we are so very glad to get into this subject. it's for me because as poet in the the artistic and spoken word community, this expression that a dope is very, very important. all right. and it's usually used you know in the the dynamic uses of language as something good. all right that poet is dope. that means they dropped the knowledge, they dropped some truth on us. i think that this book

demonstrates that as in its own way, because we were about to get some truth on a subject that has been misinterpreted twisted mis taught so much in american schools in american media so forth and so and we're getting ready to get the dope truth broken to us. dr. benjamin smith is professor at warwick university over in coventry, england. and i want you to tell us more about some of your folks and some of your research there. benjamin will be in with our very own. read him his fam dr. christie thornton here at johns hopkins in latin american. you should definitely follow her research pick up her writing. so i want us all to give a very big round applause presenting dope the real history of the

mexican drug trade up some real red emma's radical noise for dr. benjamin t smith. thank you. just pull that other mic closer to you. the folks in here can hear me. perfect. thank you, everyone, for being here and for being in conversation about this. terrific book. i'm sorry that my colleague brendan söderberg couldn't join us tonight. the original idea was to have a conversation. we sort of brought the drug trade in the drug war in baltimore together with the drug trade and the drug war in a place like mexico. we're going to try continue to do that, although i don't have deep contextual knowledge of the city. but as big fan of his writing and a deep reader, his i will try to bring what i've learned from into this conversation. i to start by just saying that this is a remarkable book. i'm so glad it's here. it's out in paperback.

it's purchasable here at red. emma's and it's a tremendous history. you have not yet had the chance to read. ben does are incredible thing, which is that he makes he sort of absorbs a massive corpus of very detailed historical facts about the history of the drug trade. mexico really entire country of mexico north to and makes into this very readable very lively very book that will as was saying really sort of slip in some knowledge while we are learning these sort of very engaging about the people who participated in the mexican drug trade time. so i really recommend folks pick up the book. you can see how heavily annotated. my copy is here. i've taken copious notes.

you have so much to teach us about this history. and so i wanted start with the question that think analysis put on the table in his introduction in which is to say i want you to describe for people what it is that you think here in the united states, in the uk, you know, sort of in the global north, what is that you think we've gotten wrong about understanding of this history, about understanding of the history of mexico's role in the global drug trade, about the way it has actually developed, about the role of the mexican state in history. we obviously have all these sort of received ideas. drugs are massive in popular culture here in baltimore we have the wire, we have narcos in mexico. you know, we have this kind of received about what the drug trade looks like. what is it that your book wants us to think is wrong about that kind of received history, right?

yeah. well, thank you. this is extraordinary space, by the way. i've failed really. honored to be here. so thank you so much to read amazon. and thanks for christi to organize this is a really it really is a big honor i don't normally get to they don't normally let me loose on bookstores it's just normally academic departments so thanks so i suppose the kind of key. so there was a huge mythology surrounding the mexican trade and surrounding the latin american drug trade as a whole. characters like pablo escobar or chapo guzman series like or el chapo or even breaking bad, they all many of them start off by attempting to humanize mexican drug traffickers, but one thing that i really discovered by looking at all this popular culture was that, at the end of the day, however much, they initially humanize these characters. by the end of the series, pretty much stuck in a moral binary.

on the one hand, you've got the good cops, however much they might have done, bit of drinking or behaved a bad manner are genuinely fighting for the good of human pity and the good of society. and on the other hand, you have these bad traffickers who have a much initially they might have been trying to take care of their family or, make a bit of money for them by the end. they're full on psychopaths. so all of this, all of popular literature and popular media and films about the drug trade, essentially up this moral binary good, bad traffickers. and i think that's kind where i wanted to. and i think when i got into this project and i've been doing this for too long, i mean, i've been researching this for eight years and when i started off it, something i believed and i'd i'd i'd spent a long time in mexico. i'd seen some of the fairly horrific acts undoubtedly done

by drug traffickers. and i think bought into this idea that there's a very simple moral binary. but the more i looked at the archives and the more i talked to people both involved, the drug industry and involved in the policing of, the drug industry, the more these easy moral categories of fell apart and by the end there was a very it was a very, very gray area. and the idea of of of of cops bad traffickers was far too simplistic for what i was observing now, but also throughout mexican history. so one of the really key lessons from your book about that mexican history, about the role of the mexican state, that's one of the through lines here. it's of the most important things that i take away from the book and the way that i frequently talk it when i'm talking to people. and i wonder if you think this is a fair characterization. so this is this is my question

to you. one of the ways that i read this history is that the state is the organizer in organized crime. and i wonder if that's what you're getting at here. yeah, pretty. i mean, that's a really good way of i wish you had read this and then edited it more carefully then it was edited. yeah, you're absolutely right. that's a good line. so the mexican state has always dealt with drug. now, i think traditionally and again is something that we see in the media in the kind of public perception of the mexican state is we call this corruption right. we call this mexican governors or police officials taking money for to look the other way. drug traffickers, traffic essentially. so this is how we perceive we think it's a bad thing. and we probably think these police officers or these are spending the money on luxurious,

vast or garages full of lamborghinis. but in actual fact one thing that i found is the mexican state certainly up to the 1990s. um, was spending at least some of this money on what we might call building the state. now, some of this stuff is relatively palatable. the state so it's schools hospitals, roads. during the 1960s and 1970s when the mexican state was involved in a fairly brutal counterinsurgency against so-called communist guerrillas, it was involved in less palatable bits of state building, arming cops, giving them uniform, arming the military. but some of this money that was coming from illicit activities, drug trafficking was going towards building in the mexican state. so by 1985, there were at least some people who were telling me the ministry of the interior had no budget in mexico because so much of their money was coming

