PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... chilling ... a century-long chronicle crammed with as much violence and mayhem as a Don Winslow border novel. It ditches drama as such and presents the war on drugs in all its grubby, often grisly, detail ... Written with a journalist’s eye and a historian’s perspective, The Dope...is comfortable telling precartel narco anecdotes that he uncovered in dusty archives, but he skims over some messy details of recent atrocities ... Smith makes a strong case that the awful escalation of violence is \'not so much in the DNA of trading in narcotics as in the DNA of prohibiting the trade.\'
