Prelude
The police had already taken away the body, but the blood and brains were still fresh on the sidewalk. We’d been eating at a restaurant just a few blocks away when my partner looked up from his phone and said someone’s been shot down the street. We got up and raced towards the sirens. The man whose cerebrum was now all over the floor had been the owner of a nearby scrap-metal shop. As the cops cleared the crime scene, a bystander lit two candles in memory of the deceased, the tiny flames reflecting in a puddle of sticky red ooze. Just another night in Manila.
While we didn’t know if this was a drug-related homicide, the MO was the same as thousands of other killings that had taken place across the archipelago since Duterte came to power. Witnesses saw two men fire two shots before fleeing on motorbikes into the urban jungle, their safe getaway guaranteed by the rush-hour traffic.
I’d come to the Philippines to investigate the drug war being waged by President Rodrigo Duterte, who’d vowed to cleanse the country of drugs by any means necessary. The story of the Filipino Drug War resonates with me, because, under another set of circumstances, I could have been the one lying there with a bullet lodged in my skull. I used to be a drug dealer, until one day I stupidly took my stuff on the London Tube and got busted by the Met’s canine squad, which earned me a free year-long stay at Her Majesty’s Prison in Isis (South London, not Syria). With an uninspired menu, rude staff, slow room service and guests unable to leave their rooms twenty-three hours a day, suffice it to say that this place wouldn’t get a good rating on TripAdvisor.
This isn’t another true-crime story. I’ve always been more of a geek than a gangster, so if you picked this up expecting the millionth book about the Krays, my condolences. This is a true-crime, gonzo, social, historical-memoir meets fucked-up travel book.
A warning: some of you may find this uncomfortable. But remember, you’re reading the perspective of a drug dealer. Since I’ve been known to be wrong about many things (especially the police presence on the Central line), I’ve travelled the world to hear perspectives other than my own: if I only talked to those who thought like me, this would be a very boring read.
We will explore our curious relationship with those plants, pills and powders that play with our minds, how and why we’ve tried to stamp them out of existence, and what the consequences of that may be. How come a gram of coke can land you in handcuffs, but you can buy beer and cigs at any corner shop? Why are so many kids dying, and why are our prisons filling up? Why does every society have an underclass whose chief source of employment seems to be black-market pharmaceuticals? Why do gangsters apparently control entire neighbourhoods, and in some cases, entire countries? And what, if anything, is going to change?
Welcome to dopeworld.
1
From Russia with Drugs
I was born in St Petersburg, Russia, or Leningrad as we called it in the good old days. I come from a family with a long academic tradition: my dad’s a professor, his dad’s a professor, and my mum teaches economics. Just then the Soviet Union was becoming one big shit-sandwich, so we emigrated first to Italy, then to America, where I learnt English from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and finally to Bath, a small boring town in the British countryside that doubles as a film-set whenever the BBC want to do a costume drama.
Because we moved around a lot, I was always the new kid in school. I was a nerd with a weird accent who loved watching films; I had no hand/leg/eye co-ordination, which made me shit at most sports; and my eyesight was fucked so I wore thick prescription glasses. As you can imagine, none of that endeared me much to the school’s social hierarchy. All I wanted was to be normal and accepted for who I was, but every time someone made fun of my accent (even though I spoke perfect English – thanks, TMNT!) or I was excluded from a social activity, it reinforced my view that I’d never really be accepted by anyone. Over time this became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. I actually got so much shit for how I talked that I can’t bear to hear the sound of my own voice, even today.
Until, one day, I decided the next motherfucker to chat shit to me, I’m gonna knock him dead. This kid on the playground, Mickey Foreskin, was always a pain in the ass. I don’t remember why they called him Mickey Foreskin and I’m not sure I want to find out, but he was definitely an ugly motherfucker. So one fateful lunchtime I was just out and about, minding my own business and eating my Petits Filous, when Mickey literally jumped from behind some bushes and started crooning ‘Nikolai, the Russian Spy!’ in a sneering imitation of my accent.
I came in like Bruce Lee; fists, knees and elbows flying. He tried to get away but I got him up against the fence and kept pounding. And pounding. And pounding. And then I stopped. Silence.
‘Get the fuck outta here.’
Limping and crying like a little bitch, I pushed him away and looked around. I was so caught up in the moment that I hadn’t noticed the whole playground staring at me, their mouths wide open in shock. All of a sudden, I heard someone chanting: ‘Niko! Niko!’
It got louder.
Copyright © 2019 by Niko Vorobyov
