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The top 8 books about being incarcerated in a third world prison for drugs.

9/8/2014

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I admit it’s a strange niche, but I promise you it’s also one that’s downright infectious with its readers. Then again, these are strange bunch – a hodgepodge of literate expatriates, backpackers, surfers, world travelers, and adventurers. This genre equally attracts a shadow class of readers – those who hop borders to make a buck (often by unscrupulous means, themselves,) to evade the law back home, dodge the IRS, or just live “off the grid” for when the Illuminati/zombie apocalypse goes down. 

These books are about people who tried their hand at smuggling drugs, got set up as unwitting mules, or just used them recreationally, but managed to gewere pinched in the worst possible places, where human rights are a joke and survival is a daily fight. For the most part, we’re not talking about fiction. These stories are about real people who got busted for drug-related crimes far from home and did some of the hardest time imaginable. Most of them are the first to confess their guilt yet a few of them are innocent or at least defensible – though justice was never once served. In some cases, a death sentence would have been far more humane. Also worth noting, this is also not about religious or political captives or prisoners of war. These books are about private citizens who danced with the devil, got caught, and barely managed to crawl back out of hell to tell their stories.

No matter how they come about these titles, a reader rarely just picks up one. Brits, Looneys (Canadians,) Kiwis, Swedes, Frogs (sorry) – they come from every country. Cambodia, Thailand, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, South Africa, Peru; they pick up these books at hostels, battered copies at little used book stores along the backpacker circuit, or grab counterfeit copies off the street for a dollar or two. They devour them in a couple of days, while smoking fags and drinking pints in cafes or on the beach. Then, they tell their equally eclectic friends and move on to the next book in the genre. 

Maybe it's pure Schadenfreude, or perhaps we globe trotters we've all made mistakes or associated with people that could have landed us in the same situations with a bad roll of the dice. Acute fear is a strange thing - unnervingly repulsive and yet we can't bring ourselves to look away. And so is the darkness of human imagination, for I dare you to read these and not think, "What would I do if that happened to me? Would I survive?"  

Here are the top 8 books about travelers incarcerated in foreign prisons for drug offenses. I listed them by their popularity (number of reviews) on Amazon.com, and a quick bio so you know what they're all about. 



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Shantaram
By Gregory David Roberts.
Note: This book garnered almost mythical intrigue among travelers, who mostly thought it was nonfiction. It turns out it's a novel, though possibly based on a true story or inspired by true events. Whatever the case, it's a wild read! 

"It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured." 
So begins this epic, mesmerizing first novel set in the underworld of contemporary Bombay. Shantaram is narrated by Lin, an escaped convict with a false passport who flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of a city where he can disappear.


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South of Normal
By Norm Schriever.
Frustrated and unfulfilled with his comfortable existence in the States, successful businessman Norm Schriever knows there is something more he is supposed to do with his life. So, he quits his job, sells and donates all of his possessions, and moves down to Tamarindo, Costa Rica, with nothing but a laptop and a surfboard, vowing to chase his long-forgotten dream of being a writer. But before he even arrives, his one and only gringo friend in Costa Rica is set up by a corrupt local attorney and thrown in a horrid local prison. Starting on his first day in town, Norm has to spend way too much "quality time" visiting his friend in that prison, where he's locked in with the other inmates. Norm soon finds that paradise has its dark side, and the perfect life in a little seaside town isn't always as easy as it seems. Whether it's adapting to the local customs and the language barrier, dodging lawless drug traffickers and corrupt cops, or helping to keep his friend alive in prison, Norm always keeps his sense of humor and forges ahead, intent on finding the paradise he has been looking for. 


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Marching Powder
By Thomas McFadden and Rusty Young.
Rusty Young was backpacking in South America when he heard about Thomas McFadden, a convicted English drug trafficker who ran tours inside Bolivia's notorious San Pedro prison. Intrigued, the young Australian journalist went to La Paz and joined one of Thomas's illegal tours. They formed an instant friendship and then became partners in an attempt to record Thomas's experiences in the jail. The result is Marching Powder.

