Howard Marks - Meeting Mr Nice - Redux

00:00:00 Opening highlights

Howard Marks: You cross that border and it’s like a sort of religious flash, or a non-sexual orgasm or something. It’s just a wonderful feeling when you get through. It’s never been matched by anything else, ever. I found cannabis smuggling more addictive than any other activity I’d ever done.

Howard Marks: I never lost any sleep at night thinking I was doing something that was morally wrong. I have always felt that the law against cannabis use is rather sinister and evil. So I felt, in some naive, idealistic way, that I was actually doing good.

News report: After more than two years of undercover work, it’s culminated in a series of arrests and the smashing of what’s being called one of the world’s biggest drugs rings.

Howard Marks: I think the getting caught bit was an important part of my being happy now. Really, it was probably the best thing that happened to me.

Howard Marks: To be reminded every day that there’s a death row, that that building is a death row, of course is ominous. You’ve got to think about it. I was definitely a much better person than the one who went in, and probably a better person than I am now.

Brian Rose: Since then, have you ever thought about going back to the life?

Howard Marks: Oh, several times. Several times. The first time was as soon as I got out, because I thought, well, tactically that’s the best. That’s the last thing they’re going to expect.

James Thompson: Jesus, Howard, you are crazy.

00:02:03 London Real Academy promo and sponsor

[London Real promo removed]

00:02:54 Brian’s redux introduction

Brian Rose: When I first moved to London in 1997, one of the first books I read was Mr Nice. This was the story of a man in Britain who became the world’s most famous and most accomplished cannabis smuggler. I never thought that one day I would get to sit down in my studio and speak to him for over two hours. I got the chance to do so about two years ago, alongside MMA fighter James “The Colossus” Thompson, and it was a really special day and a special time for me and for London Real.

Brian Rose: I really wanted to have Howard back on the show, but as many of you know, he’s been diagnosed with inoperable cancer, and so we don’t have much time left with Howard. So I wanted to re-edit this show so you could see all of Howard at once, and re-release it as a redux episode, because Howard means so much to me. He means so much to people all over the world for the crusading work he did with cannabis. Alongside that, he’s got the most incredible stories in the world. He has the most incredible personality and such a warm vibe about him that I just know you’re going to love this.

Brian Rose: This is our tribute back to you, Howard, for everything you’ve done for everyone in the world, and for the work you’ve done heightening awareness of the really ridiculous drug laws that we have, and how all of that needs to be reviewed and really thought about. So for you, Howard, for everything you’ve done for the world, we give you this, the redux episode we shot two years ago. If you don’t know much about Howard Marks, you’re going to get to know him very well over the next two hours. Thank you so much, and enjoy.

00:05:07 Welcome, Howard Marks

Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. With me today is Mr James “The Colossus” Thompson, who is a heavyweight mixed martial arts fighter who has appeared in Cage Rage, Elite Xtreme Combat and the Pride Fighting Championships, and who is definitely not Mr Nice in the cage.

James Thompson: I like what you did there, Brian.

Brian Rose: We’ve been working on that for a while, man. And our guest today is Mr Howard Marks, a Welsh author and former international cannabis smuggler who moved consignments as large as 30 tons, avoided the grasp of international law enforcement for two decades, and was connected with groups such as the CIA, the IRA, MI6, the Mafia, maybe the Yakuza.

Howard Marks: Yes.

Brian Rose: You were eventually caught by the DEA in 1988 and handed a 25-year sentence in a federal penitentiary, but you were released in April 1995 after serving only seven years.

Howard Marks: That’s absolutely correct, Brian.

Brian Rose: Howard, welcome to the show.

Howard Marks: Thanks very much. It’s good to be here.

Brian Rose: It’s a real pleasure having you. I think in some ways you’re the quintessential London Real guest.

Howard Marks: Thank you. I don’t know exactly what that means.

Brian Rose: I was wondering myself, but it’s a good thing.

James Thompson: It’s a compliment. Definitely.

00:06:40 Writing Mr Nice and why we love a rebel

Brian Rose: Howard, I moved to Britain in 1997 as an American, and I went to work in the City in finance. One of my first introductions to British culture was reading your book, Mr Nice, and I just assumed that everyone was like you.

Howard Marks: Of course, you must be very relieved to find that soon changed.

Brian Rose: It was such a wonderfully written book. I don’t know if it was a lack of ego or your storytelling, but it really hit home for me and I loved it. Could you tell us about the book? And why do you think that as a society we love the rebel, the Robin Hood type, the John Dillingers or the Howard Markses, who seem to flaunt the law with some kind of higher purpose or greater good?

Howard Marks: I think its success was largely due to my having entirely the wrong target audience in mind when I wrote it. I wrote it for fellow geriatrics, really, to give them a sense of nostalgia or try to inject some glamour into their lives. None of those bought it at all, but the kids did. So when you mention the lack of ego, that was really just due to thinking I was writing for another group of people.

Brian Rose: How old were you when you wrote that book?

Howard Marks: I wrote it after I came out of prison, so in my early 50s.

Brian Rose: And you thought it was just an ode to the good life of the past?

Howard Marks: Yes, I did. I never thought it would be picked up by the younger generation, which it was.

Brian Rose: And you became a folk hero, a symbol of a new generation.

