Drug Trafficking: Home

The definitive investigation and exposé of how some of the nation's largest corporations created and fueled the opioid crisis--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters who first uncovered the dimensions of the deluge of pain pills that ravaged the country and the complicity of a near-omnipotent drug cartel.  AMERICAN CARTEL is an unflinching and deeply documented dive into the culpability of the drug companies behind the staggering death toll of the opioid epidemic. It follows a small band of DEA agents led by Joseph Rannazzisi, a tough-talking New Yorker who had spent a storied thirty years bringing down bad guys; along with a band of lawyers, including West Virginia native Paul Farrell Jr., who fought to hold the drug industry to account in the face of the worst man-made drug epidemic in American history. It is the story of underdogs prevailing over corporate greed and political cowardice, persevering in the face of predicted failure, and how they found some semblance of justice for the families of the dead during the most complex civil litigation ever seen. The investigators and lawyers discovered hundreds of thousands of confidential corporate emails and memos during courtroom combat with legions of white-shoe law firms defending the opioid industry. One breathtaking disclosure after another--from emails that mocked addicts to invoices chronicling the rise of pill mills--showed the indifference of big business to the epidemic's toll. The narrative approach echoes such work as A Civil Action and The Insider, moving dramatically between corporate boardrooms, courthouses, lobbying firms, DEA field offices, and Capitol Hill while capturing the human toll of the epidemic on America's streets. AMERICAN CARTEL is the story of those who were on the front lines of the fight to stop the human carnage. Along the way, they suffer a string of defeats, some of their careers destroyed by the very same government officials who swore to uphold the law before they begin to prevail over some of the most powerful corporate and political influences in the nation.  

An astonishing, revelatory, and redemptive memoir from two women who escaped the international drug trade, with never-before-revealed details about El Chapo, the Sinaloa Cartel, and the dangerous world of illicit drugs. Olivia and Mia Flores are married to the highest level drug traffickers ever to become US informants. Their husbands worked with--and then brought down--El Chapo, as well as dozens of high-level members of the Mexican cartels. They had everything money could buy: luxury cars, huge houses, and expensive jewelry--but they chose to give it all up when they cooperated with the US government. They knew that life was about more than wealth; it was about love, family, and doing what's right. Cartel Wives is a love story, a "Married to the Mob" story, an insider's look into the terrifying but high-flying empire of the new world of drugs, and, finally, the story of a major DEA and FBI operation.

In 2015, Baltimore plunged into the worst American riots in recent history. In the chaos, two high school honor-roll students, "Brick" and "Wax, used their smarts, computer skills, ambition and gang connections to change the world of illegal drugs forever. With their gang associates, they looted pharmacies and robbed dealers, stealing over one million doses of prescription narcotics and heroin with a street value of more than $100 million. "Brick" and "Wax" were not going to sell drugs on corners; they used location-based technology and encrypted messaging software to dispatch ordered drugs via delivery drivers--an Uber-like service that eliminated street deals and easily tapped phones. They were soon supplying cities along the East Coast, creating a whole new class of opioid addicts with the FBI and DEA trailing in their wake. To ensure their supply of drugs did not run out, the teens formed an alliance with members of the Sinaloa cartel, headed by El Chapo. Veteran Newsday crime reporter Kevin Deutsch has been reporting on the ground in drug-ravaged neighborhoods for over a year. He's seen the bodies. Across America, thousands are dying from opioid overdoses. This middle-class crisis has been well documented, but the inner cities, where families are being swallowed up by addiction, have been ignored. Deutsch brings us into this underworld, where social unrest and cutting-edge technology allow criminals to seed the next wave of dysfunction and despair.

Historians have long neglected Afghanistan's broader history when portraying the opium industry. But in Poppies, Politics, and Power, James Tharin Bradford rebalances the discourse, showing that it is not the past forty years of lawlessness that makes the opium industry what it is, but the sheer breadth of the twentieth-century Afghanistan experience. Rather than byproducts of a failed contemporary system, argues Bradford, drugs, especially opium, were critical components in the formation and failure of the Afghan state. In this history of drugs and drug control in Afghanistan, Bradford shows us how the country moved from licit supply of the global opium trade to one of the major suppliers of hashish and opium through changes in drug control policy shaped largely by the outside force of the United States. Poppies, Politics, and Power breaks the conventional modes of national histories that fail to fully encapsulate the global nature of the drug trade. By providing a global history of opium within the borders of Afghanistan, Bradford demonstrates that the country's drug trade and the government's position on that trade were shaped by the global illegal market and international efforts to suppress it. By weaving together this global history of the drug trade and drug policy with the formation of the Afghan state and issues within Afghan political culture, Bradford completely recasts the current Afghan, and global, drug trade.