from drug trafficking, from principally the trafficking of cocaine. so yeah, was so i think a my idea was to turn the idea ideas are simply condemned this is corruption on their head. but also see the state is actually integral to building up this industry. but also this is kind of why it's accepted, right? to a certain extent and so you describe this in book through the idea of the protection racket. can you talk about what you mean? what what is a protection racket and what is the mexican state doing in this protection racket? right. okay. so a protection racket is a term taken criminology and it normally describes the mafia do. so the mafia will go up to mostly illicit businesses or at least high value businesses, and they'll essentially go will you? i won't hurt you. but we also we won't let anyone else hurt as long as you pay us a percentage, your profits right? yeah. attacks are essentially so the mexican state has attacks on

businesses. so i know like your gavroche you own your mechanic's shop, your taco stand but it also has essentially the police in mexico up to the nineties had attacks on industries so that was brothels human trafficking organizations but also the drug trade so they would essentially go we will protect you from persecution we won't give you up to the dea we will extradite you to the us right. stick you in jail for four years if you pay us a percentage of your profits. so that's effectively how it was organized for 78 years in mexico. so that was the system that was in place. that was half taxation and it's quite difficult. i think in some ways we don't really we kind of lack that and i don't want to get too technical into, but we lack the language, right? it's tax, it's half organized crime and it's somewhere in the kind of gray area between now

and i've talked to two tax collectors right in mexico i'm not sure about some of my my family was a tax raised on the municipal level and they on or in taxes zero. i mean my grandfather in britain a a tax it's a fantastically job as he repeatedly told me however tax cuts in mexico particularly at the kind of local level would tax collect tax collect taxes gone in the hand and they would collect them traffickers bars that opened late brothels and basically anyone who was right in the kind of gray area was allowed effectively. but this money did some of the money went to their mates. some of the money was used for parties. some of the money was used for a fairly, you know, dubious investment. some of the money went to the municipality right. uh, so yeah, that's, that's, as i say, part organized crime. there's a famous sociological

formation, war making and state making as organized crime and that's as the mexican state rebuilds during the 20th century after the revolutionary war. it seems like that's playing an important role. yeah, it's it's kind of an absolutely crucial and kind of ignored. so in that formulation, which has come up with this guy, sociologist charles tilley, the idea is eventually it kind of you make enough that you don't have to rely on organized, on basically bullying people for tax the mexicans never gets powerful enough to not do that. it always has to rely to a certain extent in fleecing organized criminals. it never it never gets to stage where it can go. okay. we'll just have an orthodox in tax regime like every other country. you never thought you came here for a discussion tax day, but you're really you're really, really regretting turning. so one of the things that that's really troubles, right? the distinction between sort of licit and illicit, which is one

of those myths that i think your book is really trying to break down. there is a kind of hard barrier between the licit economy, the state the sort of aboveboard business and then below board behind closed doors, illicit economy. so i think that that's a really important it's a really important lesson. the ways that drugs have played this foundational role in the mexican state. i want to i want to ask you about writing that book and finding sources that allow you to get to that right. one of the things that comes out of my understanding, one of the things that i've learned, reporters like brendan söderberg and other folks who work on the way that drug works in cities like baltimore, and then the abolitionist more broadly in the united states, is the extent to what we know about drugs comes from cops right. everything we know about drug

trafficking for a long time came from the state came from the police forces. we started to have different understandings of that as we moved into the 1980s and 1990s. we had anthropologists of embed themselves with drug traffickers, began to get kind of lesson versions of this. but in researching this as a historic, you have to rely on the archives of that kind of state power. you have to rely on the archives of police forces. so i wonder if you can talk about the sources that you used for this and the strategies that you had to use to read in order to be able to kind pull out. you know, how actually understood how drug trafficking worked. that was not entirely through the lens of what law enforcement want to tell us about it. right. there's one huge advantage that i had, which is the dea, is worst record keeper on it. so, i mean, famously i think you've tried to freedom of information that from the dea, it's pretty much impossible i, i

found out that the dea to dea agents who had worked in the 1970s, they all said we didn't bother to keep our colleagues and certainly when they left their offices above a strip in d.c. and moved it, the pentagon in 1989, they lost their archive. so in some ways i had a massive advantage. i didn't have to read certain bits kind of mediated stuff. the other thing i had is one thing that you get to learn as a kind of political historian, which i suppose we both are is, is institutions in the government really hate one another and really resent the amount of budget they get for their particular ular kind of hobbyhorse. so i had the secret service, which loathed the mexican police that were in bed with, the dea, so they undercut lot of the things that the dea and, the cops had to say. i had the state department, the occasionally gets in bed with the dea and occasionally absolutely loathes it. i had the cia mostly loathes the

dea. so in some ways there were ways kind of ways to kind of undercut this cult narrative. what i found most perhaps was was the newspapers not. everyone's a brandon roy. i mean, i was amazed by quite how crazy jealous so much of the media and think we i think i may be undressed to me today i'm away i think i think we have tendency as scholars of the written word perhaps to overestimate much the press how much power it has, but there's a there's a time when you're just going through story after story. there's an uncle moral story of a good cop and this terrible trafficker who who and there were these completely stories of the doing. absolutely things. and then you start to kind of poke your life. there's just not there's evidence there. they made this stuff. so at the moment i'm working on this. i think it's an extraordinary story of this woman. her name is la nacho, who

basically runs the secure hotel is el paso, texas. coast heroin trade for about 40, 50 years between 1930 and 1980. she's the non-vr grand mother of heroin trafficking on the east and texas right in the east coast, in texas. and and and one thing that really struck me so legends about oakridge in the media one that one thing the the way she came to power she massacred all the chinese in sudan parties together with a pistol toting psychotic bosnian husband. total nonsense. obviously there's nothing there's nothing that in actual fact seems to worked with the chinese, basically provide opium for them. i mean that that's she has a much more cooperative view of it because they're making. right. i mean i mean, one thing that i think, you know, we overestimate and one thing the press lobster stress is the idea that that

