences. Drug arrests dropped by 50 per cent in 2015 after police focused more on large-scale drug-traffickers. See Kevin Rector, ‘Battle lines being drawn in Baltimore’s war on drugs’, The Baltimore Sun, 20 February 2016. After years of struggling with high uses of heroin, Baltimore was now experiencing an influx of deadly fentanyl, causing the deaths of many citizens.

21 Peter Kerr, ‘The unspeakable is debated: should drugs be legalised?’, The New York Times, 15 May 1988.

22 Jay Gopalan, ‘The junkie and the addict: the moral war on drugs’, Harvard Political Review, 27 February 2017.

23 Jesse Kornbluth, ‘Poisonous fallout from war on marijuana’, The New York Times, 19 November 1978.

24 Adam Martin, ‘Reagan’s war on drugs reduced crime in an unexpected way’, The Atlantic, 21 December 2011.

25 Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: how to run a drug cartel, Ebury Press, London, p. 146.

26 Martin, ‘Reagan’s war on drugs’.

27 Daniel Forbes, ‘Prime-time propaganda’, Salon, 13 January 2000.

28 Aviva Shen, ‘The disastrous legacy of Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign’, Think Progress, 6 March 2016.

29 Mikaela Linder, ‘Mass incarceration nation: the truth behind Reagan’s war on drugs’, Unleashed, Bancroft School, 11 February 2018.

30 Thomas Frank, ‘Bill Clinton’s crime bill destroyed lives, and there’s no point denying it’, The Guardian, 15 April 2016.

31 ‘The Clinton drug war legacy’, High Times, 1 February 2001.

32 Bob Dreyfuss, ‘Bush’s war on pot’, Rolling Stone, 11 August 2005.

33 ‘A brief history of the drug war’, Drug Policy Alliance, 2018.

34 Dreyfuss, ‘Bush’s war on pot’.

35 Mike Rigg, ‘Obama’s war on pot’, The Nation, 30 October 2013.

36 Open and legal research on marijuana for medical and scientific purposes requires cannabis being removed from its status as a schedule-one drug and no longer prohibited. Research showed that cannabidiol (CBD) helped some people with epilepsy and other diseases. The Food and Drug Administration approved a cannabidiol drug in 2018 for the first time that was designed for sufferers of epilepsy. There were dissenting opinions about marijuana from doctors who argued that the drug contained dangers, especially for the young brain as it developed. Addiction was a problem, as was mental illness, due to excessive cannabis consumption. Driving while stoned was illegal across the country, and in some states that had legalised the drug there were increased rates of cannabis in the blood of people having accidents (although in some studies the connection between driving stoned and increased accidents was inconclusive). See Judith Grisel, ‘Pot holes’, The Washington Post, 25 May 2018.

37 One of the main opponents of the vote to legalise cannabis in California in 2016 were police and prison guard groups, who provided about half of the funds to groups campaigning against it. They feared losing the lucrative government revenue streams that they had been receiving for decades. See Lee Fang, ‘Police and prison guard groups fight marijuana legalisation in California’, The Intercept, 18 May 2016. Alcohol and pharmaceutical companies were also big funders of anti-marijuana ballot initiatives in 2016, fearful they’d lose market share. There was growing evidence in states that legalised marijuana that fewer citizens were buying and drinking alcohol, one of the most dangerous drugs alongside nicotine. See Jon Walker, ‘There’s real evidence that legalised pot can reduce drinking’, The Intercept, 20 April 2018.

38 Jessica Glenza, ‘Ten million more Americans smoke marijuana now than 12 years ago: study’, The Guardian, 1 September 2016. US government data released in 2016 found that slightly more middle-aged Americans than their teenage children smoked marijuana.

39 German Lopez, ‘Why you shouldn’t dismiss the risk of marijuana addiction’, Vox, 20 August 2018. According to the 2016 national survey on drug use and health, ‘the percentage of adolescents with a marijuana use disorder in 2016 was lower than the percentages in 2002 to 2013, but it was similar to the percentages in 2014 and 2015’. In 2016, 2.3 per cent of adolescents aged 12 to 17 had marijuana-use disorder.

40 German Lopez, ‘How Obama quietly reshaped America’s war on drugs’, Vox, 19 January 2017. In 2017, Massachusetts threw out 21,587 criminal drug cases after a chemist, Annie Dookhan, pleaded guilty to tampering with or falsifying information over nine years. It was likely the single biggest dismissal of wrongful convictions in the nation’s history.

