Drugs
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…
The new mafias that rule the world
You may not have heard of the Maras. Or Barrio 18. Or the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or the Zatas,…
Awards await this mostly terrific new Homecoming
Jamie Lloyd’s production of Pinter’s The Homecoming is a pile of terrific and silly ideas. Mostly terrific. The action takes…
How ‘stress management’ can make your blood pressure soar
‘Stress management’ seems to be perpetually on the rise
Justin Trudeau and four more hereditary prime ministers
Family business Justin Trudeau, son of Pierre Trudeau, was elected to his father’s old job as Prime Minister of Canada.…
The truth about me, David Cameron, drugs and Supertramp
This week I woke up shocked to find myself on the front page of the Daily Mail. Apparently I’m the…
Life in Rio’s most infamous favela — where you have to pay the cops to arrest criminals
When Stefan Zweig first arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1936, he was overwhelmed not only by the city’s magnificent…
When flower power turned sour
Aldous Huxley reported his first psychedelic experience in The Doors of Perception (1954), a bewitching little volume that soon became…