cartels and drug traffickers are kind of natural capitalists. they always want to kind of fight for their little space piece of pie. but in actual fact, most of them just want cooperate because the market in us is infinite. there's no need to. somebody don't buy it. doesn't let you sell san antonio. just go to chicago right it's it's it's not like selling on street corners the us market is vast so there's no need to compete. there's a need to cooperate. so that was a real and i found anyway i've really gone off that question. so i apologize no talk about some of the the sources that you were able to in mexico to kind of get at these stories, because these are not necessarily stories that, you know, when you walk into an archive and you ask, i'm interested in this famous drug trafficker right? might look at you a little askance. so what what sort of things were you able to use in sort of a mexican archive? was primary sources, interviews? i know that you did as well so how did you get at that on the mexican side? so on the mexican side, i

suppose there are two things that really opened up. one, i personally do a lot work on. i'm sure this will surprise virtually of you here. but somewhere in the region of 100,000 mexicans, 90,000 mexicans are deported each year from the united states. and i work with a lot of them attempting to gain asylum, or at least not get out of the country. and i've been working on this for for about six or seven years. so i was lucky enough to do lots of interviews of people who maybe were not involved in the drug trade, were certainly were persecuted by the groups that called themselves cartels by organized crime mean these are often pretty i mean as state owned as the taco shops owners of avocado farms people who were had just been or people who were involved in very, very low levels of the drug trade, just taking a, you know, half a key of cocaine over, the border, because they owed some money to some guy in organized crime. so i got lots of stories out of that. certainly for the last kind of three or four chapters of the book, which was which was was

incredibly grateful for in terms of the other stuff i came across and, no one's ever looked at this and i don't want to get too nerdy about it, but there is a huge quantity of judicial records like cool records, basically, that no one in mexico has ever really looked at. and these they are up to the seventies. they are probably elicited by torture post 1970. they are really problematic to read. but one thing is that is also a judicial system in mexico for, all its faults does also allow people to complain they are being tortured. so you can read these statements, do discuss the mechanics, the drug trade, but then you can also see how the police got this information out of them, which was, frankly, from 1970 onwards, most by torture, i mean, we can into the discussion and i know, you know,

quite a lot about this, but who taught the torture? you know, was it did come organically out of mexico has never been averse to using or did it come from us agents were operating in mexico and that if you ask me that question i say i don't know but but but yeah, i mean, that, that those, those bits of evidence are pretty, pretty startling, quite difficult to access. i mean, there's a huge warehouse in outside mexico city that contains all these court records. and as the site there is currently a truth and reconciliation commission and i've been attempting to it to go and look at these archives because if you really want to know how many people got tortured in mexico during the dirty war, you should probably go there and there seems to be a certain reluctance because my suspicion is not everyone wants to know quite those levels. yeah. so you together you sort of triangulate as you've said these sources u.s. law sources, media sources, these mexican judicial sources, the stories that people

have told you the legends that people have passed down about these traffickers. one of the things that i think is interesting in the book is the question of violence. you've spoken about what the violence looks like. the state violence in the 1970s, as we know of after mexican president felipe calderon sends the military into the streets, his war on drugs and organized crime after 2007, that the levels of violence really escalate. right. but one of the striking things about your book is that for the vast majority of the 20th century, violence is not a big part of the drug trade. as you narrate it. so can you talk about that? can you talk about the question, violence and how it changes over time? right. yeah, that's i suppose that's kind of why i started writing this book is because when i came to mexico in 2000, mexico an incredibly about the same murder rate as the united states it was a place of democratization, of indigenous movements, of cultural, real kind of cultural effervescence. right. and and then by 2010, it had one of the highest murder rates in

the world. it had, you know, certain cities that had the same rights as as baghdad or kabul. so it was a real question. how did this how did this violence kind of increase? and i think the assumption was and the assumption when i came to this stuff was, well, cartels are kind of these jealous of, you know, combative, desperately trying to fight for territory and for market arts and that didn't actually seem to be the case. as i said, the market's vast. you don't have to really fight over who's going to sell to the united states because the market is almost infinite. and if not just take the drugs to asia or to europe. and that's effectively what the cartels done over the last decade, basically taken the cocaine industry to europe, which america takes much less cocaine than it used to europe, and particularly the uk. it takes way more. so that didn't seem to be the

case. i did find is that what look on the surface be cartel scraps are often actually quite deliberately by the police and think this was one of the things that i did not expect so effectively policing drug trafficking is really hard because most drug trafficking are closed family run networks people are either related or they grow together or they're mates, right and they're linked by blood and marriage. it's really difficult to infiltrate these, right? it's not like policing drug sales. you can't just go to a corner and pick somebody up and bust them for selling you drugs. you've got to get inside the network. so what the dea and the mexican police would do was arrest somebody normally, torture them, make them turn informant and

then make them squeal on their fellow drug traffickers. right. so i think the thing that was most but most example of this was chapo guzman for a decade was, the dea most wanted he was also the dea was key informant, number one informant or at least his was right. so effectively what the dea and the cops would do is would take one drug dealer turn him into a for an informant make him turn on his allies and then that cause these divisions within the drug trafficking organized. so perhaps most famously in 2008 chapo guzman is basically threatened. they say you're going to go too way to jail will capture you. you know you get 300 years which is now you know supermax or can turn you can squeal on of your allies and i think it's

