What’s Left of a Cartel Cop’s Palace Playground

If you look up the definition of “police corruption” in the dictionary, there should really be a photograph of Arturo “El Negro” Durazo Moreno, the infamous Chief of Police in Mexico City, from 1976 to 1982. While his official job earned him less than $1,000 a month, Durazo made a fortune off the cocaine drug trade and…

The Last Great California Hippie Commune is still going Strong

They came from the mountains, and kept to themselves. If you were lucky, you might have seen them frolicking in the hills under the glow of the buttery, golden hour sunshine that California does so well. Collectively, they were known as “The Brotherhood of the Sun,” and in the 1970s, they emerged as one of…

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The Ghosts of Contadora Island, Panama’s Forgotten Pearl

I‘ve met Panamanians who talk about Contadora Island as if it were a relative they lost, like a favourite uncle from childhood they adored. I spoke to a Dutch ex-pat sailor who is convinced there is a curse over Panama’s Pearl islands. “There’s always something mysterious that happens to big resorts on these islands. They never last. Take that huge…

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Inside the Scarface Hotel

Today, I got acquainted with The Mutiny Hotel, the early 80s cocaine-fueled Miami hotspot where the CIA partied side by side with notorious drug traffickers, celebrities and politicians. In 1969, The Mutiny Hotel opened its doors on Coconut Grove as the neighbourhood was fast becoming a mecca for cocaine kingpins. By its peak in the late…

COCAINE COWBOYS AND THEIR “MAD MEN” MARKETING

Did you know that during the height of Pablo Escobar’s reign as the King of c0caine in the 1970s, just for fun, he actually put the “Coca” back into Coca Cola and had it smuggled into the USA? (This is just the sort of eye-opening fact you learn from the addictive Netflix series, Narcos.) The folks over at Brooklyn-based…

That Time Mickey Mouse Was a Drug Dealer

In the 1950s, non-medical use of stimulant and sedative drugs was widely accepted and promoted in the mainstream media– so widely in fact that they even made it into a children’s Walt Disney 1951 comic book starring Mickey Mouse as a speed dealer who just loves his own product. In ‘Mickey Mouse and the Medicine Man’,…

Then & Now: The Rolling Stones’ French Villa of Debauchery

In the Spring of 1971, Keith Richards began renting a villa on the Côte d’Azur for $2,500 a month. The British government was threatening to confiscate the bands’ funds if they did not leave the country by April 5th of that year as part of the Labour government’s punitive 93% tax on high earners. The Rolling…

The Drug that makes Pablo Escobar look like a Saint

There’s a lot of things that fascinate us in the world, especially the things that scare the crap out of us. And learning about scopolamine, a.k.a “The Devil’s Breathe”, will do just that. The highly dangerous substance from a plant found in Columbia allegedly hypnotizes the user (or in most cases, the victim), causing them to…