The Dope

This will be a work of brilliant narrative history in the vein of John Dickie's La Cosa Nostra, Misha Glenny's McMafia, and Roberto Saviano's Gamorrah.

The Mexican narcotics trade is a vast shadow economy, worth more (probably far more) than $13 billion annually. National and international newspaper coverage of Mexico is dominated by stories of disappeared students, drug kingpins escaping from prison, cartel warfare, and the militarised government response.

The trade is also deeply woven into contemporary culture. Its myths have shaped TV, literature and cinema. It surged through the veins of the beat poets, and shaped counterculture in the 1960s. It funded Orson Welles' noxious border sheriff in Touch of Evil; it supplied the cocaine for Billy and Wyatt in Easy Rider. Its dope fuelled the psychedelic noodling of the Grateful Dead and the 13th Floor Elevators and its brown heroin fed the death rock of Johnny Thunders and the Velvet Underground. But what's the truth behind American propaganda, and the stories we know from Netflix? How did narcotics become the lens through which many or most of us see Mexico? And how has this narrative led to the election of an American president partly on the strength of his campaign for a vast and unbuildable wall on the country's border?