The autobiography of a drug dealer, and it’s captivating.

Howard Marks went from being an Oxford student, to an Oxford academic, to being an international hashish smuggler. Not the world’s largest, as his eventual indictment in America had it, but certainly on an epic scale.

A lot of the story is quite humdrum, interesting only as background to Marks’ own development and personal life. But there are some amazing anecdotes, such as shipping dope into America in the speaker cabinets of rock bands who are actually just stoners recruited to play a part – and then realising that US border control isn’t full of rock fans and so won’t realise that there isn’t actually a band to go with the equipment. Cue some made-up rock bands doing imaginary tours. No-one notices for ages.

There’s a lot of mythologising, of course. Most of the story takes place as dialogue, and there are some very intricate travel arrangements as he flies around the world doing deals. Is this all true? – either Marks has a photographic memory, or he kept a detailed diary (risky for a drug smuggler), or the details have been imagined from a broader recollection.

Eventually he’s caught, of course: arrested in Spain, the victim of an enormous and legally questionable operation by the US Drug Enforcement Administration. Marks has no time for the DEA agents, regards them as rigid and vicious. He skewers the US legal system and its arbitrariness, as well as its moralising while fixating on admission of guilt: an almost religious insistence that the victim admit and repent even when this means admitting to a crime purely in order to then be immediately released, with everyone involved knowing how fake the whole scanario is. Evidence is lost, faked, and dubiously interpreted, creating order and conspiracy where he sees accident and opportunism. He likens it, very persuasively, to the Soviet and Chinese purges.

It’s hard to know how accurate any of this is in terms of the historical record. But as the story of an outlaw with his own morality and a willingness to help others, it’s quite fascinating.

4/5. Finished Tuesday 1 April, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)