＂What I Learned From Going to Prison for Selling Drugs＂
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Summary
In this week's episode of Trigonometry, Francis and Constantine are joined by the author of Dope World, Nikita Nikovar Bov, who tells us about his life as a drug dealer in the early 90s and early 2000s.
Transcript
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Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.
00:00:06.520
The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,
00:00:11.780
including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.
00:00:15.780
Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.
00:00:22.660
April 28th through June 7th, 2026, The Princess of Wales Theatre.
00:00:31.000
Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.
00:00:36.860
The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,
00:00:42.120
including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.
00:00:46.120
Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.
00:00:52.980
April 28th through June 7th, 2026, The Princess of Wales Theatre.
00:01:02.920
As you know, we put out an interview here every single Sunday, once a week.
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But what we thought we'd do is we've got a few extra episodes in the bank
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where we talk to somebody about something that's not really a core subject,
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So we've got a few slightly shorter, slightly different episodes
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that we'll be putting out, and this is one of them.
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Right, Anton, on mic, mate. I'm done. I quit. Right, that's it. I'm off. See you later.
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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.
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And this is a show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about.
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At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts. We ask the experts.
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Our brilliant guest this week is a former drug dealer and the author of Dope World,
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which is this book here, which we'll be talking about.
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Well, that is the first shout out to your parents we've had on the show.
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Listen, before we get into the interview, just tell everybody you've had quite a journey
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So tell us a little bit about what it's been like.
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um yeah so uh originally i was born in um in leningrad and was then the glorious soviet union
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um came to britain about the mid-90s and i lived in bath which is a great sort of city for visiting
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if you're a like a french student on an exchange trip but when you actually live there it's kind
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to. So yeah, it's enough to turn a man to crime, which I did. I wasn't very good at it. I got
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caught. And because I still have no work ethic, I became an author. So here we are.
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Well, you summarized it quite neatly. But actually, I think, having read the book,
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your story is much more detailed than that. And you've traveled around the world looking at
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the the war on drugs and drugs in general and stuff like that which is something
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the book weaves your personal story with some of the experiences you've had elsewhere and the
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research that you've done into the into drugs yeah so um one of the one of the few good things
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about prisons i had a lot of time to read so i kind of became um quite obsessed with like um
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the whole reason why uh certain things are legal and certain things are not um so because for me
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um when i was a drug dealer none of the stuff i saw was like the sort of stereotypical kind of
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like pimping out junkies when they can't pay their 20 quid crack rocks to be fair nico you
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were a drug dealer in bath this is true this is also true um but yeah uh so i would like for me
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it struck i saw myself more as kind of like a like a bartender you know so i it wasn't um
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unfair that i got locked up because like they say don't do the crime if you can't do the time
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But it did kind of something did seem very off. So I started reading a lot about it. In jail, you get obsessed with certain subjects very easily because you have nothing else to do. So, yeah, I kind of got obsessed with that. And afterwards, when I got out, I got probation so I could leave the country.
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finally i um i started going around the world went to places like russia around philippines
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i just wanted to find out more about this uh the drug problem and uh yeah the result is this book
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i mean so what were you selling when you were a drug dealer was it just weed or were you selling
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the hardest stuff uh sweet coke mdma so basically everything you need for a good night out
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sounds like you're still working right now man um well and so what happened to you just tell
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everybody before we get into some of the research that you've done and the stuff like that uh you
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you were selling the stuff you you went on the tube in london with some coke in your pocket is
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that right uh yeah well it was um it was mdma um so basically i'd moved to london because i was
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going to uni there and i i know that one of the tactics that um the met uses to get a few easier
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rest stats is they stand on top of the escalators with some sniffer dogs and that's why I always
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tell I was aware of this tactic so I was always telling people don't take drugs on a tube there
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are dogs on a tube or if I would have to do that I put in a glass jar because it takes a while for
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smells to get through glass but that day I was in a rush so I thought fuck it I just put like
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if I got off at Gooch Street like I was supposed to
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So what I had is about three grams, so I could still blag that was a personal amount,
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but they're in half gram wraps, so it looks like six grams.
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And when they went to my house, so my housemates were still there,
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and they'd actually ordered a pizza half an hour before the feds came.
