Each page of this book is breathtaking: before you is a comprehensive and exorbitantly bloody history of the drug trade - from the opium wars and assassins to the darknet and legalization.

After serving a year and a half in a London prison, former drug dealer of Russian origin Niko Vorobyov goes free determined to find out how the war on drugs works and why millions of people, despite the risk, find themselves on the wrong side of the law - and where these very laws come from. He travels around the world - Colombia, Mexico, Russia, USA, Italy, China, Afghanistan, Philippines, Chile, Japan, Netherlands, UK - to talk to hundreds of people involved in the shadow economy. Together with Vorobyov, the reader will visit El Chapo's brother's house, get to Jamaican gangsters, corrupt Iranian policemen, Afghan peasants, yakuza and learn all about the work of employees of national and international structures fighting the circulation of illicit substances.

Call him Narco Polo. And welcome to the high world.