This book establishes that San Pedro is not your average prison. Inmates are expected to buy their cells from real estate agents. Others run shops and restaurants. Women and children live with imprisoned family members. It is a place where corrupt politicians and drug lords live in luxury apartments, while the poorest prisoners are subjected to squalor and deprivation. Violence is a constant threat, and sections of San Pedro that echo with the sound of children by day house some of Bolivia's busiest cocaine laboratories by night. In San Pedro, cocaine--"Bolivian marching powder"--makes life bearable.



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Mr. Nice
By Howard Marks

During the mid 1980s Howard Marks had 43 aliases, 89 phone lines, and owned 25 companies throughout the world. Whether bars, recording studios, or offshore banks, all were money laundering vehicles serving the core activity: dope dealing. Marks began to deal small amounts of hashish while doing a postgraduate philosophy course at Oxford, but soon he was moving much larger quantities. At the height of his career he was smuggling consignments of up to 50 tons from Pakistan and Thailand to America and Canada and had contact with organizations as diverse as MI6, the CIA, the IRA, and the Mafia. This is his extraordinary story.




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Midnight Express
By  Billy Hayes and William Hoffer.  
Midnight Express tells the gut-wrenching true story of a young man’s incarceration and escape from a Turkish prison. A classic story of survival and human endurance, told with humor, honesty, and heart, it became the Academy Award-winning blockbuster film of the same name.

In 1970 Billy Hayes was an English major who left college in search of adventures to write about, like his hero Jack London. He had a rude awakening when he was arrested at the airport in Istanbul trying to board a plane while carrying four pounds of hashish, and given a life sentence. After five brutal years, relentless efforts by his family to gain his release, and endless escape plotting, Hayes finally took matters into his own hands. On a dark night, in a wailing storm he began a desperate and daring escape to freedom…



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The Damage Done
By Warren Fellows.

In 1978 Warren Fellows, Paul Hayward and William Sinclair were convicted of heroin trafficking between Thailand and Australia. They were sentenced to life imprisonment in Bangkok's notorious Bang Kwang men's prison, the Bangkok Hilton. For Warren Fellows, it was the beginning of twelve years of hell.

The Damage Done takes you behind the bars of a Bangkok prison. A place where sewer rats and cockroaches are the only nutritious food, where autocratic prison guards giggle as they deliver pulverising blows and where the worst punishment by far is the khun deo - solitary confinement, Thai style.




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Escape    
By David McMillan. 

Among the 600 foreigners jailed in the 'Bangkok Hilton', one man resolves to do what no other has done: Escape. This is the true story of drug smuggler David McMillan’s perilous break-out from Thailand’s most notorious prison. After more than a year in prison and two weeks before a near-certain death sentence, McMillan escapes, never to be seen in Thailand again.




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The Cocaine Diaries
By Jeff Farrell and Paul Keany.

'It won't happen to me. That's what I thought when I got on the plane to Venezuela. But it did - I got caught.'

Caught smuggling half a million euros' worth of cocaine, Paul Keany was sexually assaulted by Venezuelan anti-drugs officers before being sentenced to eight years in the notorious Los Teques prison outside Caracas. There he was plunged into a nightmarish world of coke-fuelled killings, gun battles, stabbings, extortion and forced hunger strikes until finally, just over two years into his sentence, he gained early parole and embarked on a daring escape from South America...




Click here for a free download of the first chapters of South of Normal!
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U.S. mother arrested and jailed for smuggling pot in Mexico, claims she was framed.

5/28/2013

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Last week, an Arizona mother of seven was detained in N, Mexico and thrown in jail, facing charges of smuggling marijuana.  Yanira Maldonado, 41, and her husband were taking a bus back from a funeral when stopped by military police outside of Hermosillo.  Everyone from the bus was herded into a small room and after a two-hour wait, the military came and told Gary Maldonado, her husband and also a US Citizen, that twelve pounds of marijuana had been found under his seat, but then they stated that the drugs were actually found under Yanira’s seat.  She was arrested and is being held in a jail in the border town of Nogeles.  

The family’s Mexican attorney arranged a $5,000 bribe for police and prison officials, but it was rejected, and Maldonado appeared before a judge today for the first time.  No verdict was issued as expected and she remains in custody, but witnesses continue to testify and the prosecutions case seems weak.  However, if the judge does not set her free she could be held for months until the trial.  