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So the pizza man and the police came at the same time,
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and there was a very confused pizza man walking up the stairs
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while all these coppers are taking down like massive bags of weed like bags of cash and
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yeah i got uh two and a half years of which i did just under a year because i didn't start any
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fights right and how much money were you making as a drug dealer right this is one thing that
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annoys me about drug dealers a lot they're saying like oh yeah i made like two grand this week
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but like how at least like half of that money is going to go towards buying more drugs because you
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have to have a sustainable business model but like in terms of pure profit i would say
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i was probably on about like 22k a year give or take so like yuppie salary 22k a year like in
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just profit not like okay right okay like if it's the money that passed through my hands probably
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some more like 50 100 yeah something like that i love how what annoys you about drug dealers is
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their poor accounting practices more than anything else you're like these guys are selling drugs that
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are killing our kids but fuck them they've got shit accounting practices that's what really
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pisses me off right um so you you get caught you you go to jail for officially two and a half years
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you come after a year and in in the time you kind of started to question well why is the stuff that
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you had in your pocket illegal but tobacco alcohol etc why are these drugs legal those two in
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particular are the big ones yeah so for example like I used to sell weed and there's not a single
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record of weed killing anyone ever in the history of mankind not like directly anyway and then maybe
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someone fell asleep in the wheel and crashed but that's not direct but I do have like one friend
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in russia who killed four people in a drunk driving accident and that's kind you can directly
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pretty much link that to alcohol so i thought why is this one well if anything when you're stoned
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you're a more careful driver you slow down more i feel like we're promoting all the wrong things
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in this episode if you want to be a drug dealer do not take drugs on the tube you know be careful
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when you drive stone like what other tips have you got for us nico uh no but but the the main
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thing actually is the impact on on your own body from consuming drugs yeah right because tobacco
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and alcohol are incredibly toxic and bad for you there are other drugs that are not and also in
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terms of their psychic um not psychic psychological effects right there are you know marijuana for
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example, there are some people, there's a link to psychosis, but broadly speaking, it's a drug that
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makes people into nicer people, whereas something like alcohol or cocaine really doesn't, right?
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Yeah, yeah. So you've explored some of that as well. So why is it that these harmful, unpleasant,
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dangerous, antisocial drugs are legal, and yet there are other drugs which you might say are
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not as bad which are illegal how did we start how did this start i think like um a lot of it has to
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do with uh it's not so much the effect of the drugs themselves it's like some social political
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or cultural thing that was going on a certain time which led to that uh so for example i was in
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iran and there okay well in iran pretty much everything is illegal like you can get arrested
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for having the wrong haircut even but um you'd be locked up mate according to our fans anyway
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yeah trigonometry fans would get in the run want you locked up yeah that's true they don't not just
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for the haircut um so one thing that's funny in uh in iran is um so alcohol is it's it's it'll be
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legal for us because we're not we're not muslims so it's it's also legal for all the uh the armenian
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refugees who fled the Turkish genocide, the descendants of them. So basically, yeah, if you
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want some booze and alcohol, call Kim Kardashian. But what's funny there is that opium, it's very
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much, they're both illegal, but opium is kind of more tolerated, because there's nothing in the
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Quran, there's nothing in the Islamic law specifically about opium. And if you really
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want to dig deep, like according to some interpretations, it's only a very specific
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kind of alcohol, which should be, they've blanket banned all alcohol, but in some interpretations
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it's a very specific kind of alcohol, it should be banned. So that just gives you an idea that
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around the world, different cultures view this differently. Another thing, so weed, originally,
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so when weed was banned in America, it was 1937, I think, and the American prohibition lasted from
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1919 to 1933 so there was 14 years where smoking a joint was legal but having a drink wasn't
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and the reason part of the reason that happened was uh so there was like a bunch of these uh
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prohibition narcs uh led by a guy called harry ansinger from the um federal pure prohibition
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bureau and once they saw that the sun was setting on the booze ban they they didn't want to like
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sit around with their dicks in their hands waiting to get redundant they wanted to get another job so
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one way they did that was they started stoking fear about marijuana so they may uh they paid
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for films like um or they supported films sorry like reefer madness great movie great movie have
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you seen it i haven't oh it's hilarious the piano scene oh it's incredible it's just faster
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it is one of the funniest films i've thought it's top 10 funny films it's brilliant really
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yeah reefer madness check it out from the 30s yeah it's is it from the 30s or the 40s yeah
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yeah yeah it's very funny there's fish called wonder and there's reefer madness
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but but it's interesting so what you're essentially saying is that it was just a
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way for the police to guarantee themselves a job yeah pretty much that and um at the time there was
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a big influx of Mexicans, like refugees from the Mexican Revolution. So people are quite scared of
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them. So it was easy to kind of, if you kind of attached Mexican immigrants to cannabis in the
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media, you'd scare like the white working class more and they'd be more likely to support measures
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against it, which is part of why in America, well here we call it cannabis more, but in America they
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call it marijuana because it sounds more mexicans like marijuana tijuana oh there you go that's very
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very interesting that is interesting so so part of it is kind of maintaining the the police force
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having something to do and part of it as you say is is about uh creating tensions between different
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ethnic communities yeah yeah uh and uh the united states actually essentially forced
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everyone else to join in the war on drugs didn't they yeah um it was uh nine like drugs or some
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drugs were sort of gradually being banned around the world already um so for obviously like china
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had the the opium wars uh so they took a harsh stance on anything psychedelic but it was really
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america which got the the un involved and made everyone sign the binding treaty i think there
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some countries that held out i think like nepal didn't sign up to like the 70s which is why nepal
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is like such a great destination for hippies in the 60s uh it's known for its hash but yeah it
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was mostly america but what's what's funny now is that like now america's kind of backing off
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so like even someone like hardline like donald trump they're like saying that uh cannabis marijuana
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on illegalization psychostates. History is pretty much staying out of that. He is a douchebag on
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other fronts, but I appreciate that stance. Broken Clock is right twice a day. But it's other
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countries like China, Russia, Iran that are fighting the drug war the hardest, I think.