41 Trump released the US government’s annual list of nations identified as being ‘major drug-transit or major illicit drug producing countries’. Released on 11 September 2018, the countries were Afghanistan, The Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela.

42 During the Trump era and before, many firefighters, police, and other safety-sensitive employees could be drug tested, and if found to have marijuana in their systems, could be fired. This was even in states where cannabis was legal and even if the drug was the only way to deal with chronic pain.

43 One of the more curious Trump appointments was Taylor Weyeneth, a 24-year-old Trump campaign worker who ended up with a senior role at the government’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, despite having no experience for the role. He was fired soon after The Washington Post exposed his lack of credentials.

44 California Democrat Barbara Lee introduced a resolution in June 2018, the Respect resolution, that aimed to fight the racial disparity in the marijuana industry. It pushed for expunging the records of people incarcerated for non-violent cannabis offences and for reducing the high fees to enter the legal marijuana industry.

45 Long-time opponents of marijuana increasingly embraced the drug for either medical or capitalist reasons. Former Republican speaker of the House John Boehner announced his support for cannabis, pushed for it be removed from the government’s controlled substances list, and became involved in a cannabis business, Acreage Holdings, that aimed to make money from the burgeoning industry. Many in the legalisation movement were sceptical about Boehner’s motives after he’d spent his life opposing marijuana.

46 Lara Bazelon, ‘Kamala Harris was not a “progressive prosecutor”’, The New York Times, 17 January 2019.

47 Former vice-president Joe Biden, a former Democratic senator, acknowledged on Martin Luther King Day in 2019 that he had been wrong to back tough-on-crime drug legalisation in the 1980s and 1990s. He helped write and support the 1994 crime bill, under president Bill Clinton, that led to mass incarceration and separate legal standards for powdered cocaine and street crack cocaine. (The latter was more harshly punished, and targeted the black community.) Biden was a Democratic candidate for the 2020 presidential election, and his troubling record on the drug war followed him everywhere.

48 Dominic Holden, ‘Inside the Trump administration’s secret war on weed’, Buzzfeed News, 29 August 2018.

49 Asawin Suebsaeng and Lachlan Markay, ‘Trump’s Disney robot obsession and Anthony Scaramucci’s dick joke: scenes from a White House insider’, The Daily Beast, 24 January 2019.

50 Nicholas Fandos and Maggie Haberman, ‘Trump embraces a path to ease US sentencing’, The New York Times, 14 November 2018.

51 One critic of Trump’s criminal-justice reforms, lawyer Keith Wattley, claimed it discriminated against violent offenders and ‘perpetuates the false narrative that people who commit violent crimes are fundamentally different from those who commit nonviolent crimes’. Furthermore, he said that it would only help very few people whose sentences would be reduced, and instead would benefit the private prison industry that aimed to sell electronic monitoring systems when a person was released from jail. See Keith Wattley, ‘Trump’s criminal justice reform is a step in the wrong direction’, The New York Times, 4 December 2018.

52 Katharine Q. Seelye, ‘In heroin crisis, white families seek gentler war on drugs’, The New York Times, 30 October 2015.

53 Dan Vergano, ‘US overdose deaths will double again in 8 years, scientists predict’, Buzzfeed News, 20 September 2018.

54 Megan McArdle, ‘The incredibly unpopular idea that could stem opioid deaths’, The Washington Post, 4 December 2018; Zachary Siegel, ‘The strongest evidence yet for a highly controversial addiction treatment’, The Atlantic, 8 December 2018; Dan Vergano, ‘The overdose crisis is so bad that some experts want to prescribe heroin to treat addiction’, Buzzfeed News, 6 December 2018.

55 Felice J. ‘Freyer, Emergency rooms once offered little for drug users. That’s starting to change’, The Boston Globe, 10 December 2018.

56 Patrick Radden Keefe, ‘Empire of pain’, The New Yorker, 30 October 2017. Despite Purdue Pharma being a lead cause of the opioid crisis, the company received a patent in 2018 to help treat opioid addiction.

57 David Armstrong, ‘OxyContin maker explored expansion into “attractive” anti-addiction market’, ProPublica, 30 January 2019.

