It takes a former drug dealer to explain the global narcotics scene

In the early 2000s, Yekaterinburg was in the grip of a major heroin problem. For Yevgeny Roizman, ‘Russia’s vigilante king’, the solution was simple: first, send in goons to beat up the smack dealers; second, round up the city’s addicts, chain them to radiators, and force them to go cold turkey. The policy, unsurprisingly, failed. For one, Russia’s fourth largest city has swapped its preferred kick: today, it’s spice that is mostly getting Yekaterinburg’s residents smashed. At the same time, the city still counts enough heroine users for their needle-sharing habits to have sparked an official HIV emergency.Still, none of this stopped Roizman — an art collector, champion rally driver and ex-convict — from being elected city mayor. This is a man who, as a teenager, wore a Star of David T-shirt on a walkabout around Russia to ‘troll anti-Semites’.

The world of drugs is full of such colourful characters, from well-meaning medics and murderous mafiosos to anti-corruption crusaders and cookie crackheads. Dopeworld is a free-rolling and frank depiction of the global narcotics scene, in which Niko Vorobyov makes it his job to introduce us to as many in this crazy cast as possible. For sheer variety, he does not disappoint. His quest takes him to 15 countries on five continents. On the way, we meet the ‘really chill’ family of the Mexican drug lord ‘El Chapo’; an off-duty cop with an opium habit in Tehran; and the brother of arch narco Pablo Escobar (‘now basically a tourist attraction’) in Colombia.

This is no sober, arms-length account, either. The author’s approach to research is — how best to put this? — ‘applied’. The trajectory is set early on, with a graphic description of an ayahuasca ritual deep in the Peruvian jungle. One shot and Vorobyov is off with the fairies, battling with giant spiders ‘somewhere in Kermit Land’.