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And so you've been talking about it. It's essentially jobs for the boys. But can't we
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all just admit that the drug war has failed it you know we talk about a drug war and essentially
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it hasn't won it's we filmed this in london if i want to go and get cocaine it will take maximum
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15 20 minutes that's because you're south american yeah just smell it out venezuelan connection yeah
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exactly i just called pablo up and he'll bring some around it'll be good quality shit as well
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but you make good point with hugo chavez's ashes no that is going nowhere near my fucking body
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But Francis makes a good point, which is drugs are everywhere.
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Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed around the world,
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probably more over the time the drug war has been waged.
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It's very difficult for politicians to get in front of a mic and say,
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like, hey, guys, remember that time we spent loads of money?
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We sent a bunch of you to jail, tore apart your families,
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started off wars in third world countries for no good reason.
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Like, it's very hard to do a sort of a U-turn on that, you know?
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Like, any politician that tries to, they're going to be seen as soft on crime.
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There was one person I met, he was a former police chief,
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Brixton, I think. His name is Brian Paddock. So he basically... He ran for Parliament, didn't he?
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He was a Lib Dem candidate. Yeah, he was. He's a peer now, he's the Lord. Oh, is he? Okay.
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Wasn't he also as well, he ran for the City of London, Mayor? Yeah, I think he might have done. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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So you met him when he was working for the police, did you say, in Brixton? No, when he was the Lord already.
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Oh, right, you met him when he was the Lord. Literally earlier this year. Right, okay, yeah.
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but um so he had a policy in i think 2002 2003 where he basically told his men to like lay off
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the weed so if they saw someone smoking like they might give them a citation uh take the ganja off
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them and then that was it and what happened was it freed up a lot of police time where they could
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solve real crimes so like i think like the burglary or the street the mugging rate like halved
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and also like the arrest for uh harder drugs like crack and stuff went way up but then of course the
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daily mail got wind of it and um yeah he was accused of being soft on drugs and there was
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like some kind of smear story in the press that he was like a dope fiend himself and he had to
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abandon the scheme but i think now people are more open to that because now i think especially in the
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UK, like a lot more local police forces are adopting a similar sort of policy. So I think
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there's some room for change. And also as well, I mean, we're always told about how our country's
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broke or the US is broke. It's a guaranteed revenue earner, isn't it? Just for tax. You
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legalize it, you tax it, let the dollars or the pounds flow in. Yeah, I read, was it last year,
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maybe this year, that in Colorado where they legalized, I think the amount of tax they have
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in one year it's hit the one billion dollar mark so imagine now like when they said about what's
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it like 250 million for the uh nhs we could raise that stone gange man
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put you in charge yeah you look like you're ready to go man there's a big backpack over there that's
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ready to roll there is a very serious question there so you were talking about uh former police
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chief of brixton and brixton is a community uh you know the caribbean community who have been
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targeted because you know they're especially with rastafarianism you know they smoke it's part of
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their religion to smoke weed and all the rest of it but that is a community that has been targeted
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and demonized and arrested yeah constantly for smoking weed selling weed all the rest of it
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yeah it's uh it's something we see around the world so like you see it with like the arabs in
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france or like in uh in russia with like central asians and gypsies and i think that create and
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in america obviously with black people and also hispanics so i think that creates a sort of very
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corrosive cycle because you're arresting people en masse they go to jail they're not going to learn
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anything good in jail they're meanwhile their family's broken up their kids like running on
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the streets without a dad they come out they have like this sort of brought this sort of jailhouse
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mentality with them so if their kid isn't already in a gang they're probably gonna get fucked up by
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this point and then we wonder like oh why didn't these communities get their act because you keep
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throwing them in jail you don't like give them a chance to kind of evolve whereas uh for example
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the uh the asian community in america hasn't been as targeted and they're flourishing
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And are the rates of drug use the same in the Asian community in America as they are for others?
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That's interesting. Because that would be interesting to explore. I'm not sure how true that is.
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Because part of it is cultural, as you said, right?
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Different people from different backgrounds do different things.
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Since you were arrested with MDMA, do you think all drugs should be legalized?
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I don't think we have to legalize all drugs, but I think we should legalize at least a core of drugs.
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So, for example, I don't think it's necessary to legalize crystal meth, for example.
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I don't think that would be a good thing for society.
