The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade by Benjamin Smith
The Dope is a fascinating book that mostly succeeds in spite of the author’s continued attempt to pin the blame on the United States for virtually all the negative impacts on every facet of life in Mexico. Fortunately, despite his occasional strident editorializing he remains a journalist at heart and thus the book is deeply reported and provides a very interesting narrative of the last 100 years or so of the illegal drug industry in Mexico. I’m going to leave aside a proper review because you can find that in many places and offer a bit of observation on the historical parallels… While the author never makes the comparison, there seems like a parallel between the drug trade and the history of the nation states of Europe and arguably the world’s nation states with a few notable exceptions. Even though the average person probably has a vague feeling that France – as embodied by the Louis’, French Revolution, Napoleon, etc. – has always existed a...