Howard Marks: Something like that. I think its success was obviously largely due to the amount of cannabis smoking that was going on here, which I didn’t know about. I’d been banged up in prison in the States and had no idea how popular it was. In my early days, cannabis smoking was pretty much the privilege of middle-class academics in universities. The postman wasn’t smoking it, the plumber wasn’t smoking it. But when I came out of prison, everyone seemed to be smoking it.

Brian Rose: These days, especially with medical marijuana in California, everyone seems to be smoking it. But you were introduced to it at Oxford. Is that right?

Howard Marks: Yes, that’s right. As I say, it was deemed some kind of intellectual, academic experiment with oneself. And of course everything was imported then, rather than grown in the backyard or in various clandestine places. So that’s changed a lot, but I wasn’t aware of that change.

James Thompson: There’s so much to importing it, whereas getting a room and setting it up yourself, with the cost, it just seems easier. Is that what usually happens now?

Howard Marks: Yes. Roughly half of the cannabis consumed in Britain is grown in Britain, which of course makes it very difficult for the authorities to legalise it. If it was all imported, they could slap an importation tax on it. Now it’s going to be very difficult. People don’t pay tax on growing cabbages.

James Thompson: I suppose it’s almost like distilleries.

Howard Marks: That’s right, it’s exactly the same. It’s like the post-Prohibition thing in the States.

00:10:24 Legalisation, the war on drugs and the smuggling game

Brian Rose: You mentioned that even when you were dealing and smuggling in the 60s and 70s, you assumed it would be legalised at some point.

Howard Marks: Yes. And I’m still of that frame of mind, that it’s just about to be legalised. I’ve felt that for about 50 years now, so by inductive logic I’m obviously not worth listening to. But I still feel that.

Brian Rose: Do you see the progress they’re making in the States? We just had Colorado and Washington legalise it for non-medical uses. There’s still the overshadow of the federal government and what they’re going to do, but is that progress in your mind?

Howard Marks: Oh yes, very much so, and from the most unlikely place. I thought America would be the last country to pioneer decriminalisation or legalisation, particularly for recreational purposes. With medical marijuana you can see that it’s bound to get through sometime. If there’s something around which can cure you, then doctors who have taken the Hippocratic oath are almost ethically bound to try to make it legal.

Brian Rose: You thought the States would be the last place because it has such a Puritan streak. You were caught up in the Reagan era of “Just Say No”. You could even argue that your arrest and conviction were based on this gung-ho president and the war on drugs.

Howard Marks: Yes. They didn’t have to think about whether or not to arrest and charge me. I was an obvious candidate.

Brian Rose: So in a way it was more of a political decision than a legal decision. Did you ever consider yourself a political prisoner when you were in the federal pen?

Howard Marks: No. I did it for the money. I can’t pretend I was doing it for any other reason. I was foolish enough not to have studied American law, so I didn’t know whether I was breaking it or not, because there are so many all-embracing laws in America, like racketeering or continuing criminal enterprise, which we’re not familiar with over here. But I can’t say I didn’t know. I did know I could make a lot of money by doing it. So I just regard myself as having lost at the game that I decided to play. I don’t think it’s a case for sympathy or tragedy at all.

Brian Rose: If you’d had more legal insight, would you have done things differently in America?

Howard Marks: Yes.

Brian Rose: And then you probably would have continued longer. Maybe never got caught. What would you have done differently?

Howard Marks: Well, for example, my ex-wife was arrested as well, purely because she answered the phone at home. A couple of people would ring and she’d say, “No, he’s in Hong Kong for a week,” or something. By American law, that’s conspiracy, because she was aware that she was assisting someone who was reasonably expected to be a dope dealer to find her husband, who was a dope dealer. So she got arrested and extradited for those sorts of reasons. Obviously I would have set things up so she would never have had to answer the phone. There’s a list of things like that. It wouldn’t have taken long to read a bit of American law. I was just very stupid.

Brian Rose: You were always one step ahead of the authorities. It’s been said that you even had better technology than they did at that time.

Howard Marks: We did. That’s the big difference between then and now. In those days we had more money to spend than the authorities did. We had faster cars, better communication devices, faster boats. Now the gap in technology between law enforcement and those breaking the law is massive, particularly when you think of mobiles and computers and all the data collection they have. So it would necessarily be a very different business now. It probably requires the same sort of characters to do it, but it’s definitely a shifting goalpost.

James Thompson: Did you have a legal team and an accounting team, people you kept close who would advise you what to do and not to do? Or was that all in your head?

Howard Marks: It wasn’t that sort of setup at all. I did have an accountants’ firm, but I’d be careful to ensure that only legitimate money, or apparently legitimate money, would be handled by them.

Brian Rose: And you had your legitimate phases. You ran a wine importation business out of Palma.

Howard Marks: Yes. I ran loads of things, everything from massage parlours in Bangkok to bars in Spain. But they all lost money. That was my way of paying tax, I suppose.

Brian Rose: When you did that legitimate stint in Palma, what brought you back in? Was it the juice, the adrenaline, the fun?

Howard Marks: Yes, all of that. I found cannabis smuggling more addictive than any other activity I’d ever done.

James Thompson: You described it as a game.

Howard Marks: Yes, it is a game.