relatively clear he squeals on his cousins, who are the leyva brothers. and this an enormous confrontation. on the one hand, chapo's gang and on the other hand the beltran lopez. so what on the surface looked like just beefs are quite deliberately engineered by policing, right. they take these these cartels, they pull them open of a wedge open. so i think often we think we've kind of had this discussion before is we assume all governments are trying to keep the violence down. but i think for the dea, this is actually crucial to their policing because it makes more people squeal on their allies. but that wasn't the case in the earlier parts of your book right, in the early parts of the 20th century, when the mexican state acting as this protection racket and doing this effective taxation this it's a relatively trade. what there's innately in in drug trafficking i think particularly

violent as i say i think it necessitate cooperation. it needs your farmers to get on with the buyers to get on with the wholesalers, to get on with the person who drives the truck. right. i mean and these are often families or friends grew up together so. yeah, no, i mean it really is extremely i mean mexico has had periods intense violence in the 20th century mostly to do with religion or but not actually to do with drugs. so that the violence of the last 20 years is something totally novel before then. you so i mean, i think one of the examples i give is sinaloa has always historically since 1930 is the biggest producer of opiates. one of the biggest producers of marijuana and where pretty much every drug traffic i've ever heard has come from. but up to 1970, 1974, it was one of the safest places in. all of america had the lowest murder rate in mexico. right. and partly because the money from drugs is being distributed.

people, poor people. right so there was no need to go and take land of slightly wealthy farmers or whatever. so it kind of smooths out over social divisions, which again, it's not terribly palatable maybe, right? no, but that's precisely the the question is we have a situation we have along most of the 20th century in which the mexican state acts as this sort of authority this taxation does. taxation sort of keeps things in check. and there is not this kind of violent history. and i think that that's a that's a really important lesson from this early part of the book. i want to take us back for one minute. i want us to return to some of the the kind of interesting, historic stories that come here, because we all want talk about, you know, what has happened in mexico since 2007 and the questions of el chapo and el mayo and, you know, even gabriel flores. now, i'm you know, so but there is this very interesting character in your book who you've written about previously, but i think you do particularly

in this book, and that is this guy, leopoldo salazar, who maybe negra. can you tell us about salazar and who he was and what he tried to do? he's really a a progenitor of what we might today call a harm reduction approach to drug use in mexico city. in the 1940s. and it's a completely story. so can you tell us about salazar and what he tried to do and what happened to him? yeah, he's he really is an extraordinary kind of drugs free. so mexico has this big political in the 19 tens and this creates a pretty a pretty kind of far reaching set of social reforms. so they give out land back to the peasants they give pretty good education to indigenous people. there were some moves that kind of gender equality not terribly successful ones but it is basically a fairly radical revolution on the level of the russian revolution. but also much less bloody and the world of the revolution,

world of free thinking comes really late to drugs. but sometime in the late 1930s, a group of psychiatrists and doctors decide that drug punishment is simply not working and. there's one guy called leopoldo salazar vinegar who is pretty much the kind of the leading the great brain, the kind of einstein of mexican doctor at the time. and he comes out he's a he's two things. one, he's a very, very clever psychiatrist, but also he's a marxist and he effectively thinks the problem drugs is not that effects right but rather the assumptions we when we take drugs now this is incredibly far reaching in actual fact, timothy leary says exactly the same thing during the 1960s. but while being creepy and a bit full of himself, leopoldo salazar is saying this stuff in

1938 and rather than timothy leary, who thinks that we're all free autonomous, sovereign hippies and we can decide what attitude, we'll take from we can take acid instead. leopoldo salazar is a marxist, so he thinks the bourgeois have already decided beforehand. right. so when you smoke marijuana and you behave in a bad manner, right which many people thought you did in mexico, that's the bourgeoisie is said when you smoke marijuana, you're going to behave in a violent or bad or terrible manner, right? so he comes up with this kind of idea why drugs affect us in certain ways. and he said, well, the best thing is to remove this these kind of prejudices about use. and rather than criminalize people and rather than demonizing these drugs, we should instead pretty much give them out, free and. the state should take control. and this is kind of genius, right? so a he's he's a marxist who thought quite deeply about how drugs affect us in certain ways but he's also a brilliant so

he's real big solution to it is okay we want to get rid of people being addicts so we want to get rid of the prejudices surrounding drugs, but we also want to get rid of this illicit and we want to start so says we should create a state monopoly that gives out he says weed but that doesn't go down that well. but then he says heroin or morphine particularly. he gives out, he opens these clinics, which gives out basically free. i mean, this is not dissimilar to harm reduction today, right? he gives the he gives out morphine to addicts and they can do jobs. right. rather than stealing in order to afford incredibly expensive morphine that the drug traffickers are selling or the drug peddlers are them, they can suddenly it's only cost you know $0.40 to buy your cheap bit of state morphine so people are.

managing to keep down jobs while being some of them they're also getting care so they're not dying of. they're also getting medical grade morphine. so they're not dying. of all the stuff that's in the kind of dodgy street morphine. so all of this stuff is going well until all just have a wild guess what country gets in the root of this of this plan. yes, it's it's harry anslinger, the kind of predecessor of the dea, head of something called the federal bureau of narcotics. the ball psychopath kind of drug who've who decides this is a spectacularly bad idea because people might actually have same idea of the united states and he effectively mexico at that time does not produce enough morphine to give out its addicts. so as a result it has to buy it from america. so anslinger for some reason is in charge of. how much morphine the us sends

to mexico and he decides to send none. so this whole project basically goes down the toilet, plus loads of people who are dying of cancer and other things all die in pain because they can't get for relief. but this is a small to pay because anslinger and the entire project disappears and veneer guru is i mean he's he's this radical right with these really interesting far reaching thoughts and he's totally forgotten the only people who remember him is in the 1960s, weed smokers cooler joint heavily agro because he was also pro legalizing weed so that was the last memory of him. he's as i say, he's a really fascinating character that i kind of yeah, i hope. i mean other people have attempted to rescue him, but i hope i, i thought it'd fascinating. he was a marx. i thought that the fact that they all came out with this kind of marxism was was was fascinating. it's a really terrific chapter, the book and it really brings us

