Book description
Since the Stone Age, drugs have been sniffed to induce sleep, mixed
to cure ills, swallowed to stimulate creativity, snorted to increase
sexuality, popped for the hell of it and smoked to see God.
Natural or synthesized, they have been smuggled for all kinds of
reasons from saving the world to becoming stinking rich. Blamed for
deaths, wars, suicides, collapses of governments, multiple crashes,
individual crises, anarchy and chaos, they have also been praised for
opening minds and expanding consciousness.
Worshipped and demonised, venerated and chastised, force-fed and
forbidden. Every society has had its intoxicant, be it sacrament or scourge.
They have also become irreversibly interwoven with politics, sex,
business, religion, and rock and roll, providing writers, whether
emerging from the ancient classical world or the street laboratory of
today, with both inspiration and challenge.
An unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime trip, The Howard Marks Book
of Dope Stories includes his favourite drugs writings from
Alexander Dumas to Aleister Crowley via Hunter S. Thompson and Charles
Baudelaire, as well as unpublished works and many new and compelling
pieces from Mr Nice himself.
During the mid-1980s Howard Marks had forty-three aliases,
eighty-nine phone lines and owned twenty-five companies trading
throughout the world. At the height of his career he was smuggling
consignments of up to thirty tons of marijuana, and had contact with
organisations as diverse as MI6, the CIA, the IRA and the Mafia.
Following a worldwide operation by the Drugs Enforcement Agency, he was
busted and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison at Terre Haute
Penitentiary, Indiana. He was released in April 1995 after serving seven
years of his sentence. His autobiography,
Mr Nice
, was first published in 1996 and has been published in nine languages.
The film of
Mr Nice
, starring Rhys Ifans, Chloe Sevigny and David Thewliss, was released in
2010.
