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hamsterisch's review against another edition
5.0
1.
So does Trump’s border wall stand any hope of reining in the cartels?
‘No, amigo,’ said Hector, now tucking into his French fries. ‘The gringos are the biggest customers in the world. If we can’t smuggle it, they will come get it themselves.’
‘Besides,’ he added with a smile, ‘I bring all my stuff by boat.’
2.
‘Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men’, said Anslinger and successfully lobbied for ganja to be outlawed through the Marihuana Tax Act 1937. And that’s how the war on drugs started. The real reason for banning drugs was straight-up racism.
3.
- ‘As a gunman I can tell you this: narco-traffic is so deep in the bowels of our society, it won’t ever stop. The violence will not stop, it will increase.’
- More black Americans are in prison today than were enslaved in 1850.
- The cops didn’t seem to care. They only wanted arrest stats. Every overdose is just one less problem to worry about. ‘Year after year, the drug trade becomes more violent and vulnerable people get caught in the crossfire.’
- But has the war at least reduced supply? Has it fuck. The amount of coke, dope and meth seized at the border remains the same. So it was all for nothing.
- Drug use going up and down has little to do with the law and everything to do with culture: the 1960s were all about herbal remedies and LSD, cocaine epitomized the greed 80s excess and now millennials are rediscovering the joy of opiates.
4.
- It’s the system - the laws which create the black market - that keeps everyone in the dark: what they’re buying, what they’re selling.
- A lot of times when someone suffers from an overdose it’s from taking PMA, not MDMA. The cooks make PMA when they can’t get what they need for the real thing. Of course the police would probably chalk this up as a success, because they’ve managed to “disrupt the supply”, but what they’ve really done is help poison everyone by being dicks.
5.
- Scare tactics don’t work: once you survive smoking your first joint, you might suspect everything else you’ve been taught is bullshit too.
- You can only hear yourself being called a lowlife, a useless smackhead, so many times before you start to believe it: ‘You know what? Fuck you. I WILL go out and steal things!’
- Someone, somewhere is getting high.
- The Portuguese system recognizes that people will use drugs, some will cope better than others, and had found a way to live with it.
6.
- The hippies were right: the future lay in drugs.
- The government is the biggest form of organized crime, dominated by the best gangsters, the international bankers. It’s always been there, it never went away.
So does Trump’s border wall stand any hope of reining in the cartels?
‘No, amigo,’ said Hector, now tucking into his French fries. ‘The gringos are the biggest customers in the world. If we can’t smuggle it, they will come get it themselves.’
‘Besides,’ he added with a smile, ‘I bring all my stuff by boat.’
2.
‘Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men’, said Anslinger and successfully lobbied for ganja to be outlawed through the Marihuana Tax Act 1937. And that’s how the war on drugs started. The real reason for banning drugs was straight-up racism.
3.
- ‘As a gunman I can tell you this: narco-traffic is so deep in the bowels of our society, it won’t ever stop. The violence will not stop, it will increase.’
- More black Americans are in prison today than were enslaved in 1850.
- The cops didn’t seem to care. They only wanted arrest stats. Every overdose is just one less problem to worry about. ‘Year after year, the drug trade becomes more violent and vulnerable people get caught in the crossfire.’
- But has the war at least reduced supply? Has it fuck. The amount of coke, dope and meth seized at the border remains the same. So it was all for nothing.
- Drug use going up and down has little to do with the law and everything to do with culture: the 1960s were all about herbal remedies and LSD, cocaine epitomized the greed 80s excess and now millennials are rediscovering the joy of opiates.
4.
- It’s the system - the laws which create the black market - that keeps everyone in the dark: what they’re buying, what they’re selling.
- A lot of times when someone suffers from an overdose it’s from taking PMA, not MDMA. The cooks make PMA when they can’t get what they need for the real thing. Of course the police would probably chalk this up as a success, because they’ve managed to “disrupt the supply”, but what they’ve really done is help poison everyone by being dicks.
5.
- Scare tactics don’t work: once you survive smoking your first joint, you might suspect everything else you’ve been taught is bullshit too.
- You can only hear yourself being called a lowlife, a useless smackhead, so many times before you start to believe it: ‘You know what? Fuck you. I WILL go out and steal things!’