into thinking about the role that the united states has played in this. right. so you've mentioned the dea a number of times. i should. that, you know, today on the day that are filming this, the day that we're having this conversation, the biden administration has made some pretty important moves, pardoning with a with a federal possession charge for cannabis, which federal possession charge for cannabis should not a thing that exists. but apparently there are thousands of people who have that and he's instructed to think about pardoning as well. and he's his secretary of health and human services to think about rescheduling on the drug schedule. so there are some small being made maybe for electoral reasons here in the united states, but important forward. and so i wonder characterizing the role the united states over this long period, over this kind of long 20th century, if us mexican drug relations, what would you say about that? how do you think the role of the united states here? i think the one thing that really struck me is the the is how the us is often the us much

bigger fish to fry than simply right. and when it comes to massive graying communists, it's a it'll put its money into that right. or when it comes to opening markets to us product, that's where it cares. but what happens is from time to time when there aren't those concerns. certain institutions, principally the dea, has decided the exporting the drug war is a really, really good way to save their skin and be save their budget. one thing that really struck me, reading about u.s., which i'm not a real expert on, is how often federal drug agencies. so federal bureau of narcotics under anslinger dea from 1973 onwards have almost been closed down. right. multiple different occasions for a huge corruption. so like 1968, they think about a third of the federal bureau of narcotics is on the tape from from the french. right.

jerry, the the bnd is closed down 1973 because they're still on the take right. the dea is almost closed in 1975 because they're still in the title. there are all these kind of corruption scandals again and again and and often their way of of getting out of these and and maintaining a budget is to say, oh, look at look at that foreign. and if we can make the country is also maybe having some kind of communist insurgency and we can ally with the state department in order to go after these people all the better. so that that is. and and american drug wars have been worries have been extremely at knowing who to go after. i mean the most classic example would be recently would be afghanistan right where where the dea yet again got a huge of militarized group of what they call false teams that were basically apart war on terror

part war on drugs. so and they sent them to afghanistan first but then they sent into honduras when they killed lots of people by mistake so. yeah that it's not all the time it's omnipresent but when the dea these these these drug institutions are in trouble they often export the drug war outside. right. and that the kind of bureaucratic struggle for position for higher levels of budget that is frequently driving what's going on here that's a very different story that kind of sociological bureaucratic story is a very different story and that one we've heard in the academic literature. your book is not written as an academic book. it's not written as kind of dry academic history. in fact, if you are an academic historian, as i am, you will find yourself frustrated by the lack of footnotes that so one of the things that i know you tried to do in this book is to kind of

name is appropriate, the right word, appropriate, some of the genre of true crime with a very different political. and this is i wish brandon was here with us because his terrific book him man banner woods, terrific book. i got monster does something very similar. it's just tremendous work that uses the the color. these stories in a way that is very similar to what might think of as the true crime genre, but with a very different end. so i wonder how how you think about that, right? what's your approach here in the way that you've written this, it's really readable despite. the fact that it's chock full of just names and dates and places and know all of this historical facts. you just fly me through it in this way. and so i wonder about your sort of approach to the idea of true crime, which, you know, has some reactionary tendencies. right. and so how do you approach that? and what do you think about your

your actual approach to the writing of this book? well, i think i mean, it's not it's not i'm not sure even having reactionary tendencies is almost wedded to the reaction. right. i mean, it's it's grown up in lockstep with mass and conservation. i mean, that's what and with the racialization of policing and all these kind of things. right. it's a super problematic genre in many ways. so i was really wondering how to write this and i felt slightly queasy at times, maybe leaning to certain aspects of that genre and and i'm not sure that it works the time, but i also think that if you try and escape too far from true crime drama, you're going to lose your readership. one's going to want to read it, right? it's not going to go on goodreads and amazon and. people are just going to ignore it. so it was a really difficult kind of balancing act. i had that i felt you had to make it kind of readable, an approachable, but at the same time say something kind of different. i mean, the one that i think had one advantage, the and i hope

maybe it is when i tried to make put jokes in which perhaps doesn't maybe they don't translate. but i think i try and bring some kind of levity to this. otherwise it can get very, very serious, maybe a kind of dryness of humor hoped that the kind of undercut it's the the pretentiousness of true crime to a certain extent. but i did read a lot of james ellroy, who is also quite problematic before i wrote it and a lot of. yeah a lot of true crime. but there's a subversive vision of the genre that goes with using that form to then tell a story that turns the finger around and points it at the state, turns the finger around and says, in fact, the people that you think are the heroes have always been something to the villains. yeah, i mean, that that that was broadly that and this been done. i mean, i think now we all live in a kind of true crime podcast

world. it's a continuing around around us. so people started to do this to assert and extent in that. gilmour and and no doubt in, also in, in some document entries. but one thing i've i've also noticed is that the door is open to undermine often the true crime drama. and then it's because of suddenly kind of slam. so i don't know how many know we've all probably turned on some netflix about crime and got this looks quaint oh they're trying to undermine this particular oh i like that. and then suddenly bang slammed in your face they were actually quite i mean, even though they're actually rather wonderful documentary about crack had some really and it had some wonderful heads and i think good friend of yours was and it had some absolutely brilliant people but then it was also it it let the cops off pretty easy and there were certain aspects

