Howard Marks and Friends @ The Forum, London - 28/02/2015 'Back on the road for one last time, his reckless love of life undimmed'

A cannabis smuggler from the Welsh valleys who became the nemesis of the DEA as the crack epidemic began. A physics scholar at Oxford who spent most of his life developing a network linking, among others, pot dealers in London, an IRA gun runner, prog rock bands, corrupt Mexican police officers, Pakistani hashish exporters, the triads, a chum from MI6, American crime families, a Philippine brothel-owning renegade member of the House of Lords, Colombia’s Medellin Cartel and the Afghan mujahideen via the CIA. An outlaw and gourmet hedonist whose skill at building up his own legend was surpassed only by his own capacity to add to it.


The life of Howard Marks defies easy explanation.

Marks has been something like a hero of this writer since reading his autobiography, Mr Nice, as a teenager stuck in a suburban stasis, caught between the apathetic subcultures of nu-metal and garage. An amateur’s story of successfully merging hippy idealism – nonviolence, soft drugs, psychedelic mysticism – into the hidden and ugly world of drug traffickers and enforcers, Marks attracted tabloid notoriety in an age that might seem far more innocent than our own, with its twitterstorms of jihadist beheadings and gang warfare and drugs scares like crystal meth and krokodil rather than LSD and pot.

But this story had a dark ending too, in Marks losing his freedom to a DEA bust that also imprisoned his wife, inadvertently abandoning their three children to the care of his wife’s sister and her abusive, heroin-addicted boyfriend. Since his release from a high-security US prison in 1995, Marks has redirected himself towards the campaign to, as he puts it, “re-legalise” marijuana, securing the release of all those still left unjustly behind bars after him. He made a new trade for himself, peddling his celebrity by telling stories in one-man shows that have built his cult following among British stoners.

Now suffering terminal bowel cancer, he is back on the road for the last time, physically diminished and shorn of his shaggy hair, but his reckless love of life undimmed.