58 German Lopez, ‘Drug companies bought doctor’s fancy meals — and then those doctors prescribed more opioids’, Vox, 15 May 2018.

59 Aaron Kessler, Elizabeth Cohen and Katherine Grise, ‘The more opioids doctors prescribe, the more money they make’, CNN, 12 March 2018.

60 ‘Why is the opioid epidemic overwhelmingly white?’, All Things Considered, NPR, 4 November 2017.

61 In 2000, Eric Alvarez had been given a 30-year sentence for distributing crack and cocaine, and for running a smuggling ring between New York and North Carolina. His first clemency application in 2013 was ignored, but he had his sentence commuted by Obama in 2016. When Alverez’s son died in 2013, he was unable to attend the funeral. He now lives as a free man in New York City, where I met him at a Starbucks. He had been in and out of correctional facilities for decades, sometimes working legitimate jobs and other times dealing drugs. He worked as a DJ, Chubb Dog (and does so again today). His first clemency application in 2013 was ignored. Today, he installs water heaters across New York. He told me that he would ‘give Obama a big kiss’ if he met him. ‘I would hug the shit out of him. He gave me my life back.’ Alvarez was talkative, funny, and grateful to have been given a second chance in life rather than likely dying in prison.

62 Justin Wm. Moyer, ‘A drug dealer got a life sentence and was devastated. So was the judge who sentenced him’, The Washington Post, 6 May 2017.

63 Michael Collins, deputy director at the Drug Policy Alliance in Washington, DC, told me that it was far easier in the Obama years to convince politicians to push for legislative changes in domestic drug laws, marijuana and sentencing reform but foreign policy and the drug war were too intimately linked to the war on terror. For this reason, Congressmen and women were reluctant to ask too many questions about the role of the DEA internationally as they were afraid that they’d be criticised for being against the war on terror. Collins said that the pro-drug war crowd had cleverly co-opted the ‘language and tools’ of the war on terror.

64 Keely Herring, ‘Was a prison built every 10 days to house a fast-growing population of nonviolent inmates?’, Politifact, 31 July 2015.

65 Raishad Hardnett, ‘The prisoners left behind’, Cannabis Wire, 7 September 2018.

66 Dinah Ortiz, ‘Battle bonded in family defence’, Medium, 17 May 2018.

67 Jane Flasch, ‘Rochester drug court amid opioid crisis: “It’s overwhelming”’, 13WHAM News, 22 August 2018.

68 Joseph Goldstein, ‘Undercover officers ask addicts to buy drugs, snaring them but not dealers’, The New York Times, 4 April 2016.

69 Kerr, ‘The unspeakable is debated’.

70 Some countries were both hard-line against drugs but also more progressive in treatment. For example, Iran still executed many people for drug crimes, but also provided harm-reduction treatment through its health-care system.

71 Samuel Oakford, ‘How Russia became the new global leader in the war on drugs’, Vice News, 18 April 2016.

72 Ann Fordham and Martin Jelsma, ‘Will UNGASS 2016 be the beginning of the end for the “war on drugs”’, Open Democracy, 16 March 2016. Many US states proposed opening safe injecting centres though the Trump administration opposed them.

73 Samuel Oakford, ‘Trump administration plans to UN meeting to ramp up the international drug war’, The Intercept, 18 September 2018.

74 By 2018, Vincente Fox was director of a Canadian cannabis company in Colombia, and advocated legalisation in Mexico.

75 Tracy Wilkinson, ‘Mexico moves quietly to decriminalise minor drug use’, the Los Angeles Times, 21 June 2009.

76 Doctors from Yale University published a study in The Lancet Psychiatry in late 2018 that showed promising results with a new drug that helped cannabis users who had problems with overuse. The drug reduced issues with marijuana withdrawal.

Chapter Five: Britain

1 Comment made to me during interview with Neil Woods on 15 May 2018.

2 David Rhodes, ‘Drug and alcohol services cut by 162 million pounds as deaths increase’, BBC News, 11 May 2018.

3 Tom De Castella, ‘100 years of the war on drugs’, BBC News Magazine, 24 January 2012.

4 Ibid.

5 Damien Gayle, ‘Police less likely to find drugs on black people during stop and search’, The Guardian, 14 December 2017.

6 Simon Jenkins, ‘The 1971 Misuse of Drugs act was the stupidest and most ineffective ever passed — but has the PM got the guts to change it?’, Evening Standard, 15 January 2013.