of that would not terribly helpful or not terribly maybe not that crack do either. yeah so so i do think there is particular lee. i was very lucky. it had a really nice publisher. well actually i say that, i mean this is, this is exactly what i'm talking about. the us publisher let me put on front cover. well i think it's quite a moving image something that i think really sums up what's going the mexican drug trade is there is a young girl in a massive field of poppies, which i think shows fact this is not just about gun toting brown men threatened coming over the border threatening you. so that was on the us and they were very kind on the uk. i had a massive fight and they refused to not let me put psychopath and m16 wielding men on the front and eventually i, i got in the hold back. i didn't get that. but on the, on the paper they insisted on putting it. and i had to have a big fight, not make them look mexican. i it's absolutely absurd, right? so they, they were attempting to

close that door. they were attempting to kind of go, you've got to keep this to two column. it's got to be in the to crime column or it won't sell enough. right. so yeah there is that that that. yeah. so our received stories about the mexican trade what that looks like are, are difficult still difficult to fight against. yeah, i think, i think it's mean it's it's it really is something completely instilled. i mean this is i think we assume this is something that is it started with narco it didn't stop it i mean you know even the narcos the local stories being told once before in a incredibly but you know it's not always going it's michael mann's bible and michael my dad he he did write his first ever tv series was called the camarena story and was basically about narcos mexico. right. that was done in 1989. so these these ideas, these tropes, ideas that the mexicans are invading, they're particularly cruel or vicious. i mean, that's they go back to

the go back to the twenties thing about to the ends, right? right. you know, i mean, when v invaded mexico in 1916, it is we don't old troops that are allegedly violating white women. i'm solute nonsense that uprising uses to nationalize us cannabis control goes from he the in the 1930s when we moved from state control cannabis into federal regulation. it's precisely the specter of the mexican using cannabis and crazed in this way. this is moment of reefer madness that's always racialized in that way. and you know, various drugs have been racialized in that way over time, you know, opium, the mexicans, cocaine thinking about african-american people in the south, just always creating a kind of racialized other against a white body politic and the pollution of that white body politic. i think i think there's also something that it made me it made me also think that you're actually undeniably in in the northeast. it's particularly racialized now

and it's been raised. it's also against puerto ricans and against colombian as well as well against african-americans. you know, the border has been constant, right? i mean it's always been about keeping the border closed, always been about the threat south of border. so i think i mean, you're actually right, there's been a racialization. so, for example. right. and with cocaine, it there has been a racialization certainly in the early 19, 1900s, where they linked it to african-americans. and then again in the 1930s. and then again the 1980s. but the borders always been been kind of bottom, you know, quite literally. bottom line on this now in baltimore, baltimore is a real pioneer there. and the way that same way the baltimore is a pioneer of racial segregation and ordinances. baltimore is one of the first places that creates one of these anti-cop arcane ordinances. the case in 1910, it's called swans cocaine ordinance. mike casiano written a terrific article about it in the book baltimore revisited. just an incredible story, the

way in which baltimore is a place that very much innovates these kind of crime control measures that are entirely racialized. and so we've seen and also creating both internal borders and order. and we we sit here on greenmount avenue, one of our internal borders here in baltimore. so i want everyone to say thank you to ben before i turn it over to question. and i think we're happy to take your questions. there's a mic here if anyone wants to ask particular things. have the gentleman on the back over here and we're going to go around here, which is why i ask that you keep your rather truncated because there's so much to unpack there. we could be here definitely all night, but if you keep question the brief and truncated and, we will try to take at least a few questions. we always invite of of questioners. please think of of some things that you may want to ask. my name is thomas from la. will cain. heating and cooling.

i say what factors in? iraq, afghanistan and all that. i've been in foreign countries, all that mean, mr. clarke, i'm a donkey in this world. most impacts are told to the world. most. but you grandstand, man. if you and i mean a foreign country man, i got to see be shot in my leg and i'll let know. man, we do city work in all that you can justify what you saying? i don't believe that it's going to mean i'm 3075 ranger battalion all that. so i mean i just left somewhere else on police station digs. so the thing is, man my, my language, i'm going to stay a master h back first grade engineer the master plumber license i'm saying so we do a we're going to city we almost take good where to pack clock alarm romo's she making sure everybody good on this shot thank you that well i love mrs. romo's person i mean at the pet

club laugh you know what i mean? when my mother died and all i just you know what i mean? but you can't say that when i've been in foreign country. my first tour was that way. beirut, i think i'm at fort benning, georgia, and all that, you know, i mean, i've been involved different tours, man. so if you talk about people, man, is about giving back to the community club. did maybe started for mayor schaefer you mean impact did it and romo's doing it now so i mean we got get it together, man. thank you. all right. that that points to the role that. you mentioned kind of afghanistan in the way that drugs have frequently in the way or have have come into conflict with other us geopolitical goals. and that's something that we've seen over time. right. the way in which the drug war when convenient, will be the priority and it's not convenient, will be left to the side. and we've seen that throughout.

yeah, yeah. i think i yeah that's completely true. thank, that's for perhaps think of very questions. right, so much. excellent stuff to unpack and i wish we had more time to do. so you've touched on this some, but i'm going to imagine myself from from the us. mm. in, in saying that what about human trafficking and everybody that is concerned right left center about, human trafficking. something shouldn't happen. but again if i'm questioning from, from, from the us right. and i say is it human trafficking caught up with the drug trade and therefore we need to increase border policing because we have to start to coyotes and trafficking these women and so forth and so on. we know all that is tied up with the drug trade. so we have to increase for the police enforcement from that and

respond to that and those two things for me, if you will? yeah, that's a really sensible question i mean, my my response to that is just to really economic one which is you put more border patrol there it becomes more difficult people to get through the border or you put up bigger walls and it becomes you've got more narrow space to get through. so organized crime can charge more to get people through effectively. so it just makes i mean, the natural fact now and i don't know how many people have been following this, but there is an enormous amount of people now crossing the border. i the right and wrong about this because there is a lot of violence in the in the in central and mexico sorry central america venezuela and mexico, which has seen a lot of people flee. and but the prices for getting the border because they now because the border patrol has been upped, have gone through the roof, it's now about 15 grand just to go over the border. so you more border patrol gives