James Thompson: It’s obviously the money, but it’s also getting one over on them. And especially because it’s cannabis, it’s not harming people. You’re actually doing some benefit.

Howard Marks: Yes. I never lost any sleep at night thinking I was doing something that was morally wrong. I have always felt that the law against cannabis use is rather sinister and evil. So I felt, in some naive, idealistic way, that I was actually doing good.

James Thompson: Did that keep you going when it got hard? “I am doing the better thing. I am Robin Hood.”

Howard Marks: Not Robin Hood, because I’ve never robbed the rich.

James Thompson: Fair enough. So who would you equate yourself with in those hard times?

Howard Marks: This has never been asked of me before. The first ever person to be called an outlaw was a British outlaw called Hereward the Wake. Hereward is obviously the same name as Howard, really, and there’s the idea of waking people up. So I would say more like Hereward the Wake than Robin Hood.

James Thompson: And what was Hereward known for?

Howard Marks: Being an outlaw, but not so much breaking the law as being almost a dropout, living outside the law, which is what the word really means. “I won’t take anything from you, but don’t expect anything from me.” Not being encompassed by the system.

00:17:41 From Oxford physics to dope dealer

Brian Rose: I was watching your movie the other night. I know it’s a movie and not exactly your life, but it portrays you. You graduated from Oxford with a physics degree, and it seemed like you tried to go straight. You stopped smoking cannabis, you moved to London, you started teaching. So something in your mind must have said, “Now it’s time to get serious.”

Howard Marks: Yes. I had a conventional career in mind, which was to be an academic, a lecturer or a teacher or a research fellow, and I was reluctant to let that go. But at the same time, the amount of time I was spending on cannabis dealing and cannabis smuggling was increasing. It was so gradual there wasn’t one moment, but certainly by the time I was 25, looking back, I had abandoned the halls of academia and become a dope dealer.

Brian Rose: The movie shows that first deal. Rhys Ifans portrayed you, and we all know he’s a great actor, and it was fantastic watching him being you. I think you drove a car from Germany or Switzerland loaded with hash all the way to the UK. Kids these days forget that there used to be all these individual borders.

Howard Marks: That’s right.

Brian Rose: So you have a potential adrenaline rush, a frightening moment, at every country you go through.

Howard Marks: That’s right. The rewards were much greater in those days.

Brian Rose: And then you have to take the boat across and go through UK customs as well. How did that feel? In the movie you looked very cool doing it.

Howard Marks: Well, it was wonderfully exciting, and of course scary. You think, God, what’s going to happen? Anything can happen. I might never go home again. I might be gone for 20 years. All that fear comes in, and then you almost submit to it. “Okay, I’m going for it. If it happens, it happens. Let’s go, let’s give it all I’ve got.” And then when you cross that border, as I’ve said several times, it’s like a sort of religious flash, or a non-sexual orgasm or something. It’s just a wonderful feeling when you get through. It’s never been matched by anything else, ever.

James Thompson: It’s almost like gambling, except you’re gambling with your life.

Howard Marks: Well, that is what it is, isn’t it?

James Thompson: So I can imagine the relief. Not only is your life okay, but you’ve got X amount in the back of the car, you’ve got lots of money as well. And then you do it again at the next border and the next. You must have been exhausted by the time you got home.

Howard Marks: Yes. The final border is of course the crowning border.

James Thompson: How many borders would you pass?

Howard Marks: One run could have up to three or four.

James Thompson: Oh Jesus. I’d be able to do maybe one, but by the third… And not only do you have to roll through, you have to be composed. Was there any way you used to talk to yourself, or would you try to become someone else, in order to be cool with the customs officials?

Howard Marks: There was no script in my mind or anything like that, just the obvious things. You mustn’t look nervous, you’ve got to look relaxed. Although you can look nervous sometimes. It’s odd. In the 60s, sometimes the best disguise would be a squalid hippie who’s obviously a smoker and not very rich.

James Thompson: So they’d let him through, because he might have a small possession but he’s not smuggling.

Howard Marks: Yes. So it would change. I’d want to not conform to the profile they had of what a smuggler is, but that would vary, both from their side and in my interpretation of it.

James Thompson: The more you think about it, I would imagine the worse it gets.

Howard Marks: You know what it’s like when you start thinking of double bluffs and treble bluffs. It’s the similarity with gambling, isn’t it?

00:22:00 Pakistan, temple balls and his preferred joint

James Thompson: There’s a part in the book where you go deep into Pakistan, I think to pick up some hash. Is that right?

Howard Marks: It was more to test the quality of the hash. There was a significant investment, one or two million dollars, by my Californian partners, and Pakistan is obviously very careful who they let into a hash factory or something like that. So my job was just to ensure the quality. And the Californian lads were very politically minded. America was heavily against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, so I had to ensure that each block would be stamped with something like “Smoke Russia away” or “Crumble the Kremlin”. So I had to make sure the stamp was right and the quality was right.

James Thompson: And this was the early 80s that you ventured in?

Howard Marks: This was the mid-80s.

James Thompson: Did you dress up and try to look like a local?

Howard Marks: Oh yes. I even had a Pakistani passport as well. Of course, dressing up to look like a local doesn’t require a great deal of make-up. You just put something over your head and something over your body, and sit in the back being very, very quiet, with everything crossed.

