Howard Marks' Book Of Dope Stories [Paperback]

"A folk legend... Howard Marks has huge charisma. He sounds like Richard Burton and looks like a Rolling Stone." - "Daily Mail"

‘Marks weaves a fascinating story spiced with brilliant detail, far stronger than fiction’

Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories will take you on an electrifying journey through the discovery, consumption, and trade of mind-altering substances

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.

Howard Marks’ Book of Dope Stories will take you on an electrifying journey through the discovery, consumption, and trade of mind-altering substances.

During the mid 19802 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. (20010730)

When I wrote Mr Nice, I did so with fellow elderly hippies in mind as potential readers. I was, therefore, truly astonished to discover that its unexpected best-seller status was primarily due to its popularity among people several decades younger than I was. Through a plethora of media interviews and several public book readings, it became clear that the predominant reason why so many adolescents and university students read and enjoyed Mr Nice was their frustration with the law prohibiting cannabis consumption and trade. Until then, I had no idea of the extraordinary extent of cannabis use by young people today. Despite having made enormous amounts of money through illegally trading cannabis, I have never been able to begin to see this as a justification for condoning any prolonging of its prohibition and have always supported its legalisation. In the past, I had to do this clandestinely or anonymously: it would have been unforgivably unprofessional to do otherwise. After the publication of Mr Nice, I found myself swamped by the spotlight of media attention. I determined to use my skyrocketing notoriety in as responsible a way as possible and to do whatever I could to hasten the day that cannabis would be relegalised. My first high-profile attempt to move towards cannabis relegalisation was to smoke a joint at a London police station and offer myself as available for immediate arrest and imprisonment. The police declined. It occurred to me then (perhaps for the first time) that the police were not the enemy. Most policemen choose that profession for completely honourable reasons, such as protecting the society they love: they did not join up to imprison people for smoking herbs. Policemen have walked the streets far more than the rest of us and know what the problems are and what causes them. The ones that I've talked with, almost without exception, do not see the consumption of cannabis as problematic, but they do see the law prohibiting it to be so. I cannot think of any law that has done more damage in terms of social upheaval, parent-child alienation and police-public hostility. Although it's hard for me to imagine anyone deciding to favour the prohibition of drugs after reading this book, its purpose is not an appeal for legalisation. The drug stories and extracts herein are chosen on the basis of their interest, rarity, amusement and provocation. I suspect that all anthology compilers are plagued by which criteria to adopt for ordering the chosen extracts. I certainly was and longed for the sudden acquisition of an undefinable skill, somewhere between that of a hard-working house DJ and that of a full-time bibliographer. Do I do it by drug, by mood, by content, or by time? Eventually, I decided to let the order reflect my and many others' journeys through the world of drugs: a period of wonderfully gentle and civilised discovery followed by a smattering of learning, a far more intense and raw discovery phase ending with extreme frustration with the social taboos surrounding drugs, then a long but finite period of living from drugs, and finally an eternal time of living with them.