Any attempt to shut down the trade in drugs such as heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine or weed invariably sets off a chain of events that just makes things worse, leaving a trail of death, illness, violence, slavery, addiction, crime and inequality across the globe. Everyone loses – except, in a weird kind of way, the drugs themselves.
Responding to a series of bans in the 2010s, Chinese chemists repeatedly tweaked the molecular formula of Spice until it had mutated from a mildly powerful ‘legal high’ sold to school kids on the British high street into something capable of causing chaos and misery in the UK prison system. This is the story of how Spice went from the head shops to tabloid-terrorising “zombie drug."
For half a century, prohibition has been causing chaos and misery worldwide. Any attempt to shut down the drugs trade invariably sets off a chain of events that just makes things worse, leaving a trail of death, illness, violence, slavery, addiction, crime and inequality across the globe. The War On Drugs is a war in which everyone loses – except, in a weird kind of way, the drugs themselves.
Hand grenades in coffee shops. A wave of assassinations. Rocket launchers fired at media offices. The murder of a lawyer representing a gangland informant. Recent developments have got people asking the question: Is the Netherlands turning into a narco-state?
In 2001, Portugal decriminalized all drugs. Meanwhile, the police in the Philippines have spent the last four years shooting thousands of addicts dead in the street.
In the late 2000s, a global cocaine and ecstasy drought led to the rise of a new drug that changed the way people get high forever: Mephedrone. Legal, dirt cheap and as easy to order online as pizza, for a while mephedrone boomed in countries worldwide. Within a few years, it had been outlawed almost everywhere, but not before introducing a generation to the online drugs market – where narcotic oblivion is only ever a few clicks away.
In the 1990s and early-2000s, the War on Drugs tried to stop smokers worldwide getting high on hash. However, this led to the UK getting its very own domestic ‘skunk’ industry – an ultra-violent shadowland populated by gangs, pushers, lab slaves, granny growers and millions of young people putting their mental health at risk.
Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán turned Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel into the most powerful drugs gang on the planet. But when, in 2016, he was arrested for the third and final time, it unleashed a tidal wave of violence as rival gangs battled for supremacy in the power vacuum left behind.
Any attempt to shut down the trade in drugs such as heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine or weed invariably sets off a chain of events that just makes things worse, leaving a trail of death, illness, violence, slavery, addiction, crime and inequality across the globe. Everyone loses – except, in a weird kind of way, the drugs themselves.
In the US, African-Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of white people – with over half sentenced for drug crimes. This is not a bug of the War on Drugs, it’s a feature. Since their earliest beginnings, drug laws have been explicitly built around targeting ethnic minorities. We trace this horrifying story – right up to how the War on Drugs is perhaps the key driver of racism in policing today.
Around 500,000 people in California are addicted to methamphetamine. Out of a population of almost 40 million, that’s one in every 200 people. But this goes way beyond the US: Meth is raging across Mexico, the Philippines and South-East Asia too.
Going on a shroom, DMT or acid trip may not sound like a conventional therapy session, but there’s a psychedelic revolution going on in the world of mental health treatment. Illegal drugs previously associated with hippies and raves are now being used to treat PTSD, depression, anxiety, addiction and obsessive disorders.
From the coca leaves illicitly grown in the jungles of South America to the lines snorted in nightclub toilets around the world – the global cocaine trade alone is worth 100 billion dollars a year.
The media has a drug problem, we need to stage an intervention. From 'face-eating cannibals on monkey dust' to people on bath salts 'ripping out their scrotum' to 'crack babies', newspapers keep making up drug stories.
In this episode of The War On Drugs, we think about what a legal market might actually look like. We look at different classes of drugs, exploring exactly how legal, regulated markets for heroin, cocaine and MDMA can be structured in order to protect users from harm.
From delays in access and research into cannabis-based medicines to driving a street-valium crisis in Scotland to critical pain-relief shortages across the global south, we explore how the War on Drugs impacts the medical world, causing massive, unnecessary suffering along the way.
For the past decade, the UK has been horrified by the phenomenon of County Lines – big city criminal groups using kids as young as 12 to take over the drug supply of smaller towns and villages.
Over the past decade or so, South American cartels have found a new way to get their product into the vast European marketplace – West Africa.
Cannabis has been legalized in Canada and many US states, and the trend looks set to continue. But just legalizing the drug is not a simple magic bullet. There are many complex issues of social justice and economic equality to be considered. We look at the lessons to be learned from places like Canada and Colorado and explore how we can get cannabis legalization right.