James Thompson: Have you ever tried the THC wax rather than the hash? I think they do call it wax. It’s almost pure THC.

Howard Marks: Yes, it’s what they also call scuff or something like that. You sort of scrape it off the plant when it’s alive. Traditionally that’s the way they always used to do it in countries like Nepal and Kashmir, where kids would run through the fields wearing hessian cloths, so the stuff would rub off onto that. Then they would take it off with a knife and either roll it like that to make what they call a temple stick, or like that to make what they call a temple ball.

James Thompson: God, that’s mental.

Brian Rose: What is your preferred method of consuming cannabis?

Howard Marks: A traditional 1960s joint with lots of tobacco, actually, is my preferred method.

Brian Rose: Which is pretty much the first one you smoked at Oxford.

Howard Marks: Yes, it was. I think very often the first hit you have of anything remains the best.

Brian Rose: Will you ever stop smoking, or does that thought ever enter your head?

Howard Marks: It does enter my head. I get bronchitis once a year, and it always enters my head then, and it usually doesn’t dissipate unless I give up smoking for a week or two. In American prison I gave it up for five years, so I don’t feel that worried about it. If a doctor says, “Look, you’d better stop,” I can stop. I know there are other ways of getting the same high, by eating it or anything like that.

Brian Rose: Are you a fan of eating it or drinking it? In California there are so many things, popsicles and so on.

Howard Marks: About a hundred different ways: lotions, electronic cigarettes now. I’ve got one of those, a vaporiser, a portable one. I’ve experimented with all that and I like them all, really. I don’t think there’s any way of ingesting it I don’t like. But to answer the question, the preferred way is a traditional UK joint.

James Thompson: How much does it take you to get stoned now? Have you built up some kind of tolerance?

Howard Marks: No, I get stoned on the first joint of the day.

James Thompson: And then you kind of stay at that level?

Howard Marks: Well, I can get more stoned. It’s not as if I’ve got any immunity to it, but I suppose I have a tremendous familiarity with the state, so I can function. You can’t always tell I’m stoned.

00:26:27 43 identities, Mr Nice and the size of the operation

Brian Rose: You mentioned you had a Pakistani passport. For people who haven’t read your book, and I don’t know how much certain Americans know about you, could you give us a sense of scale? How many passports did you have? I mentioned shipments as big as 30 tons, but what kind of money was involved, and what was the scale of your operation before it all changed in ’88?

Howard Marks: Well, as regards passports, I tried to list them all when I wrote my autobiography, and I could remember 43 different identities, most of which would have been backed up with a passport. That might not be the total. It was at least 43, but it wouldn’t be significantly more, I’m sure.

Brian Rose: From what I remember, the title of the book came about because you were tired of borrowing other people’s identities and you wanted to take a guy who wasn’t going to leave the UK, whose identity you could assume. And that is Mr Nice?

Howard Marks: Yes. He’d been released from prison, and we had a common friend, someone who knew both of us. He’d been convicted of murder and released after about 12 years, which is fairly normal over here, and had no intention of going abroad, because he didn’t like the beer abroad. A simple soul. He was very happy to let me use his identity. And of course, if the guy is still around, you can back it up with membership of a snooker hall, and keep updating it. His name was Donald Nice, as you say. It’s a lovely name, and it was lovely checking into hotels in Pakistan and saying, “Mr Nice.”

Brian Rose: I get the feeling that’s the part you loved most about it, the check-ins. Or hearing the deal had made it through?

Howard Marks: Yes. All that is good, obviously. Hearing of success at the other end of the world is fulfilling too.

Brian Rose: And how big was your empire at one point? What kind of numbers are we talking?

Howard Marks: Well, it’s been grossly exaggerated. Law enforcement tends to have its own idea of what a criminal organisation is. There was no organisation. It was a bunch of loosely knit people who occasionally came together for a deal, then split off and did another deal with other people, and came back together again. When the DEA say that there were either 300 or 600 people working for me, it’s just not true. I wouldn’t have minded if it was true. The DEA also said I was the biggest dope dealer the world has ever known. That was certainly what I was trying to be, but they nevertheless exaggerated it all. They even called it the Marks organisation, and there wasn’t that sort of organisation at all.

Brian Rose: Is that the kind of language they use to help process a case?

Howard Marks: It’s a framework that they try to fit all their evidence into, which I suppose is fair enough.

Brian Rose: And they’re probably talking about hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of product, or billions?

Howard Marks: Yes. They do the usual thing of using the street value, all the tricks of the trade as it were, to try to increase the chances of getting a heavy sentence.

James Thompson: Has there ever been a drug smuggler who stuck with a single product? Because with cannabis you might have been one of the largest, but so many of the cartels diversified into cocaine and so on.

Howard Marks: Yes. There was a guy by the name of Donald Steinberg who, during the early 80s, smuggled enormous quantities of marijuana and only marijuana. His life is documented in a book called The Underground Empire, which focuses on him for about a third of it. At any one time he’d have three ships, with several tens of tons on them, heading towards the American coast. He would count the money in terms of Samsonites. He’d know that a Samsonite full of hundreds was half a million dollars, so he’d just count the Samsonites. “Yeah, that looks about right.” He was massive, and certainly the biggest marijuana dealer there’s ever been, but he stuck to his product.