Gary and Yanira were in Mexico for an aunt’s funeral and riding a luxury bus liner that brought them from Phoenix because it seemed safer.  They claim they were the last ones on the bus and brought no luggage aboard, but placed their bags in the buses’ side compartment.  Gary wisely collected witness accounts on the scene after the military police arrested his wife.  The family claims they are being framed. 

Gary, now safely in the US, the Maldonado family, and even the office of state Senator Jeff Flake are closely monitoring the situation.
***

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I recently published an account of a year I lived in Costa Rica, where a friend and US citizen was arrested for allegedly growing marijuana.  He was thrown into a rough prison alongside murders, big-time drug dealers, and cocaine traffickers, the only US citizen in a prison of 1,600 rough Central American prisoners.  I had to visit him almost every weekend, bringing home food, money, books, clothing, and communications from his family, his attorney, and the embassy.  Eventually accepted a plea bargain instead of trusting justice in a corrupt, inept court system.  He was sentenced to 5.4 years and still remains in prison, more than 2 years later.  If you want to read a first-hand account of what life in a Central American prison is like, and the complexities to the police and judicial systems there, I suggest reading South of Normal.  

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The dude who invented Daylight Savings Time, and 30 others throughout history who were stoned.

3/10/2013

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That day has arrived, the highly anticipated moment that only comes twice a year and completely rocks your world.  No, I’m not talking about the two times a year you have sex, I’m talking about Daylight Savings Time.  

I’m not a big fan.  The morning of the time change we run around the house furiously, trying to set every clock back as if a giant comet will slam into the earth and wipe out humankind if we don’t get it all done by 8 a.m.  Just when we think we’ve adjusted every clock, watch, radio, and appliance timer in the house, we’re reminded that there’s the matter of the dashboard clock in the car to attend to.  That in itself takes 45 minutes, trying to cram the end of a paperclip into a microscopic opening while simultaneously pushing the correct buttons with the other hand, crossing us up and eliciting curses that aren’t appropriate for a Sunday morning.

I highly recommend leaving the clocks alone and just waiting six months until they move back one hour again, but that doesn’t seem to be a popular opinion.  

Instead, everyone complains about the hour of sleep they’re going to lose, so much so that they lose 2.3 hours just talking about it.  I have to admit, when someone cheerily tells me “Don’t forget to spring forward eight Sundays from now!” I want to slap them.  And if I hear another bad joke about how we lost an hour, I’m going to kick someone in their balls.  We did not lose an hour.  You can’t just “lose” an hour (other than by watching Burn Notice.)   And we don’t ever “get” an extra couple hours of daylight.  They’re all out there anyway, no matter if we set our clocks backward or forward or stand on our heads and speak in tongues. 

I understand it used to be a “sunlight thing,” but why didn’t people just wake up one hour earlier?  Wouldn’t that have been easier than all of this nonsense?  Imagine if aliens came down and examined our society from an objective, clinical viewpoint.  There would only be one conclusion they could come up with about the bizarre concept of Daylight Savings Time, before they got in their spaceship and went back to the planet Zerthion Phobius 9.2 and sent another flaming comet down to blow us up: whoever invented Daylight Savings Time was really, really high. 

You have to smoke something pretty strong to come up with: “Dude let’s just pretend that it’s an hour earlier, and we’ll tell everyone to change their clocks at exactly the same time, all over the world.  Yeah, that will work.  Now light that incense and roll up another one.”

A little internet digging reveals that a nice fella named George Vernon Hudson from New Zealand invented Daylight Savings time in 1895.  I’m telling you, Georgie was smoking the good shit.  He's #1 on our list.  DST was used on and off in Europe during times of war, but didn’t even become universal in the United States until the 1970’s, to help cut electricity usage during the energy crisis.  The 1970’s?  People talk about DST like it was some biblical mandate.   

This all led me to thinking, as it often does, who else throughout history probably smoked marijuana.   

Some of them seem obvious…

2. Whoever came up with the spelling for “Wednesday” was definitely hitting the pipe.  (I recommend we officially change it to “Humpday.”)