A world flooded with ultra-powerful synthetic opioids, people buying drugs from AI dealers, Mexican cartels pouring methamphetamine into Europe – there are some terrifying prospects on the horizon. And yet, the US, the birthplace of the War on Drugs itself, might just be beginning to turn a corner in how it thinks about this whole failed enterprise.
As the world has been transfixed by the opioid crisis in North America, another crisis, just as serious, has been unfolding almost unreported across Africa.
The Los Zetas Cartel changed the game in the Mexican War on Drugs. From the mid-2000s, they introduced an unprecedented level of violence – paramilitary-style executions, beheadings, bodies hung from bridges. But this was not simply psychopathic violence. These were special forces soldiers from the Mexican military – who had received specialized training from the US Army – who had defected, and used their training to become the most feared drugs cartel in Central America.
In the Mexican War on Drugs, the word, “cartel” gets thrown around a lot. The Sinaloa Cartel; The Gulf Cartel; La Famillia; Los Zetas. But who actually are these organisations which have inflicted grotesque violence on Mexico – and made billions of dollars in the process? How did they grow from small smuggling gangs, to mighty empires – and then splinter into separate factions each fighting one another?
All wars are fought with weapons, and the guns used to murder tens of thousands of people in the Mexican War on Drugs mostly come from America.
The rumours have circulated for decades. Did the CIA flood the inner cities of the US with crack cocaine in the 1980s? Was the American government actually responsible for the crack epidemic? Often dismissed as a conspiracy theory, but passionately believed by huge sections of the population – the idea that US intelligence agencies knowingly protected drug traffickers and played a role in bringing cocaine into the US is one of the most often repeated stories of the War on Drugs.
In 2007, federal police raided the Mexico city mansion of the high-flying businessman Zhenli Ye Gon. Inside they found $207 million dollars – over two tonnes of $100 dollar bills – along with luxury cars and automatic weapons.
We talk a lot about the human and financial costs of the War on Drugs – but this conflict is also having a serious environmental impact. From the military spraying pesticides onto the Amazon rainforest to suppress coca production, to MDMA producers dumping toxic chemicals into rivers in the Netherlands – the illegal drug trade is unquestionably bad for nature. But whose fault is this? All the drugs we take could be produced in much greener ways as part of a legal, regulated market. The problem is not that they are drugs, it’s that they are illegal. Is the war on drugs killing the environment?
From George Floyd to Terrence Crutcher to Trayvon Martin, again and again, the pattern is the same. Law enforcement officers kill an unarmed suspect, then divert the conversation to whether or not that suspect may have used drugs. It is the victim who is ultimately put on trial, rather than the officer who killed them.
In 2021, the world watched as the US military retreated chaotically from Afghanistan after 20-years of war. But in Afghanistan, America was defeated as much by the illegal heroin trade as by the Taliban itself. This is how heroin has fundamentally reshaped Afghanistan as a country for decades – and how you can’t understand the West’s failure there without it.
The UK is experiencing record drug deaths. Every year seems to break a new record in the number of people dying. But it wasn’t always like this. In the early 2000s, drug deaths were falling. What happened? This is how a faction in the British Conservative Party has completely restructured UK drug treatment, wrecking a system that had been considered world-leading – and how tens of thousands of people may have died as a result.
When people think about Jamaica and drugs, they tend to think of weed, Rastafari and reggae music. The reality is that Jamaica sits in the middle of the cocaine corridor between South America and the US, and the violent gang wars and billions of dollars this trade generates have fundamentally shaped its history. This violence is inseparable from Jamaica’s politics, creating a uniquely Jamaican kind of gang boss – the Don. And no Don was bigger than Christopher “Dudus” Coke. This is the story of Dudus, the drug lord who became the secret “President” of Jamaica.
In July 2021, gunmen broke into Haiti’s presidential residence and murdered the country’s president with automatic weapons. This kind of violent assassination is usually associated with military coups and civil wars. But, new evidence has come to light that may indicate this was a drug hit, carried out to protect the interests of cartels with connections deep in the Haitian government itself. This is the story of how Haiti’s president may have become another casualty of the War on Drugs.
Since becoming the President of Brazil in 2019, Jair Bolsonaro has signed decrees to get tough on drugs and relax gun laws. But has it worked? Not really. This is how Brazil’s deadly drug wars have been fuelled by a president who thinks the solution is to throw more guns at the problem.