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So what you're basically saying is the consequences of people using that drug are so bad
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yeah that it shouldn't be legal which i suppose is the argument that people who think marijuana
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or whatever are bad are also making right uh except it's not factual in my opinion well let
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me um let me expand on that so basically uh so meth is a stimulant at the end of the day
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but if you legalized like for example if you made like a legal version of uh cocaine or uh mdma it's
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it's another amphetamine like crystal meth i think you would take away a lot of the the market
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for meth anyway you don't also didn't need to lock up the user but you'd also take a big chunk
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of the market away so for example right now we have this problem with spice right like especially
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among homeless people and in prisons i never smoked in prison i i only got the i only got the
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real massively overpriced prison weed but people do smoke it in prison uh but sorry nico can you
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just explain what spice is because we've got listeners and viewers from all around the world
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they might not be aware of that and also we have listeners and viewers who don't take drugs
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they are a small minority of course so spice it's like a kind of fake chemical weed uh which
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originally came about because like because weed is illegal so people tried uh chemists invented it
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to kind of get around the law because weed is banned but this isn't yet um so but the problem
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with that is whereas we've had like decades of research of cannabis we know what it does
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makes you hungry sleepy your doritos are going to be gone in the morning
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but uh with spice we don't fully know what it does and could be and in fact usually is like
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a lot more dangerous like the risk of psychosis is much higher um i don't really know that much
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about it to be honest but from what i saw of it in jail it looks like nasty shit but people
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wouldn't smoke that if they had the alternative available if they could smoke cannabis so people
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not as many people i think uh would take crystal meth because if they're looking for a buzz they
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could take something safer instead so something uh they could take ecstasy they could take
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cocaine they could take like a weaker amphetamine yeah so what you're saying is the legalization of
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certain drugs would take away the demand for these more harmful more dangerous drugs yeah right so
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which drugs in your opinion should remain illegal other than crystal meth which you've already said
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um well it depends how you how you define because i think they should be legalized but in different
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ways so for example like uh something like weed i think like you should be able to sell that like
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the same you do as alcohol like you have the age checks um getting like special shop or whatever
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um it's more interesting for something like heroin uh so i don't think heroin should be
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sold in like waitrose next to the frozen fish shop you know just in little
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next to the buggies and the fucking screwdrivers or whatever.
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like I think Switzerland and Netherlands and Germany,
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so you go in get your smack shoot up like in the presence of a nurse i didn't think and there's a
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record or at least i haven't found a record of anyone ever od'ing at these places because it's
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under medical supervision it's all pure so they don't know what dose they're getting and it's
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free so they don't have to go around boosting tvs like train spotting so that that's how like um
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uh heroin would be legalized in my opinion and in fact i think we actually had that system
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in britain until the 80s when reagan got involved and told thatcher to cut this shit out
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and i think since the 80s like the number of smack addicts has grown actually exponentially
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because they also have a motive to introduce get other people hooked as well it's like a pyramid
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scheme so they're starting to support their habit to get other people's hooked and so on
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So you're saying that heroin, it should be licensed,
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but essentially for people who are addicted to heroin.
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You have cocaine, obviously the powder, but then you have crack.
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And they are two completely different types of drugs.
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Would you legalize both or just legalize cocaine?
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They're consumed differently, but fundamentally it's the same drug.
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well that's what the customers have been saying that's uh that's a good question i'm not i'm not
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fully sure about cocaine because like i think it's one of the most like uh like next to alcohol
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actually it's one of the most dangerous toxic things you could put in your body is it really
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like more so than heroin like if you took pure heroin like they do at those clinics every day
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for 20 years you might get a bit constipated but like you won't really suffer any long-term
00:26:48.860
damage whereas if you're drinking every day or if you're snorting a lion every day you'd have
00:26:54.020
some serious heart problems liver problems um so yeah it's a coke's an interesting one because it
0.94
00:27:00.260
does make people some people act like dicks um it's a mild understatement i don't i don't have
00:27:07.520
the answer to that one but i'm sure there's like some some middle ground i think that definitely
0.56
00:27:12.480
coca tea which they have in south america which is legal in a lot of south america which is
00:27:19.060
basically like a cup of coffee i think that's i think there shouldn't be any restrictions at all
00:27:24.900
i mean in theory you could go to like asda buy like 30 kilos of coca leaves and make like one
00:27:34.760
gram of coke but i think you know if you are that determined fair play to you but but it's also as
00:27:41.520
all because i mean london has a huge cocaine problem it is like i saw it's like in the top
00:27:47.900
maybe it's the top city in europe for cocaine consumption i don't remember there was a headline
00:27:52.360
last week yeah that would make complete sense yeah so do you not think it would it would it
00:27:57.680
would it's just better if we just go look you can buy it you know the government will regulate it
00:28:03.580
they'll instead of what happens now which is quite literally you go to a toilet in a pub and you have
00:28:08.660
to wait 10 minutes because someone's snorting coke in there just take the toilets out of the cocaine
0.93
00:28:14.360
room man problem solved nika i wanted to ask you about uh kind of crime and prison and the kind of
00:28:24.200
the drug dealer mindset if you like like when how did you get into selling drugs um well i'm not
00:28:32.240
gonna lie i am disgustingly middle class uh so i guess i was also kind of very insecure i was quite
00:28:41.160
a weak person i guess so i kind of i always and i got picked on a lot for being like always being
00:28:47.280
the new kid for being the foreign kid so i kind of wanted to prove myself but i was too much of
0.95
00:28:53.460
like a little bitch to be like a real gangster to just like rob people and stuff so i thought like
1.00
00:28:59.300
if i did like drugs i'd have like some more respect i'd have more friends i'd have more
1.00
00:29:05.700
money it just seemed like an easy way out if you keep bullying russians i'm gonna start dealing
0.90
00:29:11.360
drugs mate and this podcast will become profitable yeah but how did you what i mean is like okay
00:29:17.060
that's that was your situation as a kid how do you go from that to suddenly you're selling
00:29:22.380
drugs to people because you have to go and buy them from somebody yeah you have to like be like
00:29:27.000
okay i'm a drug dealer now do you know what i mean i kind of got into like my sort of um
00:29:32.000
my door my door um i got my foot through the door through um illegal rave parties so there's a lot
00:29:40.300
of that going on and also legal rave parties a lot of that going on in bristol i'm not gonna
00:29:45.800
name the clubs or the place involved but they're not hard to find um so bristol has like a huge
00:29:52.380
drum and bass scene uh also perhaps coincidentally a huge ketamine scene um like a huge sidechamp
00:30:00.260
scene so i just kept going to those uh eventually i got introduced to people and there from there
00:30:06.020
it's quite easy so like you meet people then you meet more people and it's like a mushrooming
00:30:11.720
network you know so i started out very much uh selling xd at rave so i was like i was the dodgy
00:30:17.720
guys in the corner going weed pills weed pills right and um yeah eventually that moved on to coke
00:30:27.900
and is there i mean i i don't mean this to sound judgmental i'm just trying to understand
00:30:33.380
is there at any point a part of you that goes what i'm doing is wrong not really like the time
00:30:41.540
when i did see afterwards like i did see like the misery of addiction and what drugs can do
00:30:47.280
to people that was only afterwards and i was proactively looking for that stuff in my book
00:30:52.520
like it's not all sunshine and roses like i had to i actually met um met a guy called um
00:31:01.500
ray i forgot his surname the surname uh surname evades me but um he's a he's a former teacher
00:31:47.540
I had this sort of really tight feeling in my stomach
00:31:51.240
because I thought he'd be the kind of guy who'd hate my guts,
00:31:59.520
Because when you're buying drugs, even from someone like me,
00:32:05.380
There isn't a warning label saying, you know, it may contain nuts.