James Thompson: What happened to him?

Howard Marks: He got arrested, and it was at the time that the American justice system decided that the best way of dealing with gangs of various kinds was to go for the leader and get him to roll over on everyone else, rather than the traditional way of saying, “Who’s your boss? Who’s working for you? Snitch on all of them and we’ll give you a new identity.”

Brian Rose: Start from the top down.

Brian Rose: Do you think that once you get to a certain level of making money, of being good at what you do, you’re always going to get caught? That once they’ve decided you’re known and they’re going to come for you, at some point you are going to get caught?

Howard Marks: I don’t think it’s inevitable, because obviously some people will die before that happens. But that’s about the only way of getting out of it. There’s no little trap door. They’re always prepared to crank it up again, as I would be if I thought I could definitely get away with something.

Brian Rose: That’s one of my questions. You got out of the federal penitentiary in 95, and I do want to ask you about that in a little bit. But since then, have you ever thought about going back to the life?

Howard Marks: Oh, several times. Several times. The first time was as soon as I got out, because I thought, well, tactically that’s the best. That’s the last thing they’re going to expect.

James Thompson: Jesus, Howard, you are crazy.

Howard Marks: But I didn’t. I tried, I started, but of course so much had changed that I couldn’t get any partners or anything like that. It was hopeless. But yes, I think of it. I still think of smuggling ways. But I’ve always come to the conclusion, before it’s too late, that I probably wouldn’t get away with it.

Brian Rose: Because they’re watching you, or because people are worried about being associated with you?

Howard Marks: Both, really. I occasionally come under surveillance now, probably for about two or three days every few months.

Brian Rose: I find that hard to believe, that they’re still surveilling you.

Howard Marks: But they would look so silly if I got away with it.

Brian Rose: And “they” is the UK government, or in conjunction with…?

Howard Marks: More the American government, actually. The UK government almost gave up. “Better the devil we know than the devil we don’t. He’s not a bad guy really. Let’s keep him out.”

00:34:11 MI6, the IRA and the Old Bailey acquittal

Brian Rose: So you don’t have enemies in the UK government as much?

Howard Marks: In MI6 I do, yes. The Secret Intelligence Service. The guy who recruited me, I’ve heard, really doesn’t like me at all.

Brian Rose: And he was a friend of yours at Oxford, right? A lot of people have seen the latest James Bond movie and think of MI6 as the building on the Thames. Could you describe what MI6 was when you were recruited?

Howard Marks: Yes, indeed. Officially it didn’t exist. There was certainly no building or headquarters on the Thames. It officially just didn’t exist, and it always used to amuse us over here that in America, outside Washington, there’d be a big road sign saying “CIA”. There was an idea that there was a British secret service, but understandably it couldn’t officially exist, otherwise it wouldn’t be a secret service.

Brian Rose: But it’s the same firm as James Bond?

Howard Marks: Well, MI6 stands for Military Intelligence 6, and MI5 stands for Military Intelligence 5. MI5 looks after foreign spies that come here, to ensure there aren’t Russian spies, or whoever our enemy is these days, lurking around doing stuff. MI6 was a more proactive thing, where agents would go out to foreign countries. And of course James Bond was one of those, and I was another one. But I didn’t have a licence to kill. I just saw myself as having a licence to deal, really.

James Thompson: So does that mean there’s an MI12?

Howard Marks: No. I don’t know why they started with those numbers.

Brian Rose: Did they recruit you because you were smuggling, or because they knew you from Oxford and knew you were a smart guy?

Howard Marks: Both, really. Someone they recruited while we were at Oxford was a friend of mine, so they had a reference: “Yes, he’s all right, he’s solid.” And they had their own information: “God, he’s smuggling dope with the IRA. He might be useful.” Because at that time the IRA was a problem.

Brian Rose: Can you tell us about your involvement with the IRA, or how that worked?

Howard Marks: Yes, I can. I met a guy by the name of Jim McCann, who’d recently escaped from Crumlin Road Prison in Belfast. It was the first escape from there since the Second World War. This was in 1970 or the very early 70s. He said he was the chief intelligence officer of the Belfast brigade of the IRA, and I believed him. As far as I was concerned, he was an IRA member. But it has to be said that he’s the only person in history about whom the IRA decided they had to say, “He’s not one of us.” So the IRA say he’s not, he says he was. The safest thing for me to do is to take the IRA’s word for it that he wasn’t.

James Thompson: I remember from reading your book that you didn’t go looking for him to be part of the IRA, and you don’t really know whether he was or wasn’t. But because he says he is, or he’s known to be linked, you get tied in with dealing with the IRA.

Howard Marks: That’s correct. But at that time, in the late 60s, sympathy with the Catholic minority of Northern Ireland was pretty much part of everyone’s left-wing agenda. In 1969, for example, the British Army was sent into Northern Ireland to defend the Catholics, basically on the IRA side. So there was a lot of sympathy for the Catholic minority. Also, Jim was very happy to do interviews with underground and left-wing newspapers, so everyone knew of Jim McCann. He was a sort of Fidel Castro of Northern Europe, if you like, with that kind of image.

