New Zealand is a long way from anywhere, and drug cartels have traditionally not bothered sending them much cocaine or heroin. So, Kiwis have had to improvise – and they discovered a love for meth, and random new chemicals no one’s ever heard of.
This was all getting very dangerous, with rising addiction and biker gangs fighting over territory. Then one man – a steam-punk glam-rock musician named Starboy – decided to try and end New Zealand’s drug war once and for all. And he almost managed it!
The War on Drugs has failed. Okay, but ending it is more complex than just letting people sell heroin to kids in supermarkets.We think about what a legal market might actually look like. We look at different classes of drugs, exploring exactly how legal, regulated markets for heroin, cocaine and MDMA can be structured in order to protect users from harm.
We examine the social implications of prohibition worldwide. Any attempt to shut down the trade in drugs such as heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine or weed invariably sets off a chain of events that just makes things worse, leaving a trail of death, illness, violence, slavery, addiction, crime and inequality across the globe.
Everyone loses – except, in a weird kind of way, the drugs themselves.
Over the past decade or so, South American cartels have found a new way to get their product into the vast European marketplace – West Africa.
The region’s porous borders, endemic poverty and weak law enforcement make it an easy target for international organised crime. But now drug use is spilling over into local markets, and the corruption inherent in the War on Drugs has begun to warp entire societies, leading to the emergence of Africa’s first real narco-states.
We examine the social implications of prohibition worldwide. Any attempt to shut down the trade in drugs such as heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine or weed invariably sets off a chain of events that just makes things worse, leaving a trail of death, illness, violence, slavery, addiction, crime and inequality across the globe. Everyone loses – except, in a weird kind of way, the drugs themselves.
Going on a shroom, DMT or acid trip may not sound like a conventional therapy session, but there’s a psychedelic revolution going on in the world of mental health treatment. Illegal drugs previously associated with hippies and raves are now being used to treat PTSD, depression, anxiety, addiction and obsessive disorders.
This is the story of how incredible new research is bringing the therapeutic benefits of magic mushrooms, LSD, MDMA and DMT to light – and how the War on Drugs has needlessly held this research back for 50 years.
We examine the social implications of prohibition worldwide. Any attempt to shut down the trade in drugs such as heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine or weed invariably sets off a chain of events that just makes things worse, leaving a trail of death, illness, violence, slavery, addiction, crime and inequality across the globe.
Everyone loses – except, in a weird kind of way, the drugs themselves.
Ana is a filmmaker who gets hooked on Crypto trading. Her husband and her father want her to go to therapy, but instead Ana decides in desperation and as a healing exercise to make a documentary about Bitcoin fever. With her enabling producer, a chaotic production crew of newly-converted crypto-speculators and an exasperated economist father who wants to protect his daughter from being bankrupted by a scam Bull Run takes us on a rollercoaster exploration of the world of Crypto Trading. With humour, honesty and insight, we meet the people and investigate the technology, diving head first into the culture of Crypto speculation. A world where normal citizens become pundits and every trade can make you rich or bankrupt you, and the line between investment and gambling is ever more blurred.
Millions of people worldwide are physically dependent on commonly prescribed psychiatric drugs. While these drugs can provide effective short-term relief, pharmaceutical companies have hidden -from both doctors and patients- their dangerous side effects, addictive nature and long-term harm.
Combining cinema verité and investigative journalism, Medicating Normal follows the stories of those whose lives have been torn apart by the very medications they believed would help them. Expert testimony and undercover footage reveal a systemically corrupt industry.
Medicating Normal is the untold story of the disastrous consequences that can occur when profit-driven medicine intersects with human beings in distress.
With the world fighting a deadly pandemic, another heartbreaking public health crisis is raging in North America. A new synthetic drug is killing more than gun crime, homicide and car accidents combined.
100 times stronger than heroin, the deadly opioid fentanyl is cheap, potent and small enough to send in the post. These market forces have seen it replacing the heroin supply, spreading unprecedented death, destruction and misery. And, like all epidemics, it is spreading fast.
The death toll has disproportionately affected the homeless and marginalised. And now, due to its strength and low cost, the drug is also starting to appear in party drugs, such as cocaine and cannabis – with fatal results.