00:32:08.160
like that's the biggest problem yeah so like if they knew what they were getting if they knew
00:32:16.620
the exact dose and what the the health like the healthy dose for other people was and if they got
00:32:22.960
it from a shop or whatever like a licensed shop they could check the ingredients they'd still be
00:32:27.040
alive today yeah so his standpoint was essentially the same as mine and where do you stand on you
00:32:33.840
know because you were talking about you know you started dealing in illegal raves illegal raves
00:32:37.860
I'm sure that you probably did it, like you said, at certain nightclubs.
00:32:41.280
Where do you stand with the whole, what the police do,
00:32:44.700
which is they shut a nightclub down if drug dealers are found to be operating there,
00:32:57.020
So what, are you going to shut down all the clubs in London?
00:32:59.380
Okay, people are just going to throw warehouse parties
00:33:01.720
or parties in fields like they did back in the 90s.
00:33:04.600
like it's um it's called the balloon effect so you crack down on drugs in one place it just pops up
00:33:12.800
somewhere else so i see pavel escobar got killed in what 92 93 a great man
00:33:19.440
colombian cartels came tumbling the short time after the cali cartel went down then what happened
00:33:27.840
like the drug business just moved to mexico mexico is now the the most important nation for drug
00:33:33.780
trafficking in the western hemisphere so and and but why do you think we we need to take drugs
00:33:40.780
because surely you know there's that's quite a loaded question i'm not sure we necessarily need
00:33:45.600
to take drugs the question just to make this podcast entertaining that's that's how it works
00:33:51.360
but i think i think people do need to i mean they do need to take drugs how many people take drugs
00:33:58.840
on this planet and it's more than the people that doesn't mean they need to it might mean that they
00:34:02.900
are genetically predisposed to or they might feel like taking them doesn't mean they need to
00:34:08.420
you need to breathe oxygen you don't necessarily need to take drug the message of trigonometry is
00:34:14.080
not that you need to take drugs is what i'm trying to say i'm trying to preempt all the
0.99
00:34:18.840
fucking libel suits or whatever that's going to come after this shit well that's actually um
0.98
00:34:23.880
especially in the last two years there's been quite a lot of research that in some ways uh
0.99
00:34:28.700
some drugs in some ways can be good for you like right now there's a lot of research in america
00:34:33.040
about um using mdma for treating ptsd so they're trying it now on uh war veterans people coming
00:34:39.680
back from iraq afghanistan and i think uh the the organization is called maps i forgot what
00:34:46.400
it stands for but it's called maps you guys can look it up and i think they had like an 81 percent
00:34:51.980
success rate for treating PTSD. So that's quite good. And another avenue that's being explored
00:34:59.860
now is psychedelics and how they can kind of change your way of thinking and thinking around
00:35:06.800
the box. So when I came out of prison, because like I said earlier, it's very easy to fixate
00:35:14.160
on certain things in prison. So I became fixate of this one girl that I knew and I basically became
00:35:19.860
a stalker for a bit um and flash forward like two years later i'm uh i'm in the amazon about
00:35:28.180
two hours away from any anything that could be described as civilization i'm in like a hut with
0.95
00:35:34.260
a shaman and he gives me this uh well they call it a tea but it just tastes like ass it's uh
0.87
00:35:41.940
it's called ayahuasca it's like it contains dmt which is like the most powerful
0.98
00:35:48.360
psychedelic in the history of man so i drank that um a lot of shit happened i won't go into all of
0.90
00:35:57.020
it but um i went to kermit land kermit the frog took me on like this odyssey down the river
0.79
00:36:04.060
um it makes you throw up a lot and i turned to throw up and into a bucket the bucket was actually
00:36:10.960
there that wasn't me tripping but who was holding the bucket but rafiki from the lion king and he
00:36:16.980
was looking at me like you'll come with Rafiki he know the way and I just vomited and then I saw
00:36:23.160
there like a million jaguar face in the bucket going in a spiral they didn't look happy at what
00:36:29.020
I've just done but it also made me like reassess my life from a lot of points of view and it helped
00:36:37.860
me get over like a lot of my kind of not sure if that's the word but like my trauma or my fixations
00:36:43.940
from prison and it's not an issue for me anymore because it helped me see outside the box that I
00:36:50.600
kind of put myself in my mental cell as it were well I guess the question you were really asking
00:36:57.100
before I rudely interrupted you just to make a joke was why is it that people are drawn to taking
00:37:02.960
drugs what like there is Johan Harry who talks about the fact that it's a way of dealing with
00:37:07.660
trauma uh what what happened what do you think drives people to take certain drugs uh do you
00:37:16.180
mean like drives people to just use drugs or drives them specifically to like addiction and
00:37:21.240
bad stuff i guess both you can take them one at a time uh well just drugs it's the same uh same
00:37:30.040
reason for us um drinking a cup of coffee or like smoking a cigarette talking with your friends