more to the organize crime groups that run human trafficking. it's a bit like clamped on the drug trade kind of giving more power to the turn, more money to drug traffickers. i wish there was one thing that there's a lot academic article i once read that really brought this home to me right? so drug policing is utterly counterproductive so let's say you take one kilo of cocaine off, the streets, right? we clamp. we think this is a great thing. okay. the table, we jump at the table. let me say that. good. right. that's not going up. somebody knows, mean, whatever. however, all that does is incrementally the price of cocaine on the street. more expensive, right because there's less coke. okay. now, what does that do? essentially, that incentivizes more people to get involved in the drug industry because they can make more right.

so the whole premise, drug policing doesn't work even if you took half the drugs off the street right. all that would mean is the price of drugs will go up and more people want to go and sell drugs. it's it makes no sense. so i think that that was a kind of big unknown like i think it's pretty obvious in some ways, but it's like it was a big kind of discovery. me prohibition creates the black market and it's a lesson we should have learned during the prohibition of alcohol. that's one that we did not and, you know. lopez as salazar had the idea of creating the state run monopoly precisely to undercut the power of the black market and that is a lesson that we continue to i mean, yeah, i mean, one thing that i keep, you know, having to say and i think is really important to keep in mind is the the, you know, it is all very well saying we should we we should decriminalize. we should or we should legalize narcotics or we should create a

state monopoly. but you've also to create a whole kind of medical, psychological infrastructure around that regulatory apparatus or and that's kind of actually what salazar is trying to do. he was he put like the doctors in of these clinics. right. it wasn't just a bunch of injecting people. it was we also try and help. so i think that is also really important and that so for america is moving on this it always makes me somewhat worried that they're not moving with health care regular you know health care or psychological help for people because the other thing that what your response to analysis says is you know not just that it makes the trafficking of people or the trafficking of drugs more, it actually makes it more dangerous. right the prohibitory regime makes the drugs that come across more dangerous. one of the huge reasons that we're seeing the crisis now. right. you create the incentives for people to find new synthetics, right. bulky is too big. they move into heroin, they move into cocaine.

and then once we have the ability to kind of traffic small amounts of the synthetic drug, you know, in people's backpacks across the border crossing and checkpoints right that that incentive is actually created by prohibition regime and that is bringing in more dangerous drugs that's making crossing the that much more dangerous with the extortion and the you know, the of violence that being beating out on migrants. but if you're a coyote as well and you that somebody is going to snitch on you or think that and you're going to get 20 is in jail or 30 years in jail you work working right you're not just going to well you know i might be snitched on i'll do it know six months and then get out i mean the hard at the harsh of the prisons the more likely somebody who is being pushed into acting as a criminal is going to act in a more criminal manner. so so it's completely illogical. i mean, that's a yeah. so i'm getting a bit annoyed. you know, the analogy of, all these things you make me think of johann hari's excellent book,

the scream. absolutely. also which ties a lot of these things together. which leads me to remind everyone present in every one watching. how do you get these books? how is it that you get the dope? how is it that you get christy thornton's revolution in development? how is it that you get johann work? you go to read emma's dot org already as in david e amazon mary. mary as scored great m as dot org. you can order and purchase books there we mail within the united states please go there now you've already heard this excellent discussion. i know you. want to go ahead and get the book. those of you with we have it right here. those of you watching us please go to read them as dot org and get these books as this is crucial information. we have another question. thank you thank you so much. this was really interesting i was just curious and you kind got into this a little bit a moment ago, but in the us, in the last couple of years, there's been a sort of what's

been described as like a sea change in the drug market due to some, but also because what happened during covid and this like kind of freeze on the market and which has created a vacuum and also to, you know, a doubling down on a lot of like the really intense drug war rhetoric here. i'm just curious, you can speak to how that's playing out in mexico. it's a really good question. i'm not entirely sure. mexican white nose knows how is playing out. so one thing that mexico is not doing is really looking to its own addiction problem. so one thing that happened during the pandemic is a lot of the drugs that were being in the us suddenly got sorry, suddenly sold in in mexico. so mexico now has a, a larger meth than than marijuana use. i mean, it's really seriously problematic. and yet and yet the mexican government is is in denial, frankly this so that that's that's so a lot of the i think the mexican at present has done a rather good job in pushing the dea out, not going after

kingpins in not making things worse. but when it's done a very bad job is not frankly to admit that it has major drug problem that has to solved with harm reduction, health care, psychological care, etc. . that's kind of undermined any good that the current government has tried to do. yeah. so in terms of synthetics, the other thing it's really done is it's meant it's cut peasants out of the whole drug business. i mean that's something that, i think again, the mexican government is not taking serious. one of the reasons that there has been a big move, one of the reasons a lot of people turning up at the border, but also a lot of reasons that turning up in the outskirts of mexican cities is because the opium market has just gone through the floor. right. i mean, i think we did some work this and we found out the opium market. i think you can get about 20% of what you used to be able to get for free, for opium in the villages. one of the interesting things actually i found recently is the sinaloa cartel.

for all its it is actually it's kind of interesting keeps the level of it pays opium at a much higher level but because basically because because their families come from these villages right. and they do have and if they want to run away from the dea, they still go up to these villages. so you want keep them sweet by still paying them half decent fees, whereas the rest of mexico, the price of opiates gone down to the pan basically. so you have multiple things that are happening it's happening very fast and no one's really finding kind of stuff out. i mean, we still have the data on drug addiction and use in mexico is hopeless. it's like 40 years out of date compared to what you get in the us. yeah, and i think there are so many of those ways that the changes in. i mean said this earlier about the ways in which this is a demand driven market changes here in the united states just wreak havoc in supply countries like mexico.