We travel to Vancouver, the epicentre of the fentanyl epidemic to meet with health care workers, activists, fentanyl dealers and people who use it.
We learn of radical initiatives to fight back against a toxic drug supply and ask what the world should expect if the fentanyl epidemic spreads outside of North America.
Vancouver has been voted the best city in the world to live in but it has a dark secret – the downtown east side ghetto. With the roughest neighbourhood and the highest crime rate in North America living conditions here are on a par with third world countries, and homelessness and drug-addiction are rife. And yet provisions for those in need couldn’t be better.
Misha Kleider, in an effort to find out what is going wrong, goes under cover for a month in December leaving behind his apartment, his friends and his wallet to see first-hand what life on the streets is really like. Starting with nothing but his underwear he journeys through the institutions and services available to the homeless and makes some startling revelations along the way. The experience upsets any pre-conceived notions about how to “fix” the problem and what begins as a social experiment in the vein of Orwell’s’ Down and Out in Paris and London takes a darker turn as Misha connects with the real residents of the downtown east side ghetto; the crack addicts, the junkies, the dealers and the diseased. As Misha becomes more involved in this world, the film speeds towards a shocking finale that will leave you breathless and in awe.
Streets of Plenty is a fearless, fast paced and entertaining exploration of what it means to live on the streets of North America’s worst ghetto.
Dennis Rodman is on a mission. After forging an unlikely friendship with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, he wants to improve relations between North Korea and the US by staging a historic basketball game between the two countries. But the North Korean team isn’t the only opposition he’ll face… Condemned by the NBA and The Whitehouse, and hounded every step of the way by the press, can Dennis keep it together and make the game happen? Or will it go up in a mushroom cloud of smoke? For the first time, discover the true story of what happened when Dennis Rodman took a team of former-NBA players to North Korea and staged the most controversial game of basketball the world has never seen.
Not many thieves end up on Interpol’s most wanted list, but Mark Blaney did. After growing up in Manchester, he joined his brother Colin and the rest of their gang travelling around the north of England learning the skills of the shoplifting trade. After deciding to relocate to Amsterdam, they moved into the jewellery game, covering most of Western Europe stealing Rolexes, rings and cash from stores.
Sugar was once so valuable it was called “white gold.” For centuries, Britain’s sweet tooth drove the world economy and helped build its colonial empire—at the cost of millions of enslaved Africans forced to work on plantations in the West Indies and America. At the center of the trade was Bristol, where men like Edward Colston grew rich from investments.
Zing Tsjeng travels there to uncover the human cost behind our addiction to sugar and reveal the enduring legacy of colonial exploitation, from financial institutions to the food on our tables.
Around 500,000 people in California are addicted to methamphetamine. Out of a population of almost 40 million, that’s one in every 200 people. But this goes way beyond the US: Meth is raging across Mexico, the Philippines and South-East Asia too.
Meth is also one of the most misunderstood and unfairly stigmatized of all the illegal drugs. Here we pick apart crystal meth fact from fiction and discover how the War on Drugs has created a world on speed.
We examine the social implications of prohibition worldwide. Any attempt to shut down the trade in drugs such as heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine or weed invariably sets off a chain of events that just makes things worse, leaving a trail of death, illness, violence, slavery, addiction, crime and inequality across the globe.
Everyone loses – except, in a weird kind of way, the drugs themselves.
Any attempt to shut down the trade in drugs such as heroin,
cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine or weed invariably sets off a chain of events that just makes things worse, leaving a trail of death, illness, violence, slavery, addiction, crime and inequality across the globe. Everyone loses – except, in a weird kind of way, the drugs themselves.
Around 58,000 Americans were killed in the Vietnam War. But in 2017 alone, 70,237 Americans died of drug overdoses; the War on Drugs is like a Vietnam War every year.
This is the story of the North America Opioid Crisis – how an oversupply of the prescription drug oxycodone collided with fifty years of drug prohibition to create an epidemic every bit as serious as COVID-19.
This terrifying crisis reaches every corner of American life, far beyond the clichés of the ‘inner-city drug user’.