00:37:38.280
going for a walk playing sports or whatever it's just uh it's just something to do it's just the
00:37:43.400
way to be sociable to be happy um having a drink it's the same thing what happens with addiction
00:37:51.600
is so obviously like thousands of people snort lines across the whole of london every saturday
00:37:58.920
night right but only like a small portion of them go on to do it like compulsively where
00:38:04.360
it's like 5 a.m on a Monday and they're still doing coke so like I think with a lot of those
00:38:12.740
people like one a friend of mine she can be described as let's say a problem coke user and
0.95
00:38:21.340
she got raped a lot when she was a kid she was like six to nine years old i think she was
00:38:28.960
repeatedly raped by a family friend so i think like for a lot of people i get addicted and the
00:38:34.740
same with hard drinking they're kind of trying to numb the pain in their lives trying to get over
00:38:39.620
something um some hang-up they have some trauma they have and i think that's eventually that's
00:38:46.540
where kind of the chemical hooks gradually set in and that's when you start having a problem
00:38:51.540
and do you think that when you look at let's say like let's take a drug like cocaine right so you
00:38:58.680
have to go to a drug dealer to get it you buy the drugs you then have to find a place where nobody's
00:39:03.640
seeing you in order to take the drug and then you know the entire process make it gives a sort of
00:39:09.380
glamour to it doesn't it a sort of dark dirty glamour that if you went and you just bought it
00:39:34.880
Dutch people don't actually smoke that much weed
00:39:39.060
I'd say most of the people smoking weed in Amsterdam
00:40:10.500
because people just drink, have a glass of wine with their parents
00:40:14.320
when they're like 13, 14, and they're kind of eased into it.
00:40:21.780
So I think, yeah, I think there's something in that, definitely.
00:40:24.680
And what about, I just want to come back to the start
00:40:31.540
because it doesn't occur to you that any of this is wrong.
00:40:36.620
Do you have, like, you obviously have to avoid the police.
00:40:39.260
you have to think about that stuff even at that point it doesn't it doesn't cross your mind and
00:40:44.300
again i don't mean this in a judgmental way i'm just trying to get into the mindset it doesn't
00:40:48.180
cross your mind that what you're doing is wrong yeah like it obviously i i know it's illegal but
00:40:53.920
i don't see it as um as wrong as like a bad thing as like an immoral thing because for me there's a
00:41:00.220
big difference between uh what's moral and what's legal yeah so for example like um the people who
00:41:07.640
and frank during world war ii they were acting illegally under the german occupation but i
00:41:12.240
wouldn't say they were acting immorally obviously i'm not comparing myself to that but like let's
00:41:18.120
say um like a rum runner during the prohibition uh during the american prohibition someone who
00:41:24.060
smuggled whiskey in from canada like it's illegal the government says it's wrong but
00:41:28.960
you know everyone drinks all your friends drink like it doesn't really occur to you that it that
00:41:35.960
it's like an immoral bad evil thing all right and then you get arrested yeah and what happens
00:41:42.100
mentally at that point for you that was that was a big shock to the system because
00:41:47.640
no one ever thinks they're getting caught otherwise they wouldn't do it that's why i
00:41:55.020
think like things like the death penalty doesn't work because no one thinks they get caught in the
00:41:59.080
first place there's a lot of evidence for that actually that it's not the extent of the punishment
00:42:04.600
but the certainty of being the likelihood yeah yeah that has a much bigger effect on offending
00:42:10.160
so people think that they're gonna get a slap on the wrist but it's a hundred percent they're much
00:42:16.300
less likely to do things yeah then if they're gonna get a really bad punishment but it's like
00:42:20.660
10 chance of it happening yeah yeah so you didn't think you were gonna get caught like most people
00:42:25.000
no and then bam you get caught yeah also for a while uh i feel like by being like a sort of white
00:42:31.800
middle class student i'd been in a few situations with the police before where i did either get just
00:42:38.080
a slap on the wrist or they didn't even suspect me to begin with so that kind of made me more
00:42:43.660
kind of arrogant i guess or careless i don't know what the right word here would be but when i
00:42:49.340
actually did get caught it's just like there's a once that metal door slams shut you think like
0.97
00:42:57.320
oh shit oh shit what do i do now what do i do what do i do what do i do
0.96
00:43:00.740
and for a while like i was pretty not calm but like my mind didn't really accept it
0.99
00:43:10.340
uh except that this was real until i actually got sent down for two and a half years
00:43:16.660
and then uh then i went a bit insane because i was like okay i'm here now no one's gonna
00:43:24.840
to rescue me batman's not gonna come busting through the window and then i immediately start
00:43:31.900
thinking of things to do and like i calculated my sentence down to the second and i started like
00:43:39.220
counting down like one million nine hundred thousand ninety nine and so on and then i
00:43:47.220