- Someone, somewhere is getting high.
- The Portuguese system recognizes that people will use drugs, some will cope better than others, and had found a way to live with it.
6.
- The hippies were right: the future lay in drugs.
- The government is the biggest form of organized crime, dominated by the best gangsters, the international bankers. It’s always been there, it never went away.
cheezh8er's review against another edition
5.0
A well research book on drugs that doesn't talk down to you or contain War on Drugs rhetoric. About time. The author provides real solutions to drug problems around the world and never loses his sense of humor. Also my sister recommended it to me and she only reads like one book a year so I knew it had to be worth checking out.
swmproblems's review against another edition
5.0
5+ stars!!!! You hear a lot of times how a certain book/author is hilarious but then it's just generic or corny and people shouldn't use that word so carelessly? This guy is super freaking funny and more than a few times you will laugh out loud by a joke or his explanation of something.But other than that, it's also really informative and explains something as complex as the global drug trade and its policies in a way that's interesting and obviously completely factual. If the first 20 - 30 pages or so don't get you a little chub and wanting more, don't worry...I feel horrible that I actually considered putting this one down and starting it some other time and pick something new, and that's something I can only do if I'm really not feeling it because im so fucking OCD that i force myself to waste time reading something crappy because I cant put it down. This time I'm really thankful for that!!!! Won't regret reading this!!!
tabbycat26's review against another edition
4.0
Very good history of the drug trade in different countries even if it's a bit of a even if its a bit of historical fiction.
cowgirltings's review against another edition
3.0
This book had the potential to be much more valuable to me than it was. I keep being conceptually curious about gonzo journalism and then kind of disappointed with the results. In theory I would really enjoy a stripped-back, fuck-convention look at the world of the drug trade, and overall I did…I learned a lot from this book, but I feel like its political grounding was so paradoxically centrist and pro-establishment, and it kind of misuses “harm reduction” even though it contains a history of the origin of that term in HIV-safe community heroin injection sites. Harm reduction =/= government harm eclipsing the harm that is invoked by international mafias and organized crime, and that take is an extremely lazy conclusion for a book claiming to be in a trailblazing genre. I appreciate a lot of the angle that Vorobyov took, but I wonder if he felt too much pressure to instill his history with a moral or a policy plan for going forward, landing in a simplistic and unfortunately liberal place that didn’t need to be the conclusion of his investigation/arguments.
eloisebell's review against another edition
4.0
This was a brilliantly amusing look at the history and underworld of drugs and drug users. Told from a very realistic, down to earth view, Vorobyov’s voice was compelling. With a perfect mix of interesting and beyond hilarious anecdotes. This was a brilliant read.
stguac's review against another edition
so first...the positives. i think vorobyov has a very engaging style of telling true events and his sense of humor is certainly there. its not a bad book. but sometimes you just dont jive with a book, just like sometimes you just dont get along with someone for no discernable reason.
firstly im not a big fan of the aforementioned humor. he really sounds like some 15 year old cum town listener. age doesnt really have much to do with maturity or how youthful you are but sometimes it really bums me out knowing there are borderline gen xers who really need to adopt the lingo of the fellow kids to stay relevant. i think his particular brand of libertarian social justice-esque speak peppered with ironic bigoted remarks is tired and overdone. the world is an awful hellhole. no one wants to be preached at by self righteous 'sjws' but there are parts of this book where vorobyov fully takes us out of the action to tell us how bad the war on drugs are.
as much as i agree with his message about the war on drugs, i was left with a nasty taste in my mouth when he really felt the need to go out of his way to justify his own drug dealing. why is that so bad? do i secretly harbor hatred towards addicts and users and dealers? no, and id rather not reveal my own personal relationship to drugs on fucking goodreads, but this specific instance happened after detailed the half century of destruction levied upon colombia thanks to the drug war. he begins to realize that maybe his dealing in europe did have a direct effect on the unimaginable suffering of an entire country, but then turns around and says that if you use a cell phone or any electronic with cobalt in it then you are directly funding genocide in the congo.
