EVERY MAN A MENACE - PATRICK HOFFMAN

I’m always interested in the more globalized and connected aspect in the drug trade and ecstasy (or MDMA or “molly” as they call it in this book) has always been particularly interesting since you have to extract the precursor chemicals from a tree that grows in Southeast Asia and is being forested into extinction. The bizarre web it traces across the planet as it’s refined and sold and resold (and who it’s being sold and resold by) is fascinating to conceptualize (especially on molly) and I was told this was the best book on the subject. I was disappointed when it began. The book, at first follows a man, Raymond Gaspar, recently released from prison who is being asked to look into a huge shipment of MDMA to San Francisco by is still-incarcerated boss. At first I think that Gaspar is going to be the main character and the book will be a battle between the various parties involved in the deal, each trying to rip each other off. This plot seemed boring and predictable. However, the antagonist during this section is a maniac criminal named Shadrock who’s a very transfixing character. He forces people to take LSD and says all sorts of out there shit and threatens and oozes violence and chaos. He reminded me of the pedo-LSD-Satanist-meth-swamp-nazi guys from the first season of True Detective. So I’d resigned myself to a quick read (I read this whole thing on a flight to Amsterdam) of a cliche book with a slightly original villain. Then it explodes out. The book follow the shipment of MDMA across the globe zeroing in on milieus in Southeast Asia and Miami and explains to us why this shipment is particularly large and how these drugs get moved and what sorts of people move them. It’s pretty amazing how he manages to show how what seems random or chaotic is the consequence of a choices made by people you’ll never meet, a world away. I’m convinced you could read the book backward and get the same feeling since the sections (the San Francisco part, the Miami part, the SE Asia part) work both on their own but then gains another layer when you’ve read the other parts of the book and can understand the network everyone is trapped in as a whole. Excellent, especially for plane rides. 9 grams of crystalline MDMA