Howard Marks: An editor of an underground magazine was a friend of mine and had interviewed Jim McCann. So all I knew was that there was this guy who could smuggle loads of arms into Ireland, on the side of someone that all of us lefties supported and believed in. I had no problem thinking it would be better if he smuggled in dope rather than guns. That seemed okay for everyone concerned, as far as I could see. So I went ahead. I didn’t have ethical problems with it.

James Thompson: Did it help that they were on the left and you sympathised with the left?

Howard Marks: Oh yes, completely.

James Thompson: That eased your conscience into it.

Howard Marks: Yes, absolutely. Because they hadn’t started killing kids and risking the lives of children visiting the Tower of London or something. They were more freedom fighters than terrorists then. I know the distinction can easily be blurred, but they came across to all of us in London then as freedom fighters.

Brian Rose: Was that a revolutionary idea, to think, “I can smuggle dope through these arms connections”? Did you just come up with that while smoking?

Howard Marks: Yes.

Brian Rose: Because in retrospect it’s obvious, but at the time it doesn’t seem like anyone would have come up with it.

Howard Marks: As far as I know I was the first, but other people might well have thought about it. They could get things into a Northern European airport. I had the connections to get things into Ireland. So it was a massive opportunity.

Brian Rose: It was an easy question. And how did that relationship work out over the years? Was it a net gain for everyone, or were there downsides?

Howard Marks: There were downsides, but it was a net gain for sure. We did a tremendous number of consignments, all of which got through. But one got busted after it got through, and Jim McCann got charged with it. He got acquitted by saying he was infiltrating MI6 through me, and of course I later used the same defence, saying I was infiltrating the IRA on behalf of MI6. We both got acquitted, which is absurd.

James Thompson: How many times can you use that get-out-of-jail-free MI6 card? You said you were in it for nine months, technically, but you used that card for 15 years. How could you keep using it?

Howard Marks: Because it didn’t officially exist. It’s meant to be secret.

James Thompson: You could just use that once you’re up there.

Howard Marks: I never even signed the Official Secrets Act. I was having a pint in the pub, talking about it and giving some information here and there. When I skipped bail, they did a severe investigation into it, and the lawyer for MI6 admitted, “Yes, he was an agent for us.”

James Thompson: All he had to say was “No, he wasn’t.”

Howard Marks: He could have done.

James Thompson: But that put doubt in the jury’s mind.

Howard Marks: Well, it convinced the jury.

James Thompson: Because that’s all it is, isn’t it? Convincing people. And you were an agent, just more exaggerated. How are they going to know where the exaggeration is?

Howard Marks: That’s right. During my trial the prosecution was trying to say, “No, he wasn’t a member of MI6. He wasn’t. He wasn’t.” And then they finally conceded: “All right, he was.”

James Thompson: God, that must have been amazing when it got knocked out.

Howard Marks: That was wonderful.

Brian Rose: This is when you were acquitted in London?

Howard Marks: That’s right, at the Old Bailey in London. That was 1981.

Brian Rose: And you probably became much more well known.

Howard Marks: Yes, that had a lot of publicity. And I of course took it as a direct message from God to carry on smuggling.

James Thompson: The big man upstairs. “Look how it’s going.”

00:43:37 Jim McCann, Malik and the question of grassing

Brian Rose: Out of all the characters from the book, good and bad, like Jim McCann, who really stands out for you?

Howard Marks: Well, Jim, of course. He’s the most extraordinary character I’ve ever met, I think. People who know us both say that’s the one character I got unreservedly right in the book. I think that must indicate how fascinated I was with him, that I could get across what he was really like.

Brian Rose: How did the movie do for him?

Howard Marks: It increased that, in fact. I think David Thewlis played him very, very well. He almost stole every scene he was in.

Brian Rose: Do you stay in touch with him? What happened to him?

Howard Marks: I have been in touch with him since I left prison. I’ve seen him about two or three times, but not for about six or seven years now. I haven’t seen him since the film came out, for example. But our children are friends with each other. They’ve got better things to do than talk about their dads, but there is a contact. I occasionally see a photograph of him with his kids.

James Thompson: I thought he died. Something about a tank. I’m way off here.

Howard Marks: No, he’s definitely still alive. He’s about 73 now. He was photographed by a newspaper quite recently, within the last six months or so. He lives in Holland and spends a lot of time in Russia. He doesn’t come to Britain.

James Thompson: Is there any danger in associating with any of your former associates? Do you have to be careful about appearances?

Howard Marks: Generally, no. I would never worry about meeting Jim. Perhaps I would be foolish not to, but I wouldn’t. I see Malik, who was my Pakistani contact, almost every year. I go and visit him in Pakistan. It’s a friendship based on business, but we’re not planning deals. He’s 91 or something like that. We’re friends. He’s godfather to my son, and that carries on.

Brian Rose: He was one of the few people who didn’t testify against you. Is that right? Because you had a few people who did.

Howard Marks: Almost everyone else was prepared to.

Brian Rose: In the movie that scene was quite famous, because he refused to. Did he do time on the back of that? And have you had any relations with the people who did testify against you? Do you hold any ill will against them?

Howard Marks: There are a few questions there. We’ll do the Pakistani first. As soon as I was sentenced, when it was all over and there wasn’t going to be a trial because I was pleading guilty, at that point he at least played the game of “I’ll cooperate with the authorities”. But I’d got 25 years, so what could they do against me?