i entirely agree that capitalism, whether you like it or not, fully dominates our lives. you cannot live outside the system, you cannot live ethically, you cannot avoid a negative impact on others. this is immutable. the capitalist system ensures that we are, for better or worse, always related to one another. that even the most downtrodden of us affects someone else negatively through a violent international system of enforced poverty and misery. that being said, having this 'no ethical consumption' talk right after talking about the ravages of the drug-related civil war in colombia, again, really, really pisses me off. there is a difference between realizing your complicity and interconnectedness within a system and wiping your hands of all guilt. and i dont even think hes guilty of anything! dealers arent the devil. theyre not evil people. and im saying this as someone who lives in rio de janeiro, as someone who knows that the only presence in favelas are sometimes dealers paying 5 year olds R$50 to take a baggie down the hill. but to say this IN THAT CONTEXT rubbed me the wrong way.
and vorobyov was not dealing out of necessity or because he was groomed into it as a child. he admits his parents are middle class and respectable and he just got into it as a matter of fact. i dont agree with his jailing nor do i think one needs to be this broken beaten down victim to deserve empathy. but i think this level of posturing about how youre not even a little to blame for something you fully chose to do as a middle class european is insane. its really insane.
vorobyov shouldnt have been sent to prison and drugs should be fully legalized with an emphasis on drug safety and harm reduction, not because drugs are evil or whatever but because humanity has always gotten fucked up and preventing this always leads to far more tragedy than simply allowing people to smoke a fucking joint. i think he makes a really good point for this. but these are beliefs i already held prior to reading this book. his message bordered on preachy. and considering this tone, i dont really need to read a book by an annoying self righteous dude telling me shit i already know.
and i dont usually do this but i checked out his twitter, which of course isnt a complete representation of one's personality or anything, and ofc that confirmed my suspicions. some irony poisoned 40 year old irony poisoned-yet-woke anti communist (its ok guys, he was born in the soviet union, something he never ever fucking stops reminding you of) really wants you to read his book detailing the barbaric, gruesome shit third world people do to each other. yah he talks about how the first worlds need for drugs fuels this violence but really thinking about the drug wars relationship to imperialism is not his objective. vorobyovs only goal is to convince you that drugs are 100% ok.
regardless of what you think about drug use, i think the most foul part of this book was downplaying the opium wars as mere overreaction and opportunity for propaganda for the chinese communist party. like holy shit dude. of course the chinese used opium BEFORE england economically and militarily held a stranglehold on their country. the point was that life under colonial rule was markedly fucking worse and we all know that people who are fucking miserable tend to be drawn more to drugs than people who are overall content, a point that vorobyov made at least twice in the book. does he think having your country occupied by some fucking bucktoothed inbreds makes you HAPPY or something? i shouldve stopped reading then but no, i really powered through it and let myself take psychic damage from ridiculous audiobook.
and speaking of the audiobook, holy shit dude maybe dont imitate the accents of every third world person you meet lmao. i recognized that some of the voices were different from the narrators and thats obviously fucking fine but sometimes the narrator sounded like he was outright mocking someones accent. i can just imagine this fucking dude typing out some insipid 'ah, the pc police wont even let us have some fun, there are real problems in the world you know' tweet now and im shouting angrily in my room for him to shut the fuck up lmao im getting genuinely worked up the more i think about this. nothing annoys me more than annoying whataboutism from people who hate 'woke sjws' or whatever but then gallop away on their moral high ground posturing to everyone about how much better they are than you because they said so.
firstly im not a big fan of the aforementioned humor. he really sounds like some 15 year old cum town listener. age doesnt really have much to do with maturity or how youthful you are but sometimes it really bums me out knowing there are borderline gen xers who really need to adopt the lingo of the fellow kids to stay relevant. i think his particular brand of libertarian social justice-esque speak peppered with ironic bigoted remarks is tired and overdone. the world is an awful hellhole. no one wants to be preached at by self righteous 'sjws' but there are parts of this book where vorobyov fully takes us out of the action to tell us how bad the war on drugs are.
as much as i agree with his message about the war on drugs, i was left with a nasty taste in my mouth when he really felt the need to go out of his way to justify his own drug dealing. why is that so bad? do i secretly harbor hatred towards addicts and users and dealers? no, and id rather not reveal my own personal relationship to drugs on fucking goodreads, but this specific instance happened after detailed the half century of destruction levied upon colombia thanks to the drug war. he begins to realize that maybe his dealing in europe did have a direct effect on the unimaginable suffering of an entire country, but then turns around and says that if you use a cell phone or any electronic with cobalt in it then you are directly funding genocide in the congo.
