Book: The whole truth about the international drug business

Also popular in the 1980s was a special (and very Japanese) type of corporate blackmail called sokaya, in which the yakuza bought enough stock in a company to gain admission to the AGM. There, these people began to behave like complete assholes, yelling, not allowing anyone to insert a word, and press charges against management until they were agreed to pay. Some shouted "Banzai!" and "Long live the emperor!" - it is difficult to imagine a more ridiculous method of extortion.

William Wilberforce, a well-known nineteenth-century philanthropist who achieved the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and founded the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, as well as the state of Sierra Leone in West Africa, sat on heroin. Carl Sagan, an authoritative astronomer, author of more than sixty scientific works on space, a famous lover of marijuana. Steve Jobs described the acid trip as "one of the two or three most important things done in life." What about the father of modern psychoanalysis, Sigmund, his mother, Freud, who sniffed cocaine for tons? Not to mention Barack Obama, who in his youth was an ordinary cigarette butt, and then became the most powerful man in the whole world.

Usually, crimes are not committed simply because people are bad in themselves; they happen because people see the opportunity to get something (money, power, the pleasant feeling that arises when you suddenly take off your clothes in front of unsuspecting passers-by) and think that they will get nothing for it or that there is a risk justified by the expected reward.

At the same time, alcohol is one of the most dangerous drugs. Its short-term effects include a hellish hangover, vomiting, and the use of the phrase "pidaras" against the club guard.

How is it that because of a gram of cocaine you can be in handcuffs, and beer and cigarettes are sold in any stall?