When we think about cartel bosses, we almost always think of one group of people – men. But this misses out on key parts of the story. Across Latin America women have been rising through the cartel ranks – taking command, making millions and committing terrifying acts of violence just like their male counterparts.
But this was not a war against some communist regime or terrorist group – this was a drugs bust, aimed at arresting Manuel Noriega, the dictator of Panama, who was wanted on trafficking charges in Miami. Awkwardly for the US, Noriega had been a major CIA asset for decades – even as they knew he was becoming massively embedded with the cartels flooding the streets of the US with coke. This is how US intelligence shielded Noriega, even as he trafficked cocaine and laundered cartel millions – and also how the War on Drugs came to replace the Cold War as the central feature of US foreign policy.
Just as Vladimir Putin launched his war in Ukraine, he went on Russian TV and accused the Ukrainian government of being drug addicts. This reveals a wider pattern in Russian policy and society, where people who use drugs are routinely stigmatized and brutalized in the most horrific ways..
For decades an amphetamine-like drug has been gaining popularity across the Middle East. From Lebanon to Saudi Arabia, use of the drug Captagon has been spreading throughout all levels of society. Then came the civil war in Syria. The brutal and despotic regime of Bashar al-Assad saw an opportunity to finance its war machine – and used its military to take over the Captagon trade. This is how Syria became the world’s most industrialised narcostate, using illegal speed to finance crimes against humanity.
New Zealand is a long way from anywhere, and drug cartels have traditionally not bothered sending them much cocaine or heroin. So, Kiwis have had to improvise – and they discovered a love for meth, and random new chemicals no one’s ever heard of. This was all getting very dangerous, with rising addiction and biker gangs fighting over territory. Then one man – a steam-punk glam-rock musician named Starboy – decided to try and end New Zealand’s drug war once and for all. And he almost managed it!
When you think of the Pacific Islands, you tend to think of a tropical paradise – not bricks of cocaine and meth being cooked up with rat poison. But there’s a new Pacific drugs superhighway emerging across the South Pacific islands, with unforeseen and devastating consequences.
MS-13 is a gang so deadly and violent that the Trump administration tried to officially label them a terrorist group. But how does this gang really operate? How do they fit into the drug trade which is transforming Central American countries into narco-states? How have they virtually taken over entire cities? This is how America gets MS-13 totally wrong – totally misunderstanding what this gang is and how they actually work. We go inside El Salvador's deadliest street gang.
As Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency in the Philippines is over, we look at what his deadly drug war actually achieved, and whether the new president Bongbong Marcos – the son of the Philippines' former dictator – will continue the bloodshed.
The Albanian Mafia is the new power in international drug trafficking. Over the past decade, organized crime groups from Albania have taken over huge sections of the cocaine trade – particularly trafficking to Europe, which has become the biggest coke market in the world. A lot of myths have sprung up around these Albanian mafia networks – about how they operate and the violence they inflict. We separate truth from fiction – showing how the Albanian crime groups maintain their power, and how they have revolutionized the cocaine trade using innovation, entrepreneurial flair and deadly violence.
Asia’s Golden Triangle is a lawless area running along the borders of Myanmar, Thailand and Laos. These semi-autonomous zones are loosely ruled by local warlords and have suffered decades of conflict – the perfect breeding ground for drug trafficking empires. For decades, the Golden Triangle was known as the world centre of heroin production. But in recent years, the focus has switched from opiates to amphetamines – particularly meth. The Golden Triangle meth trade is now a multi-billion dollar industry, rivaling anything in Central or South America. Furthermore, there is speculation that parts of the Chinese government are flooding the area with weapons, supplying the rival meth warlords, and making huge profits along the way.
The Sinaloa Cartel are probably the richest and most powerful criminal organization on Earth. From the mountains of North West Mexico, their reach now extends not just across North and South America, but into Europe, Africa, and Asia. This reach and power are based on one thing – trafficking illegal drugs. The US spent millions trying to capture its leader Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, but his imprisonment in 2019 has barely dented the cartel’s ability to traffic drugs, murder competitors, corrupt officials and rake in billions. This is because law enforcement and most media fundamentally misunderstand how the Sinaloa Cartel works.
The Jalisco New Generation Cartel is Mexico’s deadliest narco empire. But amidst rumours that their leader is actually dead – could this all be about to crumble? In ten years, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel has come from nothing to become the deadliest rising power in Mexican drug trafficking. They have achieved this by applying unprecedented levels of organised, paramilitary-style violence – even using tanks and drone warfare against other cartels and the Mexican military. But, rumours are swirling that the near-legendary boss of the CJNG is out of action – and possibly even dead. Could this be the beginning of the end of this brutal cartel empire?
