Antwerp
Antwerp harbour leads up the River Scheldt and into the heart of Europe, a port the size of 16,600 football fields, sucking in 240,000,000 tonnes of freight each year. From the giant aerial photograph spread out on the floor …
We need to talk about chemsex
When people gather anonymously to talk about dancing in the shadow of drugs and sex, the energy in the room glows with a warm ball of white light. This feeling, I think, must be the immanence of healing. So much …
Mexico’s cartel corruption on trial
It is no big secret that Mexican police officers moonlight for drug traffickers. As far back as 2010, a state commander nicknamed “El Tyson” admitted in a confession video on national television that he was not only a high-ranking cartel …
Is the psychedelic industrial complex evil?
“More real than reality itself.” This is the sales pitch made by fans of dimethyltryptamine. Otherwise known as DMT, the compound found in ayahuasca returned to the spotlight recently thanks to Prince Harry’s description of his trips, which, he says, …
Inside El Salvador’s brutal gang crackdown
In her cramped breeze-block home on the outskirts of El Salvador’s capital, across an alley from a school currently occupied by soldiers, 65-year-old Francisca Alas rolls down her sock to show a scar from the machete of a gang member. …
Mexican cartels have turned to fentanyl
In the hills of Mexico City’s luxurious Lomas suburb, close to an embassy and UN offices, is a white pillared mansion that was the site of the world’s biggest ever drug cash bust. In 2007, Mexican federal agents stormed through …
The drug trade has wrecked Amsterdam
Amsterdam
“It’s fine on the other side, it’s fine on the other side!” sing five rowdy, dancing Brits, to the tune of the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West”. On the other side of the 14th century Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal, a …
Liverpool has been seduced by gangs
I was 12 when we moved to the Cantril Farm Estate in Knowsley. It was July 1976, and we didn’t have much choice: my family had been included in a housing deal to relocate 200,000 council tenants to one of …
Welcome to Philip K. Dick’s dystopia
Philip K. Dick, whose novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired the film Blade Runner, did not live to enjoy his Hollywood success. He died on March 2, 1982, three months before the film was released.
In the years …
Harm reduction has captured the US
It seems that every large city in America has marked off a neighbourhood where drug addicts are free to die in the streets. San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, downtown Portland, Skid Row in Los Angeles, Hunts Point in New York, Kensington …
We are all Teletubbies now
Is children’s TV programming actually made for ravers? It’s a long time since my last pharmacologically-assisted all-nighter, but I have vivid memories of watching programming aimed at the under-fives at breakfast time, having not yet been to bed.
The bright …
How the Netherlands became a narco state
Amsterdam
A hit squad compared to a “well-oiled murder machine”. A lawyer and journalist shot on the streets of Amsterdam. A blasé approach to killing the wrong person — there’s even slang for every accidental victim: a vergismoord. Welcome to …
Why America is losing the war on drugs
In the summer and early fall of 2020, as protests and riots swept across the United States, a new consensus began to emerge among progressive activists, writers and politicians. Given that black men, from George Floyd to Daniel Prude, were …
Ernst Jünger: our prophet of anarchy
With its modern themes of detachment and alienation, the recent revival of Ernst Jünger’s early work by the internet dissident Right is an understandable urge. When I was a younger man, Jünger’s Storm of Steel, his hallucinatory account of …