7 Genevieve Fox, ‘From the archive: drugs on the rise in Britain’, The Observer, 2 December 2018.

8 ‘Why Britain loves drugs’, Mixmag, 27 May 2014.

9 Alan Travis, ‘Revealed: how drugs war failed’, The Guardian, 5 July 2005.

10 David Nutt, ‘Blair’s other war’, Evidence not Exaggeration [blog], 26 April 2011.

11 Leo Benedictus, ‘How the British fell out of love with drugs’, The Guardian, 24 February 2011.

12 Danny Kushlick, director of Transform Drug Policy Foundation, wrote in The Times in 2004 that all drugs should be regulated and legalised, removing the huge amount of money earned by organised crime. See Danny Kushlick, ‘Ending the guns-drugs connection’, The Times, 12 October 2004.

13 ‘The Guardian view on UK drug laws: high time to challenge a failing prohibition’, The Guardian, 9 March 2016.

14 ‘The Guardian view on drug wars: protect the innocent’, The Guardian, 14 February 2019. In response to the Guardian editorial, some of the country’s leading drug reformers, including David Nutt, Niamh Eastwood, Crispin Blunt MP, Neil Woods, and Thangam Debbonaire MP, wrote in a letter to the editor that it was strange that the paper provided no viable alternatives to the drug war. The letter read in part: ‘This dismissal of political alternatives sits oddly in a newspaper with a noble tradition of opposing mass violence in pursuit of unwinnable political ends.’ ‘The “war on drugs” is causing great damage’, The Guardian, 16 February 2019.

15 Police recorded possession of drugs offences in England and Wales from 2004/05 to 2017/18, Statista, 2018.

16 The Greens pushed for a radical overhaul of Britain’s drug laws including non-violent offenders, the majority of people in prison, being allowed to rehabilitate in the community.

17 Ashley Cowburn, ‘Government accused of “squandering” 1.6 billion pounds on anti-drug policy’, The Independent, 7 August 2017.

18 Franklyn Addo, ‘Iain Duncan Smith should stop and search his views on youth violence’, The Guardian, 30 August 2018. Margaret Thatcher’s favourite free market think-tank, The Institute of Economic Affairs, released a report in 2018 that called for the legalisation of cannabis.

19 Damien Gayle, ‘Labour peer Charles Falconer apologises over war on drugs’, The Guardian, 28 September 2018.

20 Michael Allen, ‘Inside the secret world of a British undercover drugs cop’, Vice, 5 September 2014.

21 Decca Aitkenhead, ‘“I’ve done really bad things”: The undercover cop who abandoned the war on drugs’, The Guardian, 26 August 2016.

22 ‘Drugs should be legalised, regulated and taxed’, The British Medical Journal, 10 May 2018.

23 The Prison Governors Association said in 2013 that keeping Class A drugs illegal guaranteed that criminals controlled the market and pushed people into crime to support their habits.

24 Peter Hitchens, ‘There are real laws against smoking — maybe that’s why kids switch to drugs’, Daily Mail, 5 November 2017.

25 Mark Townsend, ‘Kings of cocaine: how the Albanian mafia seized control of the UK drugs trade’, The Guardian, 13 January 2019; and Borzou Daragahi, ‘“Colombia of Europe”: how tiny Albania became the continent’s drug-trafficking headquarters’, The Independent, 27 January 2019.

26 Guy Kelly, ‘The real cost of cocaine: Following the drug from Colombian rainforests to British suburbia’, The Telegraph, 1 September 2018.

27 Jon Stone, ‘Former Tory justice minister says he was told to stop asking how much drugs prohibition actually costs’, The Independent, 3 October 2016.

28 Anushka Asthana, ‘Nick Clegg accuses Theresa May of tampering with drug report’, The Guardian, 18 April 2016.

29 Lester Black, ‘Talking weed laws with Crispin Blunt’, The Strangler, 9 May 2018.

30 James Hanning and David Connett, ‘London is now the global money-laundering centre for the drug-trade, says crime expert’, The Independent, 4 July 2015.

31 Paul Flynn, ‘Banning cannabis has failed — now is the time for our MPs to show true courage’, The Mirror, 11 October 2015.

32 Decca Aitkenhead, ‘David Lammy: “Kids are getting killed. Where is the prime minister? Where is Sadiq Khan?”’, The Guardian, 7 April 2018.

