HEROIN

From policing to harm reduction, award winning drugs writer, JS Rafaeili explores every aspect of the drugs world through a series of interviews with leading experts.

A new form of packaging heroin in pill form has hit Durban, South Africa, upending the market and sparking brutal gang wars that the police are struggling to contain.

India’s northernmost state Himachal Pradesh is in the grips of a heroin crisis, as collateral damage of border state Punjab’s War on Drugs against the alleged Pakistan funded Narco Terrorism.

In Afghanistan, America was defeated as much by the illegal heroin trade as by the Taliban itself. This is how heroin and violence have shaped Afghanistan as a country.

Who are the Mexican drug cartels? How did they develop? How did the War on Drugs turn them into billion dollar empires, capable of paramilitary style violence?

The former head of a drugs gang reveals how he made millions by building up his reputation, evading authorities and, at times, using violence.

County Lines – big city crime groups exploiting kids to sell drugs has horrified the UK. But, we show how this phenomenon is a direct product of the War on Drugs itself.

The War on Drugs has failed, but legalisation is going to be a complex process. We explore what legal heroin, cocaine and ecstasy might actually look like.

This is the story of the North America Opioid Crisis – how a combination of medical overprescribing and drug prohibition created an epidemic as serious as COVID-19.

Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán turned Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel into the most powerful drugs gang on the planet. When he was arrested, it unleashed a tidal wave of violence.

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized all drugs. Meanwhile, the police in the Philippines have spent the last four years shooting thousands of addicts dead in the street. Which is more effective – decriminalization or death?

Spice was a cheap and legal chemical cannabis. However, government bans saw chemists tweak its formula until it had mutated into a “zombie drug” capable of causing chaos