eventually i gave up after about an hour when i realized this actually wasn't making time go
00:43:51.480
it was making it a lot a lot slower right and do you think what from your experience which prison
00:43:58.880
were you in i was in two prisons first i was in uh hmp temp side which was all right you know
00:44:05.040
we had you'd recommend it yeah five stars yeah better than a travel lodge yeah and then the
00:44:11.020
other one it's the hilton the prison and the other one was right next door is the appropriately
00:44:16.620
named hmp isis which was just a shitbox we called it crisis right okay now so you you had you had
00:44:26.080
you spent a significant amount of time in prison does it work as a way to rehabilitate offenders
00:44:49.920
see people get released and I'd see them come back
00:45:04.140
but you really have to be kind of determined to do that because when you're in jail everything
00:45:11.800
is actually against you're surrounded by your fellow co-conspirators you make new links
00:45:18.680
especially in ISIS which is an offender's institution there's a lot of street gangs
0.86
00:45:23.160
like postcode wars and stuff so it's very easy to get drawn into that
00:45:27.400
um yeah i think uh apart from like vile like violent offenders and kitty fiddlers i don't
0.88
00:45:36.000
think people should really be sent to prison as much as they are now it seemed to work for you
00:45:40.640
though well i got a bunch of new material yeah no but my point is you're doing something very
00:45:46.460
different now to what you were doing before right that is true and it sounds like prison
00:45:51.220
was for you a wake-up call is that fair to say sounds like a no to tell us what it was like
00:45:57.820
i think it's more uh in my case it's because i had a have a strong family so my family still
00:46:04.160
supported me but i think if i didn't think if uh what my mama thought of all this wasn't constantly
00:46:10.260
on my mind as well i think that i could have very easily gone back and being a bigger drug dealer
00:46:16.460
I've got links to like Russia, Uzbekistan, Brazil, Bulgaria now, all over the place.
00:46:24.780
Like if I didn't have, and a lot of the people in prison, they come from either one parent households or sometimes no parent households.
00:46:34.040
So I think for them, it's a lot more difficult.
00:46:37.960
And were steps taken to try and rehabilitate you, to try and give you other skills that you could perhaps use on the outside?
00:46:46.060
or were you just sort of left to it well for me i was already doing my masters by that point so like
00:46:52.380
that sort of little bullshit it class that i did on the side didn't really help much i just used
00:46:58.620
that for uh writing and printing off letters because i was too lazy to write them in my cell
00:47:03.100
um but one thing that's interesting the um painting and decorating course is very popular
00:47:11.380
so i bet i'm gonna say that some like nine out of ten paints and decorators in this country are
00:47:17.780
probably ex-cons really really wow i'm now having my house redecorated again i'm just messing but
00:47:26.220
um what so you you talked about how when you are in prison you have a lot of time
00:47:32.160
to think about stuff uh is the environment that you're in a big factor in why we see that
00:47:40.480
the mental health epidemic is so so so prevalent and so terrible in jails yeah absolutely i mean
00:47:49.320
especially now like in the last few years because of all the cutbacks so i even when i was in i think
00:47:55.660
2016 that's when they really started kicking off but even when i was in prison like the officers
00:48:00.360
were warning like there's going to be riots when they start buying tobacco they start doing cut
00:48:04.420
back so um our prison isis they basically cut half the stuff wow so that means that they couldn't run
00:48:12.820
half the prison effectively at any given time so half the prison was shut down so we could be in
00:48:17.460
ourselves for up to 23 and a half hours a day like they let us out for our like compulsory exercise
00:48:22.740
and that's it and what will affect is that like mentally being in the room for 23 and a half hours
00:48:29.680
well i'll tell you jeremy carl gets boring real quick um so you do have a tv and stuff but it
00:48:37.500
yeah yeah you have a tv uh if you behave yourself you get a tv i think the tv is a good thing
00:48:43.040
because if it wasn't there we'd have a lot more rights that's how strange ways happen pretty much
00:48:48.740
because people are just like you see people in newspapers say yeah it's toughen up our prison
00:48:53.300
it's just a holiday camp i think those people have been taking the wrong holidays and i also
00:49:28.160
five more days of this then it's the weekend i get more visit two more weeks till the end of the
00:49:35.680
month three more months till the end of the year one more year till i'm released like you don't
0.96
00:49:41.700
think about that in the real world you don't think of time that way and that can really really fuck
0.88
00:49:48.060
with your mind and one other one other thing i wanted to ask you about obviously a lot of our
00:49:53.180
impressions about prison are actually taken from american movies yeah so it's the shawshank
00:49:59.540
redemption there um what's the one with the green mile the green mile but what's the one with edward
00:50:05.080
norton um so american history x right so it's all about violence sexual violence etc what is