i entirely agree that capitalism, whether you like it or not, fully dominates our lives. you cannot live outside the system, you cannot live ethically, you cannot avoid a negative impact on others. this is immutable. the capitalist system ensures that we are, for better or worse, always related to one another. that even the most downtrodden of us affects someone else negatively through a violent international system of enforced poverty and misery. that being said, having this 'no ethical consumption' talk right after talking about the ravages of the drug-related civil war in colombia, again, really, really pisses me off. there is a difference between realizing your complicity and interconnectedness within a system and wiping your hands of all guilt. and i dont even think hes guilty of anything! dealers arent the devil. theyre not evil people. and im saying this as someone who lives in rio de janeiro, as someone who knows that the only presence in favelas are sometimes dealers paying 5 year olds R$50 to take a baggie down the hill. but to say this IN THAT CONTEXT rubbed me the wrong way.
and vorobyov was not dealing out of necessity or because he was groomed into it as a child. he admits his parents are middle class and respectable and he just got into it as a matter of fact. i dont agree with his jailing nor do i think one needs to be this broken beaten down victim to deserve empathy. but i think this level of posturing about how youre not even a little to blame for something you fully chose to do as a middle class european is insane. its really insane.
vorobyov shouldnt have been sent to prison and drugs should be fully legalized with an emphasis on drug safety and harm reduction, not because drugs are evil or whatever but because humanity has always gotten fucked up and preventing this always leads to far more tragedy than simply allowing people to smoke a fucking joint. i think he makes a really good point for this. but these are beliefs i already held prior to reading this book. his message bordered on preachy. and considering this tone, i dont really need to read a book by an annoying self righteous dude telling me shit i already know.
and i dont usually do this but i checked out his twitter, which of course isnt a complete representation of one's personality or anything, and ofc that confirmed my suspicions. some irony poisoned 40 year old irony poisoned-yet-woke anti communist (its ok guys, he was born in the soviet union, something he never ever fucking stops reminding you of) really wants you to read his book detailing the barbaric, gruesome shit third world people do to each other. yah he talks about how the first worlds need for drugs fuels this violence but really thinking about the drug wars relationship to imperialism is not his objective. vorobyovs only goal is to convince you that drugs are 100% ok.
regardless of what you think about drug use, i think the most foul part of this book was downplaying the opium wars as mere overreaction and opportunity for propaganda for the chinese communist party. like holy shit dude. of course the chinese used opium BEFORE england economically and militarily held a stranglehold on their country. the point was that life under colonial rule was markedly fucking worse and we all know that people who are fucking miserable tend to be drawn more to drugs than people who are overall content, a point that vorobyov made at least twice in the book. does he think having your country occupied by some fucking bucktoothed inbreds makes you HAPPY or something? i shouldve stopped reading then but no, i really powered through it and let myself take psychic damage from ridiculous audiobook.
and speaking of the audiobook, holy shit dude maybe dont imitate the accents of every third world person you meet lmao. i recognized that some of the voices were different from the narrators and thats obviously fucking fine but sometimes the narrator sounded like he was outright mocking someones accent. i can just imagine this fucking dude typing out some insipid 'ah, the pc police wont even let us have some fun, there are real problems in the world you know' tweet now and im shouting angrily in my room for him to shut the fuck up lmao im getting genuinely worked up the more i think about this. nothing annoys me more than annoying whataboutism from people who hate 'woke sjws' or whatever but then gallop away on their moral high ground posturing to everyone about how much better they are than you because they said so.
Content Warnings
Graphic: War, Drug abuse, Drug use, Alcoholism, Racism, Police brutality, and Xenophobia
book_ish_bitch's review against another edition
4.0
Did you like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? Then do yourself a favor and read Dopeworld, the 21st century's answer to Gonzo journalism. Niko is audacious, precocious, and always entertaining. A refreshing look at all things underbelly, Dopeworld is the next chapter in dark tourism.
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