Just say yes

Narcos is back on Netflix, set in Mexico this time, with a cool, world-weary, manly voiceover swearily lecturing us at the beginning that if we smoked sensemilla in the 1970s, then we were partly responsible for the bloody, endless drug wars that went on to kill more than half a million people.

Oh really? Sensemilla (derived from the Spanish for ‘without seeds’) is the kind of product of human ingenuity and free markets we should be celebrating, not decrying. It’s more compact than bog-standard weed, making it easier for entrepreneurs to ship, thereby increasing their profit margins. It affords a sweeter-tasting hit and a more euphoric high, thereby giving greater pleasure to the consumer.

Of course I empathise with the victims of the drug wars, such as the 43 students kidnapped and massacred in Iguala, Mexico, in 2014. And, more recently, with the hapless location scout Carlos Munoz Portal, murdered last year while looking for places to film this very season of Narcos. But the idea that those of us who like the odd puff are responsible for their fate is ludicrous. Nor am I persuaded that cheeky lines any of us may have snorted over the years contributed to the deaths of anyone murdered in Colombia by the Medellin and Cali cartels. It was prohibition that caused the criminality, not the product.

But I think that even Narcos understands this on some level. It’s why, as you did with young Pablo Escobar in the early episodes of season one, you find yourself instantly warming to Felix Gallardo (Diego Luna), the former police officer who decided to do his bit for the local community by transforming it into ground zero for the global marijuana production industry.

We begin in the mid-1980s in the Mexican state of Sinaloa.