Brian Rose: So you had already made your deal.

Howard Marks: Yes. He did cooperate with the authorities after that, but nothing concerning me, and it was quickly discovered that he wasn’t really cooperating with the authorities but playing both sides for his own financial gain. So he got arrested again, extradited again, did some sort of deal and got out again.

Brian Rose: Did he do time in the States?

Howard Marks: Not really. He spent some time in prison, but it was more of a remand situation. He never got convicted of anything.

Brian Rose: And you said pretty much everyone else testified against you.

Howard Marks: Well, not everyone. It would be very wrong to say that, because there were a few very staunch people who didn’t, and I’d like to say thank you to them. As regards my attitude to the people who did, one was my brother-in-law, for example. I don’t think one can start blaming other people for being what they are. I misjudged him. I can only blame my inability to judge. He is what he is, and it was up to me to work out what he is. If I don’t work out what he is, I’m taking the chance. So I don’t think, “Oh, that dirty, filthy rat, I’m going to do him one day.” Not at all.

Brian Rose: Did you think that at the time?

Howard Marks: Perhaps a bit, yes, before I analysed it myself. And I think that largely came about because I thought, I want to see my kids again, shall I roll over? I did think that. It did occur to me. And that’s when I analysed it properly and realised it’s not for me. I wouldn’t be able to look my kids or even my parents in the face if I became a snitch or a grass.

Brian Rose: You’re very famous for never snitching, never grassing people up when you had the opportunity to. Was that something you always felt, through your whole smuggling career?

Howard Marks: Oh yes. But I think even those who did end up rolling over thought that too. It’s only when you’re actually in that situation. Even now, if you stuck a gun to my kids’ heads, I’d probably tell you every name I know.

James Thompson: It’s like the game you’re playing has your rules, and the game someone else is playing is the same, but it’s their rules. And if you can’t see their rules, which can be hard, especially when there’s lots going on, moving things about and getting shipments in…

Brian Rose: That’s very deep. I suppose you had a lot of time to think about it.

Howard Marks: Well, yes. You’re in a cell, you’ve got two years to think about it.

James Thompson: “I’m really going to get to the bottom of this one.”

00:50:35 Terre Haute, the jailhouse lawyer and parole

Brian Rose: What was it like in the US federal penitentiary? Because that is the big time. I think you’ve been quoted as saying it was one of the only federal penitentiaries that has a death row.

Howard Marks: It is the only one.

Brian Rose: Which probably gives it a more ominous feel, or means you’ve got prisoners in there who are the worst of the worst.

Howard Marks: Certainly a more ominous feel. To be reminded every day that there’s a death row, that that building is a death row, of course is ominous. You’ve got to think about it. And when you see fellow prisoners helping to build it, you start thinking this isn’t right.

Brian Rose: That’s weird, isn’t it?

Howard Marks: It is, I think, still the only federal prison that has a death row. There are plenty of state prisons with death rows, obviously, but that’s the only federal one. The first person to be federally executed there was Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

James Thompson: But you don’t associate with the people on death row? It’s that dead man walking thing?

Howard Marks: They are kept separate at all times. You might see them being escorted, and I think there was the odd time where there’d be a class, a yoga class sometimes, that people on death row would participate in, but it was very, very rare. You wouldn’t be having any recreational time with them. So you’re not aware of the people who are on death row, just more aware that it’s possible.

Howard Marks: As regards the prisoners there, you don’t get rapists, you don’t get child molesters, you don’t get the rubbish of crime, if you like, because they’re federal crimes rather than state ones. But even though that was the principle, many state prisoners, particularly the gang ones like the Bloods and the Crips and the Vice Lords in Chicago, would often be too difficult for the state authorities to handle, so they would be drafted into a federal prison, and then you’d get some of the rubbish. But generally you’d get proper criminals, mainly big drug dealers.

Brian Rose: And how was that first month there?

Howard Marks: I was scared. I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle it at all.

James Thompson: Did you try to change your personality somewhat? You’re very obviously laid back.

Howard Marks: I’m not naturally a threat to anyone. Never have been. But I became very aware that it’s quite easy to step in shit in that sort of environment, even if you’re not looking for trouble. So I just became more careful, making sure I didn’t bump into people, all that kind of stuff.

James Thompson: Did you make friends who would watch your back?

Howard Marks: They did, but I never had to ask them to, because I quickly got a job teaching English grammar, and that sometimes required teaching people to read. They would ask me to write things, even letters to their girlfriends, because they didn’t have the ability to articulate it. So I would do that, and that became an important thing to them. I also became a jailhouse lawyer as a hustle within prison, and succeeded in getting a couple of convictions overturned and sentences reduced. So that made me liked, if you like.

James Thompson: It made you valuable too. You kind of became their voice.

Howard Marks: Yes. That’s what got me through, I think, more than anything.

James Thompson: And did the fact that you didn’t snitch and grass give you a lot of capital in prison?

Howard Marks: Yes, that only helped. Being famous, if you like, a little less so in America than over here, and being known for not being a snitch.

Brian Rose: Were you surprised when you got paroled, because it was seven years of a 25-year sentence?

