Welcome to Narcomania: quality journalism and hot takes about drugs and crime

In an era of fake news, there are few subjects more prone to distortion than drugs and crime. I think this is because they exist in an illegal world seen as having no morality, so the normal rules around facts and not making things up fly out the window. It’s a free-for-all, where journalists, police chiefs, politicians and activists feel they can get away with saying what they want: drugs are instantly addictive, fentanyl can make people collapse just by looking at it; Africans are getting high off crushed human bones and catalytic converters; there’s a needle spiking epidemic; snorting cocaine causes children to stab each other on UK streets. And the rest.

Laid open to misrepresentation and presumption, it’s a subject area that has become a political football, and a happy hunting ground for those wanting to spread prejudice, fear and propaganda.

Alongside this there is a public hunger for crime, as long as it’s not happening in our own street. Crime has colonised social media, with non-stop reels on TikTok and news sites showing people fighting in the streets. ‘Our cities are out of control’ shriek far right agitators from the comfort of their armchairs hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of miles away. It’s all over Netflix and TV, with endless, mainly crap, shows about cartels and gangsters. ‘True crime’ and ‘crime fiction’ sections take up half of bookshops.

Why? Because, like horror, crime serves up life or death situations, folk devil characters, and the fine line between chaos and law and order.

But truth is often stranger than fiction.

This Substack is for anyone whose interested in the inside track of the world of drugs and crime and how it really works. It’s for drug users and dealers, for police and thieves. It’s for law makers, policy makers and meth makers, for academics, mums and dads, and kids being hassled to sell drugs on Snapchat. This subject, strange though it can be, is not a siloed-off ‘underworld’, it impacts us all, across multiple themes: young people, race, addiction, politics, injustice, policing, healthcare, addiction, housing, education, corruption and violence.

My job here is to decode the drug world and get to the heart of crime. Narcomania will be a space where readers can imbibe at their leisure insightful, clued-up journalism which will bring together stories from all over the world, minus the fog of nonsense. I will supply you with a weekly dose of drug and crime hits, including my takes on the big stories, insights, analysis, titbits, interviews and investigations.

It’s going to be an interesting ride. Of course the never-ending game of cat and mouse played between police and a variety of criminals – from shoplifters and street drug dealers to contract killers and mafia bosses – means it’s always full of eye-popping, marmalade-dropping innovations, situations and surprises. It’s also an expanding world.

Just in the last decade, global drug use, addiction and deaths have surged. So too have the drug trade profits for organised crime, which has used this extra wealth to gain global power and influence. Meanwhile, the authorities have never been further away from wiping out an illegal industry they’ve been battling for over 100 years. The world is deeply divided on drugs. In California you can get a loan for selling weed, while in Saudi Arabia you can be beheaded.

The word ‘narcomania’ was coined by Victorian addiction specialist Dr Norman Kerr in 1865 to mean a ‘pathological craving for drugs’. Narcomania, a book I co-wrote in 2012 about the UK drug world, repurposed the word to characterise the deeply confused way in which drugs, drug users and the drug trade are seen by the state, the media and wider society. The name became a pseudonym for my work, representing a new way of writing about drugs and crime.

For those who don’t know much about me, I’ve been writing about this stuff for about 30 years. I started off covering violent parts of London on local papers, then social issues in the Big Issue, before editing a drug magazine and becoming global drugs editor at Vice. Whether writing for national newspapers or specialist magazines, I’ve always written on my own terms, finding my own stories, writing my own way and making sure the headlines don’t suck. That’s why I’m trusted by academics, journalists, cops and criminals alike.

In 2019 I won an Orwell Prize for my investigations into ‘county lines’ drug dealing.

Recently I’ve carried out in-depth research into Russia’s crazy drug market, wrote for the Guardian about cocaine corruption in Europe, on London street gangs for The Fence, on the Italian mafia in Germany and on the rise of ketamine for UnHerd.

I think one of the favourite things I’ve written is this piece for Vice, where I interviewed a long time drug dealer about getting shot, crack dealing, the rave scene, gentrification, running pub coke sales and mental health.

I want this Substack to spark debate, to become a place to share knowledge, question accepted truths and work out new answers to old questions. I hope you enjoy it.