3. The astrologists who all of a sudden decided Pluto wasn’t a planet anymore were baked.  How are you a planet one day and then you’re just a 5,000 mile round ball of rocks the next day?  That’s like saying one day, “Sorry New Jersey, you’re not a state anymore.”  Well, bad example – that would actually make sense.  But you know what I mean.

4. Who else?  Albert Einstein?  What do you think?  Have you seen his hair?  He shagged Marilyn Monroe.  That dude could party.  

5. Mother Theresa probably hit the bong every once and a while – she was WAY too nice. 

6. Ben Franklin was as high as a kite.

7. Michael Jackson was an alien.

8. Whoever built the pyramids had to be smoking reefer.  In fact, the Egyptian Pharaohs did use marijuana for its health and transcendental benefits.  

9. Christopher Columbus carried cannabis sativa seeds on board his ships, and thus takes credit for introducing marijuana to the Americas.  No wonder why he sailed hecka slow and kept getting lost.

10. Queen Victoria’s private physician prescribed marijuana when she had bad menstrual cramps. 

11. Joan of Arc led the French army to victory over the British in the 15th century when she was only 19 years old, but then was accused of using “witch drugs” (including cannabis) and burned at the stake.  She probably fucked up the rotation.  Puff, puff, pass, Joan.     

12. They’ve found residue of cannabis on clay pipes unearthed from William Shakespeare’s garden in England, though he would claim “Doth thinketh it belongs to yee landscaper.”  

13. Jesus was a hippie, walking around the dessert with Birkenstocks and stinking of patchouli oil, never having any money or bringing enough food, but somehow still making do.  I saw him selling hash brownies at a Dave Matthews show in Colorado once – true story.

14. Buddha?  He sat around naked except for a loincloth with half-closed eyes as people brought him incense and snacks as offerings.  Yeah, that’s an easy one.

15. Michelangelo had to be stoned when he painted the ceiling of the Sixteen Chapels.  That’s a lot of manual labor. 

16. Thomas Jefferson grew marijuana.

17. So did George Washington.

18. Michael Phelps, who won more Olympic medals than anyone else in history, had the munchies so bad that Subway signed him as a spokesperson.  

19. Clinton tried it but couldn’t figure out the inhale thing correctly, 

20. Where Barrack Obama got it right.  

21. Not only did George Bush smoke weed, but Mr. “War on Drugs, God talks directly to me,” was a sloppy drunk and a big cokehead when he went to Yale. 

22. Al Gore invented marijuana.

23. The ancient Greeks gave marijuana to teenage boys to try and calm their sexual urges enough to sleep through the night 

Who else are some documented marijuana smokers throughout history?

24. Winston Churchill,
25. Walt Disney,
26. The Chinese emperors,
27. John F. Kennedy,
28-30. Mega-wealthy entrepreneurs Bill Gates, Ted Turner, and Sir Richard Branson.

That’s pretty good company.  Me, personally?  I can care less about smoking or not smoking these days, but I’m glad to see the U.S. is starting to get its head out of its ass and loosening up on a plant that’s been on earth as long as we human beings have.  

But either way, please, I’m begging you, someone get stoned enough to come up with a better idea than the Daylight Savings Time thing.  

Wait…what’s that?  What did you say?  Someone just reminded me cheerily to “remember to spring forward today, buddy, because we lost an hour.”  Please excuse me for a second – I have to go kick someone in the balls.  


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*****
To read more semi-funny writing by Norm I would recommend picking up his new book, South of Normal.  Click on the book cover to see more.

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    Norm Schriever

    Norm Schriever is a best-selling author, expat, cultural mad scientist, and enemy of the comfort zone. He travels the globe, telling the stories of the people he finds, and hopes to make the world a little bit better place with his words.   

    Norm is a professional blogger, digital marketer for smart brands around the world,  and writes for the Huffington Post, Hotels.com, and others.

    Check out South of Normal his Amazon.com best-selling book about life as an expat in Tamarindo, Costa Rica.

    Cambodia's School of Hope explores education and empowerment in impoverished Cambodia, with 100% of sales going to that school.

    The Book Marketing Bible provides 99 essential strategies for authors and marketers.

    Pushups in the Prayer Room, is a wild, irreverent memoir about a year backpacking around the world.  

    Follow Norm on Twitter @NormSchriever or email any time to say hi!

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