00:50:13.760
the situation like for someone like you who as you say is a white middle class kid going in on a
00:50:20.020
relatively short stint compared to maybe some of the other people in the prison uh in terms of you
00:50:25.280
know being assaulted being beaten up and stuff like that actually no i was fine um i used to
00:50:31.500
work out a lot more back then so i was a lot bigger um i don't i tried to be like respectful
00:50:39.080
to anyone i wasn't involved in any of the gang stuff so i was fine pretty much but i did see
00:50:45.360
like a lot of stuff go down um saw one guy get hit in the eye with like a tuna can in the sock
00:50:52.240
and he was walking around looking like two-faced from batman for about a week
0.86
00:50:56.420
um there's a lot of um i think we've told people enough illegal shit for the podcast there's a lot
0.98
00:51:02.480
of uh stabbings with let's say sharpened toothbrushes like toothbrushes with uh little
0.86
00:51:08.120
razor blades attached melted into the thing yeah yeah yeah uh i'm not gonna tell you guys how to
00:51:14.800
do that no but but the reason i ask about it what i mean is is there a lot of that going on
00:51:21.960
yeah and why is it going on you mentioned like the gang stuff so if you as a person you you're
00:51:27.700
in prison you're not part of a gang are you generally going to be all right as long as you
00:51:31.480
don't if you're not being addicted to people or whatever i think uh yeah especially in like the
00:51:37.220
the big man jail. So I was in ISIS is a young offender. So 18 to 25. There was one 28 year
00:51:44.940
old there by mistake. He wasn't happy. But again, an adult prison, I think most people just want to
00:51:51.120
kind of do their time and get on with it really young offenders. It's different. You have a lot
00:51:57.840
more bullying or more intimidation. Just because that's just full of young wannabe gangsters want
0.80
00:52:04.060
to prove themselves but yeah generally it's not as bad as as they say but it's still it can be
00:52:11.840
pretty bad it can so your way of getting through it was essentially keeping your head down did you
00:52:20.000
make any sort of connections there did you did you meet people or is it something that you just
00:52:26.040
literally went i'm not going to talk to anyone it's going to be a year i'm just going to have
00:52:29.560
tunnel vision every day i'm just going to keep my interactions that's impossible you'll go crazy
00:52:34.160
from that uh now i try to make friends there's always like a couple of cool people in each wing
00:52:39.480
um i remember there was one group which everyone called the russians
00:52:45.060
which was basically consists of me the only actual russian about six lithuanian guys
00:53:25.000
The Uzbek guy, he stole, I think, three million pounds,
1.00
00:53:30.380
sending viruses to banks and then siphoning off the money.
0.95
00:53:34.840
But he fucked up when one day he forgot to turn the encryption on his laptop,
0.96
00:53:41.800
And, yeah, he got done for, like, fraud, money laundering, all kinds of shit.
0.97
00:53:49.120
So it's almost, you know, it's survival, isn't it?
00:53:52.200
You go in there, and then you kind of meet like-minded people.
00:53:56.860
You have to, and that's the way you get through it.
00:53:59.280
But you don't think it works for the vast majority of people.
00:54:04.300
It should be about bringing someone in, trying to do your best to fix and give them skills
00:54:23.960
He can't, like, go Instagram his fellow Nazis.
0.76
00:54:29.980
It's like school library internet, so, like, obviously a bunch of stuff is filtered.
00:54:46.000
You don't have to be, like, bang up 6 o'clock in yourself for the rest of the night.
00:54:50.420
And I think their re-offending rate in Norway is something like 15%,
00:54:56.560
whereas with us, I think it's something close to the half.
00:55:00.380
Wow. So every other person who comes out of prison is going to go back in.
00:55:04.960
Yeah. Don't quote me on the exact statistic, but it is much higher than Norway's.
00:55:12.320
And you must have encountered people where you just looked at them
00:55:15.140
and they just thought, look, we need to rehabilitate people.
00:55:19.700
But you must have met the odd person who was like,
0.95
00:55:21.460
there's no fucking way you should be outside.
0.91
00:55:40.620
that looked exactly like Asterix and Obelix.
1.00
00:55:43.500
And the big fat one, he was a fucking psycho, man.
0.99
00:55:47.340
like i i was cool with him but like some people don't need to be in jail and some people need
0.99
00:55:54.380
to be in jail and he definitely needs to be in jail and why was sorry astro let's hope he never
0.83
00:56:01.660
comes out and finds out and starts watching trigonometry um thanks for coming nico i recommend
00:56:06.400
everybody get this book and read it it's uh it's a great read and like i said it weaves his personal
00:56:11.720
story when with a lot of facts and research into the drug war it's a really good read uh thanks
00:56:17.100
for sending us a copy um and uh as always follow you're on twitter but you're not very active on
00:56:23.120
there right or are you my twitter game is weak yeah your twitter game so don't follow him on
00:56:27.040
twitter but follow us and we'll see you again in a week from now with another brilliant episode
00:56:32.820
thanks for watching guys as always subscribe to the youtube channel click the bell button
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