Reading like a riveting true crime thriller, The Cocaine Wars moves from the jungles of South America where coca leaves are grown to the streets of America where the white powder is sold. The inside story of how the powerful cocaine business has become America's number one problem.

When best friends become arch enemies - it's murder ... In March 2000 Gardai raided a central Dublin hotel and uncovered a 1.7 million drug-mixing factory. Three men were arrested at the scene, but just two were charged. The third, Declan Gavin, was labelled a 'rat'. Within eighteen months he was dead and the Crumlin/Drimnagh feud was born. Childhood friends and neighbours were forced to take sides. One faction supported Gavin's successor, 'Fat' Freddie Thompson, and the other sided with his arch enemy, Brian Rattigan. War was declared, and over the course of eleven years, sixteen young men have been brutally murdered in tit-for-tat killings. Cocaine Wars chronicles the shocking story behind Ireland's deadliest gangland feud: from the growth of the gang under the tutelage of notorious criminals John Gilligan and Martin 'The Viper' Foley, to the brutal way in which they established themselves as Dublin's most feared drugs mob. For the first time, the stories behind the feud are revealed: the mother who has lost two sons to the relentless violence, the criminal who orchestrates murders from the prison cell he shares with his beloved pet budgie, and the women who remain loyal to the ruthless gangsters.

Inaugurated in 1984, America's "War on Drugs" is just the most recent skirmish in a standoff between global drug trafficking and state power. From Britain's nineteenth-century Opium Wars in China to the activities of Colombia's drug cartels and their suppression by U.S.-backed military forces today, conflicts over narcotics have justified imperial expansion, global capitalism, and state violence, even as they have also fueled the movement of goods and labor around the world. In Drug Wars, cultural critic Curtis Marez examines two hundred years of writings, graphic works, films, and music that both demonize and celebrate the commerce in cocaine, marijuana, and opium, providing a bold interdisciplinary exploration of drugs in the popular imagination. Ranging from the writings of Sigmund Freud to pro-drug lord Mexican popular music, gangsta rap, and Brian De Palma's 1983 epic Scarface, Drug Wars moves from the representations and realities of the Opium Wars to the long history of drug and immigration enforcement on the U.S.-Mexican border, and to cocaine use and interdiction in South America, Middle Europe, and among American Indians. Throughout Marez juxtaposes official drug policy and propaganda with subversive images that challenge and sometimes even taunt government and legal efforts. As Marez shows, despite the state's best efforts to use the media to obscure the hypocrisies and failures of its drug policies-be they lurid descriptions of Chinese opium dens in the English popular press or Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign-marginalized groups have consistently opposed the expansion of state power that drug traffic has historically supported. Curtis Marez is assistant professorof critical studies at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television.

Since the late 1990s, the United States has funneled billions of dollars in aid to Colombia, ostensibly to combat the illicit drug trade and State Department-designated terrorist groups. The result has been a spiral of violence that continues to take lives and destabilize Colombian society. This book asks an obvious question: are the official reasons given for the wars on drugs and terror in Colombia plausible, or are there other, deeper factors at work? Scholars Villar and Cottle suggest that the answers lie in a close examination of the cocaine trade, particularly its class dimensions. Their analysis reveals that this trade has fueled extensive economic growth and led to the development of a "narco-state" under the control of a "narco-bourgeoisie" which is not interested in eradicating cocaine but in gaining a monopoly over its production. The principal target of this effort is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who challenge that monopoly as well as the very existence of the Colombian state. Meanwhile, U.S. business interests likewise gain from the cocaine trade and seek to maintain a dominant, imperialist relationship with their most important client state in Latin America. Suffering the brutal consequences, as always, are the peasants and workers of Colombia. This revelatory book punctures the official propaganda and shows the class war underpinning the politics of the Colombian cocaine trade.

Introduction: How drugs made war and war made drugs -- Drunk on the front -- Where there's smoke there's war -- Caffeinated conflict -- Opium, empire, and Geopolitics -- Speed warfare -- Cocaine wars -- Conclusion: The drugged battlefields of the 21st century .