the the you know legalization of cannabis in a number of states here really devastated the marijuana market in mexico. no one was buying marijuana that was produced. mexico, all of a sudden, we had all this really good organic produced in california and and then similarly, once synthetic came on the market, the market for, opium poppies. and so the economic impact in the countryside in a countryside devastated by the free trade agreements, the complete collapse of the corn economy, etc., you just see once again it's the it's the mexican peasantry and in the countryside, it's the poor people that lose. yeah. and i mean, it's of the i mean, one of the other things i think is, is that has been a much greater kind of economic and crime with asian markets. i don't know if i was watching as in maybe i'm as anyone i've ever heard of trapped in new york. so there's a weird mixing of music and trap music, which is which sounds just as as you might think is. but i was watching some of the

kind of videos of this. and one thing that really struck me is the amount asian in the videos which which was really surprising but beside these kind of slightly romanticized version of what it was like to be a drug dealer in sinaloa right there was always the kind of asian fentanyl supplier in the background in loads of these videos, or at least i don't, i presume to be a fictionalized version. well, maybe a real version, but it was, you know, that that's also that's it's way more important to get on with your your your foreign suppliers than is with your peasant supplies right now, full circle back to la nutter. kind of, yeah. hi. thank you so much. i'm wondering about your method a little bit. oh, well, yeah, i'm thinking about how you this kind of work in a non extractive way, in an ethical way, especially i mean if you watch the series documentary now, it kind of

spoofs vice documentary going they said like three different white turtle es with no spanish to investigate, you know, narcos so how does one do this in a sense, it lifts people up and wants to give a sense of justice. it's a really, really good question. is something i can continually came back to and i'm not sure that i've really come to terms. so i think two things. one, if we believe in power of books, if we believe in the power of argument, then i've got to believe, at least in putting a sensible argument, that says this is the devastation of the war on drugs as war brought, it can make incremental changes. right. and then maybe hopefully in the powerful policy changes, i think the second thing you're absolutely right. there's an extractive element to what i do which is kind of somewhere between journalism anthropology i suppose so one of

the things that i did, i was writing this book is i would i would i mean, i did a lot of and pro bono work for deportees. so i felt i don't think you ever really work this out, do you? but you kind of feel to a certain extent you're kind of, you know, balancing out in the in the big scheme of things, maybe that know. but but you're right, there's absolutely doubt you take quotes from people who i mean, i think i start with the story, this devastating story of a guy who was just it's really sad. he's like a family man living up in the northwest, picking apples, had a kind of three, i think three kids in his family, you know, two or three kids in his family. and they found out he had some kind of drug he's got some minor drug offense in mexico. and they made out he was in some pablo escobar. i mean, he was he was like just a you know anyway. so i'd lost his case he was sent back to mexico and but i use his

case to open my book. i mean obviously disguise it heavily. you know, there's nothing there's not there's really none of his story and none of the facts of his story. there remains no way to identify him. but there's note. there's no doubt they his story, i suppose a. helped other people like him and they didn't get sent back and then b yeah, let's hope stories like that make maybe the judge who reads this think twice before sending this person back for no reason of ripping him from his family. i wonder, you know, we're having this conversation in the u.s. and of course, talking about, to a large degree the miseducation and the lack of critical media literacy in the country. you know, literally half of it was was mexico at one time. and you have all of xenophobic, anti-immigrant hate because talking about two border countries and what have you and so i can imagine the conversations that you will

have, you know, on tour with book and some of the pushback. what is the sensitivity and understanding all of this in europe? i wonder, i assume that the the miseducation on these topics and the lack of critical media literacy is much the same over there. but i could be wrong. or if want to rephrase it this way, do you or expect to get less pushback? oh, on some of these things in europe than you would get here in the us where you have ground zero for the type of friction that we're discussing it's a really good so in some ways britain is as or more backward on drug policy than the united states so in terms of the the amount white nonwhite people who are in jail of minor drug infractions it's pretty much the same as us. it's completely out of whack with the actual amount of

population, right. so way mostly but asian and afro-caribbean get stuck in jail. minor drug charges in britain than white people do despite the fact they take drugs and pretty much exactly the same quantities as white people. right. so we have problems like that have we're nowhere near legalizing marijuana and we have a government that you know doesn't understand basic economics, let alone basic science. so i'm not sure we're in some ways, we're far away. having said that, there is a to speaking about mexico basically because mexico most in britain think it's a place somewhere near tenerife. i mean i mean, it's so alien that you can kind of talk in a slightly more complex manner where people don't go, oh, so saying the mexican government is a bit corrupt. oh, it's terrible. you know, they're slightly more they kind. whereas i think if you spoke, for example, about you would get slightly more kind of critical

comeback or whatever. so it's basically we have we have an empowering ignorance sin in britain. you know, there's there's a kind of bigger space to talk about this stuff in a way you can. right on. yeah. yeah, exactly. exactly like that. sadly in a way. but at the same time, you know, understandably maybe fascinating conversation before. we get one final round of applause to our speakers. i want to again invite everybody to come see us here at our new location, baltimore at 3128 greenmount avenue, that's in the waverly neighborhood. come see the new redeemers bookstore? a coffeehouse space, please do check us out online. red emma's dot org not only so you purchase this excellent book so that you can get other books and so that can read about our history and the philosophy of our project. go to the events tab. hopefully you can get to baltimore so that we can see you live at some of our events so that you can check out some of our youtube recorded events and

things that nature and future c-span covered events. this has been a fascinating conversation. let's give it up one more time for dr. christie and dr. benjamin smith