33 Denis Campbell, ‘Only one in ten Britons knew that alcohol causes cancer’, survey finds, The Guardian, 8 January 2018.

34 Denis Campbell, ‘Thangam Debbonaire: “I saw the light about alcohol and cancer”’, The Guardian, 16 January 2018.

35 Thangam Debbonaire and Jeff Smith, ‘Labour can afford to be bold on drug policy reform’, Labour List, 10 July 2018.

36 Tom Newton Dunn, ‘Drugs death capital’, The Sun, 7 August 2018.

37 ‘Is it high time for a change?’, The Sun, 30 October 2014.

38 Some of the most powerful advocates for drug reform were parents of children who had lost their lives to overdoses. Anyone’s Child is made up of families whose lives have been destroyed by repressive drug laws, and they advocate for drug regulation.

39 Dan Vevers, ‘Home Office’s injection room refusal “endangering lives”’, STV News, 8 October 2018.

40 David Hillier, ‘One UK country takes way more drugs than any other country in the world’, Vice, 9 May 2018.

41 Mike Power, Insta-gram: How British cocaine dealers got faster and better, Mixmag, 7 March 2019.

Chapter Six: Australia

1 Comment made to me during interview with Dr David Caldicott on 25 October 2017.

2 The only condition of interviewing users at the safe injecting facility was that I didn’t identity their real names and that they had the right to read and amend the transcripts of their interviews if they believed their words could be better expressed. One female drug user, whom I interviewed for the book, backed out months later after she was sent back to prison.

3 European nations such as Germany and Switzerland have drug inhalation rooms where methamphetamine, ice, heroin, or crack can be safely ingested, with medical staff watching on. The aim, as with safe injecting centres, is to support users and offer appropriate treatment and support. In Bern, Switzerland, there’s a police-approved ‘courtyard system’ where registered users can buy and sell drugs among themselves while police observe. See Eamonn Duff, ‘The safe room’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 July 2016.

4 ‘Front Page – The Tele Fit Up’, ABC TV Media Watch, 11 September 2006.

5 Jackson Stiles, ‘Australia has “most dangerous” ecstasy drugs’, The New Daily, 8 June 2015.

6 Jamie Doward, ‘Testing drugs at music festivals is a “lifesaver”, study finds’, The Guardian, 9 December 2018.

7 Kevin Franciotti, ‘How harm reduction services are keeping festivalgoers safe’, Filter, 7 December 2018.

8 ‘History of drug laws in Australia’, State Library of New South Wales.

9 Desmond Manderson, From Mr Sin to Mr Big: a history of Australian drug laws, Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 12.

10 Desmond Manderson, ‘Like men possessed: what are illicit drug laws really for?’, The Conversation, 3 November 2014.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid. ‘History of drug laws in Australia’, State Library of New South Wales.

13 Manderson, ‘Like men possessed’.

14 Manderson, From Mr Sin to Mr Big.

15 Katie Burgess, ‘“Drug pushers in suits”: why the ACT’s bid to “legalise heroin” failed’, The Canberra Times, 23 July 2017.

16 Steve Evans, ‘Drug campaigners gather to remember victims’, The Canberra Times, 29 October 2018.

17 David Caldicott, ‘Pyne’s pain’, The Advertiser, 31 May 2007.

18 Australia is a world leader in regulating tobacco and cutting rates of smoking. The federal Labor government introduced plain packaging for cigarettes from 2012, and despite tobacco companies launching legal action, evidence proves that it is improving public health and reducing consumption. A number of other countries followed Australia’s lead.

19 Nicole Lee, ‘Three charts on: Australia’s changing drug and alcohol habits’, The Conversation, 1 June 2017.

20 Jonathan Hair, ‘Australia has second-highest concentration of dark net drug dealers per capita, new criminology research finds’, ABC News, 1 June 2018.

21 Michael Heath, ‘One part of Australia’s economy is booming: illegal drugs’, Bloomberg, 11 December 2018.

22 Lucy Cormack, ‘Our illicit drug splurge may top our café spend’, The Age, 20 February 2019.

23 ‘The drugs debate we have to have’, The Age, 22 April 2018.

24 ACT Labor politician Michael Pettersson introduced a private member’s bill in September 2018 that pushed to legalise cannabis for personal use. He claimed that around 60 per cent of drug arrests in his territory were for marijuana and that these funds could be better spent elsewhere.

