Drugs
My fictional Abimael Guzmàn turned out to be eerily accurate
Few Peruvians today are interested in ‘the Shining Path years’, which left no traces besides 70,000 mutilated bodies and a…
Startlingly fresh and jaggedly strange: Birds of Passage reviewed
You don’t come across too many films from Colombia, but every few years one wriggles its way through the festival…
Letters: Stop with the propaganda – marijuana use is not trivial
Scrutinising charities Sir: Toby Young was right to raise questions about War on Want’s links to the Stop Trump campaign…
As a QC, I believe the time has come to legalise drugs
I have been a defence lawyer for more than 25 years. I have defended clients charged with almost every crime…
It was pretty good for me: Joan Bakewell on the Sixties
For me this book evokes a Gigi duet moment: ‘You wore a gown of gold.’ ‘I was all in blue.’…
Mortimer Sackler and me
New York It was 51 years ago, in the Hôtel du Cap d’Antibes, that I first met the man…
In defence of Fiona Bruce
Will I be allowed to take my dog to Europe after 29 March? A trivial question, you might think, in…
The scent of London has changed: all I can smell now is cannabis
Fewer people are smoking cannabis these days, down to 1.4 million from two million, they say. I say, if you…
Laudably perverse – maybe album of the year: Cypress Hill’s Elephants on Acid reviewed
Grade: A+ Easily album title of the year, maybe album of the year. A true bravura offering from these supposedly…
How bad is the drugs problem in British jails?
Cultured tastes Dawn Butler accused Jamie Oliver of ‘cultural appropriation’ for coming up with his own recipe for jerk rice.…
Washed-up junkies, Trump the director and a cash giveaway: Edinburgh Festival round-up
Trump Lear is a chaotically enjoyable one-man show with a complicated premise. David Carl, an American satirist, has arrived on…
Is Tegucigalpa the crime capital of the world?
The Spanish journalist Alberto Arce worked for Associated Press in Honduras in 2012 and 2013. After a year, he says:…
Mary Whitehouse’s publishers also produced Gang Girls, The Degenerates and Bikers at War
The year 1971 was a busy one for Mary Whitehouse, self-appointed ‘Clean-up TV’ campaigner. Not only did she help establish…
LA used to be fun – dope has just made it dull
Los Angeles stinks. Not just of the usual things: sex, money, suntan oil, hipster food, surfer wax — odours that…
Drugs and drag queens in New York’s vanished clubland
In 2014 Michael Alig, impresario, party promoter and drug provider, was released on parole after 17 years in prison for…
Acid reign
In 1988–9, British youth culture underwent the biggest revolution since the 1960s. The music was acid house, the drug: Ecstasy.…
A top criminal lawyer’s guide to cocaine
Drug-taking is less glamorous when you know how the trade really works
The vaping craze isn’t about nicotine. It’s about gadgets
Probably you never visited the flats of middle-class student drug dealers in the 1990s, because crikey, neither did I, and…
Kathmandu — or don’t
Although Nepal’s earthquake last April visited our television screens with images of seismic devastation, the disaster has probably had little…
The heartbreaking story of becoming homeless in America
This is a very upsetting book. The Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond spent a year and a half living in low-income…
Confessions of a Saga lout
Baby boomers like me aren’t giving up irresponsible hedonism as we age. We’re just getting worse at it
Who killed murder?
The mystery of violent crime’s dramatic decline
Hitting rock bottom in LA
The title of this book tells you a lot. Jack Sutherland, who grew up in London and Los Angeles, worked…
Phil Lynott, from Dublin teenager to rock'n'roll burnout
It’s often said that there are only seven basic plots in literature. When it comes to biographies of rock stars…
What were they thinking? The Benefactor reviewed
The Benefactor is both a bad film and a thoroughly inexplicable one. It’s one of those what-were-they-thinking projects that wastes…
