Tag Archives: drugs

Streets of Plenty

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.

The Digital Drug Industry

Drugs have never been more marketed than they are now. The most recent European Drug Report refers to this as an “uberisation” of the drug market, with it now being easier to order a gram of cocaine than a pizza. But with this ease of access and glossy marketing has come a dark outcome; a sharp uptake in drug use in children, as young as 10. The world has been hit by a wave of deaths of children who have taken Class A drugs such as ecstasy, and many have been found to have bought those drugs on Instagram and Snapchat. Tir Dhondy investigates how easy it really is to pick up, and whether it’s possible to regulate this digital wild west.

GHB: The Deadly Party Drug

GHB can make you happy and horny with no comedown but a milliliter too much can put you in a coma or kill you. You may have heard about it as a chemsex or a date rape drug, the substance that leads to DJ Jackmaster’s career being canceled, or in headlines about overdoses all over Europe.

With a lack of reliable statistics and reporting, we investigate just how widespread this dangerous drug is. What we uncover is alarming: a hidden G epidemic has been spreading through raves and clubs across the continent, leaving a trail of death in its wake.

We travel to the party island Ibiza, visit Holland’s hardcore fanatics, and DJ Jackmaster speaks out for the first time since he was accused of sexually harassing festival staff while he was on the drug.

Mexico’s Cartels and the Dark Side of Medical Tourism

Medical tourism to Mexico from the US is huge, with an estimated three million inbound medical travellers in 2020 alone. Medication is cheaper in Mexico than the US, and you can buy most drugs without a prescription.

While most people are able to find the care they desperately need, some are also buying cheap unregulated medicine without knowing it’s fake. The ingredients can be completely unknown and in recent years, the DEA have seized counterfeit medication laced with the deadly opioid fentanyl.

The Prison Black Market

The UK prison system has a rich and thriving black market, with its own micro-economy based on tinned fish. Drugs, food, iPhones, and games consoles are everywhere – if you know where to look (and who to ask). We speak to former prisoner and filmmaker Chris Atkins, author of ‘Time After Time’ and ‘A Bit of a Stretch’, about how prisoners get contraband and chicken stew inside their cells.

The Rise of Contaminated Weed

Banks (not his real name) earns tens of thousands of euros every month distributing weed to dealers in a small town in central Germany. But he wants to stop, because he says his product has become poison.

The weed he sells is so laced with synthetic cannabinoids that it has become a new drug entirely: something extremely potent, addictive – and possibly lethal.

The Most Expensive Rehab in the World

Paracelsus in Switzerland is the most expensive rehab in the world, serving a clientele of royalty, politicians, oligarchs, business tycoons and A-list celebrities. Forget the £20,000-a-month celebrities spend at The Priory in Surrey, or the £41,700 they shell out for 45 days at the Meadows in Arizona – a five-week residential rehab here costs a whopping £315,000 – about ten times the average UK annual salary.

Staying at a lakeside villa in Zurich with 24/7 limousine transportation, a personal chef, a butler and a concierge, clients have access to a five-star hotel spa and a live-in therapist (who sleeps in the spare room). Activities include tennis, yoga, martial arts, weightlifting, massage and more.

Writer and model Sydney Lima see if it could help her kick her partying lifestyle. But while she was there, she uncovered a strange, unexpected world.

The Psychedelic Boom

The UK is experiencing a psychedelic renaissance. Young people in England and Wales are taking three times more LSD than they did five years ago, scientists at top universities are claiming hallucinogens can revolutionise how we treat mental illness and the use of magic mushrooms has been increasing by around 40 percent year on year.

Music festivals are awash with recreational trippers, but we also see how psychedelics have become a new health craze by attending a shamanic magic mushroom ceremony in which 50 people trip out in a London warehouse. Despite studies showing that psychedelics are some of the safest drugs you can take, we meet one person who spilled a bottle of acid on himself and never stopped hallucinating.

What is making this new generation of drug takers so interested in self-transformation? And as the self-help trend grows, what happens when thousands of people start trying to solve their mental health problems themselves by taking powerful hallucinogens in unregulated settings?

The Truth About Crystal Meth

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.

How America Got Hooked on Opioids

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’.

The 12-Year-Olds Drug Dealers

For the past decade, the UK has been horrified by the phenomenon of County Lines – big city criminal groups using kids as young as 12 to take over the drug supply of smaller towns and villages.

It’s taken years for the police to even begin to understand that many of these children are groomed and exploited, rather than just arresting them as dealers. We show how county lines are a direct product of the War on Drugs itself.

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.