For over 50 years, Colombia has been ravaged by a brutal civil war – involving communist guerrillas, right-wing death squads and the Colombian state all fighting a messy and violent struggle for control of the country. And this decades-long conflict has largely been financed by Colombia’s multi-billion dollar cocaine economy. This is how half a century of aggressive drug prohibition – and the booming global cocaine market – have prolonged and worsened Colombia’s bloody civil war.
When we think about the global heroin trade, the news is usually about Mexican cartels and North American opioid crisis. In fact, the country seizing more heroin and opium than any other is usually the Islamic Republic of Iran. Despite being an authoritarian, religiously puritanical state that even bans alcohol, drug addiction has spread like wildfire across Iranian society. This is how a combination of geography, geo-politics and failed War on Drugs policies in Iran have created what might be the world’s worst heroin crisis – and how corrupt elements of the Iranian state itself might be profiting from it.
From poaching endangered shellfish to smoking quaaludes, this is the wild origin story of how meth took over South Africa. The use of meth, known as Tik, has skyrocketed across South Africa. It's thought that the country might have one of the highest per-capita rates of crystal meth use on earth. But the wildest twist in the tale is that this may have been ultimately caused by a secret weapons program run by the old apartheid regime itself.
What do watermelons, submarines and sex toys all have in common? They’ve all been used to smuggle drugs. The War on Drugs has forced cartels to become serious innovators. For every method police develop to catch them, drug traffickers will come up with new ways to get their product from producer to seller to buyer. This can lead to advanced technological innovation like narco-submarines and "trap cars". But it can also create violence, coercion and massive political corruption. And, just occasionally, it can lead to hundreds of pounds of cocaine getting eaten by wild bears – a true story, which has now become the inspiration for a Hollywood film. We look at the craziest and most inventive ways cartels have smuggled drugs, and how these have become more and more advanced over time.
Like any war, the War on Drugs runs on propaganda. Mexican cartels stop at nothing to control their public image and the flow of information. From creating entirely new genres of narco-rap music to the emerging generation of Cartel TikTok superstars, drug cartels are becoming pop culture brands. This plays a key role in how they recruit young soldiers and cement their place within Mexican society. But there is also a very, very dark side. Anyone who tries to report on cartel violence and corruption can be attacked and murdered. Mexico is now the most dangerous country in the world for journalists outside of active war zones.
Hezbollah is a Lebanese terrorist organisation and the political party responsible for deadly attacks all over the world. This is the story of how they became major players not just in the Middle East hash trade, but in the global cocaine and amphetamine business – trafficking tons of drugs across the world, and laundering hundreds of millions of dollars for South American cartels. Even murkier is how a major DEA investigation into these activities was allegedly undermined by the CIA and the White House – leading agents from different agencies to all end up accusing each other of endangering national security.
A new synthetic opiate has killed dozens of European heroin users. Nitazenes, which are up to 300 times more potent than heroin, are increasingly showing up in the continent’s drug supply, sparking fears that they could fuel a surge of overdoses, on par with North America’s fentanyl crisis.
This is how decades of conflict have shaped Northern Ireland’s prescription drug scene and why it is leading to alarming drug deaths among young people. Benzodiazepines—a class of sedative drugs, known by name brands like Xanax and Valium, that are commonly prescribed to treat anxiety and depression—are a major part of Northern Ireland’s drug culture, with recreational users often necking down benzos alongside party drugs like cocaine or MDMA in a way that’s uncommon in the rest of the UK.
This is how Mephedrone (4-MMC) has spread across Eastern Europe and become the most popular drug for everyone from ravers to intravenous users. M-Cat is king of Russia and a number of former Soviet states, such as Georgia. It is cheap, available and increasingly potent which explains why it’s turned into most people's favourite amphetamine.
This is how surging cocaine trafficking has fueled a burgeoning crack crisis, which is taking hold across Western Europe.
In Nepal, cannabis isn’t just a plant—it’s sacred. Every year during Shiva Ratri, over a million devotees gather to honor Shiva, the god of creation, by lighting up at Kathmandu’s holiest temple. But outside of this one day a year, cannabis remains illegal—a law rooted in the US-led War on Drugs, which pressured Nepal to abandon its ancient traditions in the 1970s.