This is a list of people I interviewed for the book, and a short description of who they are. Where the interviews are marked with an asterisk,...

Endnotes The book has extensive end-notes explaining all my sources, and the book’s methods. In a few places in the end-notes, I reference...

Bevan Dufty is Billie Holiday’s godson. Here he describes a moment of realization: Juan Fraire Escobedo recalls his mother’s...

Colorado and Washington State have both legalized marijuana, after victory in referenda. This chapter is the story of the people who led this fight...

Jose Mujica was kept at the bottom of a well for nearly three years by the Uruguyan dictatorship in the 1980s. He emerged to lead his country – and...

Fourteen years ago, Portugal decriminalized all drugs – from cannabis to crack. This chapter is the story of Dr Joao Goulao, the extraordinary...

In the early 1980s, a doctor called John Marks was posted to Merseyside, and began to massively expand a program that prescribed heroin to addicts....

In the year 2000, a homeless drug addict on the streets of Vancouver was watching his friends die all around him. He started an uprising – one that...

This is the story of a scientist who discovered the biggest cause of addiction, in a startling experiment that blew my mind, and I suspect will blow...

This is the story of a baby who was smuggled out of the Holocaust and grew up – partly because of that experience – to discover one of the key...