25 Justine Landis-Hanley, ‘For these Australian prisoners, a 14-month wait without being sentenced’, The New York Times, 21 August 2018.

26 Angus Thompson, ‘Coroner compares drug prohibition laws to racism’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 November 2018.

27 ‘Weeded warriors: the young veterans breaking the law to treat their PTSD’, Hack, Triple J, 14 September 2017.

28 Elise Worthington, ‘Aura Medical Corporation: Clinics offering ketamine injections to treat depression blame negative publicity for closure’, ABC News, 15 July 2015.

29 A brave doctor who believes in the benefits of ketamine for depressed patients is Tasmanian-based Dr Stephen Hyde. He told me that he faced constant pressure from the medical establishment because of his desire to prescribe ketamine. Being in private practice, it was nearly impossible to legally source ketamine, so his patients, many of whom he believed would benefit medically from the drug, could not access it. He thought it was principally ‘fear and ignorance’ that led the Australian establishment’s position. He was cautiously optimistic about the development by pharmaceutical giants such as Johnson & Johnson of a commercially viable ketamine-style nasal spray for depression that could allow large numbers of depressed patients to use it. Hyde told me that ketamine had been ‘a life-changing treatment for a number of my patients. It’s extremely frustrating that we’re not able to prescribe in a way that it should be.’

30 Alex Wodak, ‘Australia’s drug policy led the world 30 years ago. Now politics holds us back’, The Guardian, 2 April 2015.

31 Police were obsessed with arresting young people with drugs at music festivals. After the Field Day music event in early 2016 in Sydney, where 184 people were arrested for drug offences, one magistrate took harsh action against 11 of them, imposing fines and finding them guilty, despite some of them having no more than four ecstasy tablets.

32 Miranda Devine, ‘A dangerous idea that stubbornly refuses to die’, The Daily Telegraph, 27 October 2010.

33 Miranda Devine, ‘Vale the old Kings Cross, victim of lethal injection’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 28 September 2003.

34 ‘Cross Currents: The story behind Australia’s first and only medically supervised injecting centre’, Uniting Care, 2014.

35 Miranda Devine, ‘We are losing the war on drugs’, The Daily Telegraph, 11 November 2014.

36 Adam Gattrell, ‘Alcohol a bigger scourge than meth: doctors criticise “disappointing” drug strategy’, The Age, 1 August 2017. According to Australian Bureau of Statistics data for 2016, drug deaths reached their highest level in 20 years, mostly from prescription pain and anxiety medication and ice. Heroin was the fourth-biggest killer. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found in 2017 that one million Australians had misused pharmaceuticals in the previous 12 months.

37 Miranda Devine, ‘This ice age has gone on too long’, The Daily Telegraph, 24 October 2016.

38 The Daily Telegraph never stopped its crusade against drug users and dealers, targeting the weak and powerless in its endless campaign against illicit substances. For example, in May 2018 its target was ‘fresh-faced young women’ being ‘groomed’ to smuggle drugs into music festivals. These women were doubtless being pushed into the job, but they were easy targets for the newspaper, instead of it going after the government and police for arresting scores of young people with small amounts of drugs. In article after article, the violent language of the drug war was used, despite decades of it failing to stop dealing, supplying, or using.

39 Patrick Hatch, ‘Marijuana stocks skyrocket, set to “lead world” after export approval’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 January 2018.

40 Tacey Rychter, ‘Even Australia’s medical marijuana poster boy can’t get the drug’, The New York Times, 11 February 2018.

41 Michael Vincent, ‘Medical cannabis “pretty much inaccessible”, leaving patients looking to the US’, ABC News, 24 July 2018.

42 Jill Margo, ‘The paradox at the heart of the medical marijuana industry’, The Australian Financial Review, 10 October 2018.

43 Kathleen Donaghey, ‘Australian-made medical cannabis hits pharmacy shelves’, The New Daily, 11 September 2018.

44 Sean Nicholls, Lisa McGregor, and Stuart Washington, ‘Marijuana moguls optimistic about legalisation of recreational cannabis in Australia’, ABC News, 23 April 2018.

45 Naomi O’Leary, ‘Sex, drugs and puke: partygoers turn Amsterdam into an “urban jungle”’, The Guardian, 5 August 2018.

46 John Silvester, ‘How Victoria became Australia’s pot capital’, The Age, 16 June 2017.

Chapter Seven: Solutions

1 Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: exploring the new science of psychedelics, Allen Lane, London, 2018, p. 12.

2 The potency of MDMA/ecstasy had rapidly increased over the last years, sold on the street and via the dark net, partly due to drug dealers sourcing different chemicals from China. Deaths due to ecstasy soared. An investigation in Mixmag magazine went undercover in China to talk directly with a major chemical supplier, but concluded that the ‘problem with MDMA is not purity, price, or availability. It is a lack of understanding — a fundamental, systematic, cultural ignorance of the drug and the way it is used — on the part of the politicians who uphold and extend the illogical laws to ban this, and any drug. That is the problem.’ Mike Power, ‘We went undercover in a Chinese MDMA factory’, Mixmag, 29 May 2018.

3 James Martin, ‘Australia emerges as a leader in the global darknet drugs trade’, The Conversation, 17 February 2017.

4 James Martin, ‘Cryptomarkets, systemic violence and the “gentrification hypothesis”’, Addiction, 16 October 2017.

5 James Martin, ‘“Fair trade” cocaine and “conflict-free” opium: the future of online drug marketing’, The Conversation, 12 August 2014.

6 Kate Wighton, ‘The brain on LSD revealed: first scans show how the drug affects the brain’, Imperial College London, 11 April 2016.

7 Ariel Levy, ‘The drug of choice for the age of kale’, The New Yorker, 12 September 2016.

8 Psychedelic drugs could be abused by the wrong people. The Associated Press reported in 2018 about US service members in Wyoming using LSD, cocaine, and other drugs while off-duty in 2015 and 2016; these were individuals who were tasked to guard the country’s nuclear missiles. See Robert Burns, ‘Security troops on US nuclear missile base took LSD’, Associated Press, 24 May 2018.

9 David Nickles, ‘It’s time to debunk prohibitionist narratives and calls for monopolies within psychedelic science’, Psymposia, 2018.

10 Oliver Moody, ‘Robots may be given anti-depressants to keep their spark’, The Times, 11 April 2018.

11 Mike Riggs, ‘Medical researchers are steps away from legalising ecstasy. Here’s how they did it’, Reason, 18 July 2017.

12 Ibid.

13 Tim Martin, ‘The new science of psychedelics’, New Statesman, 5 September 2018.

14 Ayelett Shani, ‘Patients say that ayahuasca is like a reboot for the brain’, Haaretz, 30 August 2018.

15 Martin, ‘The new science of psychedelics’.

16 Jessi Appleton, ‘I was in the MAPS MDMA for PTSD study. It freed me from a childhood of abuse’, Psymposia, 3 October 2017.

17 Stephen Buranyi, ‘New trials are using ketamine to treat alcohol addiction’, Vice Motherboard, 21 July 2016.

18 Eugene Rubin, ‘Can craving for cocaine be blocked in addicted individuals?’, Psychology Today, 2 February 2017.

19 Baum, ‘Legalise it all’.

20 Ibid.

21 Steve Rolles, ‘Legalising drugs: The key to ending the war’, New Internationalist, 2017, pp. 50–51.

22 Baum, ‘Legalise it all’.

23 Rolles, ‘Legalising drugs’, p. 66.

Conclusion

1 Max Daly, ‘The world’s war on drugs has failed yet again’, Vice, 23 October 2018.

2 Emma Young, ‘How Iceland got teens to say no to drugs’, The Atlantic, 19 January 2017.

3 Robert Muggah and John P. Sullivan, ‘The coming crime wars’, Foreign Policy, 21 September 2018.

4 Alfred McCoy, ‘Will China be the next global hegemon?’, TomDispatch, 21 August 2018.

5 Global Commission on Drugs Policy 2018.

6 When ‘migrant caravans’ started moving towards the US border from Latin and Central America in 2018, many of the refugees came from Honduras, but most of the mainstream media coverage wilfully ignored the reasons why so many Hondurans had had to flee. I saw barely any discussion of US policy towards Honduras and how it had worsened drug and gang-related violence.

7 Daly, ‘World’s war on drugs has failed’.

8 German Lopez, ‘How one renegade country could unravel America’s war on drugs’, Vox, 20 December 2015.