Howard Marks: I was astonished, actually. There was a 25-year sentence. I did reduce it on a post-conviction motion to 20 years, on the grounds that I was being punished more harshly than the judge intended, and won that motion. So then I was eligible for parole after a third of that time, which is six and two-thirds years. Even though I behaved myself impeccably and brought the education department up to the top in the federal system, parole was not granted as a result of your behaviour really. Parole has gone now, but good behaviour was a threshold to be considered. Parole was judged more on the current political perception of the crime that you committed, and drugs have never been good for that. So I was astonished to get parole.

Howard Marks: I’m only guessing, this isn’t documented, but I think what had happened was that the judge was very annoyed with the DEA for lying to keep me in an American prison and not transferring me to the UK, which is what the judge had wanted. So he was just giving them another kick up the arse, really.

Brian Rose: So they really pushed to get you to stay, and they wanted to convict you pretty hard.

Howard Marks: Yes, they wanted me to spend as much time as possible in prison.

Brian Rose: Is that because you evaded them so well over the years that it became personal?

Howard Marks: I guess so. But I don’t think it became more personal in my case than anyone else’s. I think that’s the way they’re trained.

Brian Rose: The culture of the DEA: “We get our man and we do the worst possible.” It’s a very political institution. It almost seems to get its mandate from the president.

Howard Marks: Yes, it is. It was formed by Nixon, wasn’t it? To find another job for the Watergate burglars, basically. G. Gordon Liddy was there. “Keep them busy.”

Brian Rose: It must be strange to see your life affected by the political winds. If you rob a house you get four years and you’re out in two, but for you, your punishment is subject to the winds of time and whoever gets elected. Was that frustrating for you?

Howard Marks: It was frustrating, yes. But it’s common knowledge in prison. Everyone knows that their only chance of getting out is an amnesty, which is going to be politically determined, or a change in the law, which is going to be politically determined. So you know that you’re subject to the whims of political change. You’re very aware of it in prison.

00:58:30 What prison gave him

Brian Rose: What was positive about prison?

Howard Marks: I know for sure I emerged a far better person than the one who went in. It didn’t do me any harm. I’m not suggesting anyone should check in, but it really didn’t do me any harm. It made me stop taking myself too seriously. It made me realise I can’t really control events, I can only control my attitude to any event. And, this sounds a bit soppy, but also the power of helping people less fortunate than oneself. It’s like a spiritual energy which makes me feel good. I never had that before.

Brian Rose: It was the first time you’d done something like that?

Howard Marks: Yes. Teaching English and helping them with their appeals. That force is quite a strong one.

Brian Rose: Have you kept that up?

Howard Marks: Yes. That’s why, when I came out of prison, I got so much behind the legalisation movement. I felt at last I had an agenda, a moral and to some extent a political agenda that I could pursue, and that was more important to me than writing books or making money. Now it’s all become a bit subsumed and interrelated. I now get paid to talk about legalisation and so on. But during the first few years that I was out of prison, I was definitely a much better person than the one who went in, and probably a better person than I am now.

Brian Rose: When I’ve heard you talk about your prison stay, it sounds like how some people talk about a psychedelic experience. They come out with their ego reduced, feeling more connected to their family and loved ones.

Howard Marks: That’s correct. And it’s not particularly surprising. You’ve been stuck mainly with your own thoughts for several years, and you’re going to examine yourself more ruthlessly than ever before.

James Thompson: I suppose that depends on what kind of character you are going into it.

Howard Marks: To some extent, James, of course. But perhaps it was more the awareness and use of the positive aspects of my character that came out in prison. I thought I would spend time very sad, crying to myself, and of course I missed my kids like you couldn’t believe. But on the whole I was happy there.

Brian Rose: Did you meditate at all?

Howard Marks: Yes, a lot. I’d been in prison before, for two years, and learned how to do yoga and meditate then. But I tended to give it up and revert to debauchery every time I was free.

Brian Rose: You talk about learning yoga in the federal penitentiary, and those two things just seem so different to me. Is that something they promote in prison?

Howard Marks: Yes, it’s something they encourage and something you have access to. I found American prison very understanding and supportive of people who wanted to do yoga, because they preferred it to people doing weightlifting. It is a bit daft, isn’t it? First of all they incarcerate you, ruin your life and make you hate them, and then they build you up and teach you how to be like James, able to do something. So yoga makes it less of a hate factory for them.

01:02:29 Money, banks and laundering in the old days

Brian Rose: Do you miss the money, or the lifestyle that it afforded you?

Howard Marks: Not really. I suppose occasionally I get worried about finances running out and not being able to afford stuff in the future, but that makes me more like everyone else. I’m not sure if I’d opt for winning the lottery. Well, yes, of course I would. What am I talking about? But I feel that’s been done. I’m looking for other interests in life.

Brian Rose: I think your lifestyle fascinates people who haven’t been there. Maybe it’s just a great job done by Rhys in the movie, but you don’t seem to be consumed by the lifestyle. You seem to enjoy doing the business, but you don’t seem to revel in the luxury.

Howard Marks: No. The idea of counting massive amounts of one’s own money and masturbating all over it has never struck me as sensible.

James Thompson: Reading the book, you opened so many different accounts. Do you still have times where you might be smoking and think, “That’s where it is”?

Howard Marks: No, I’ve never forgotten where I’ve stashed anything. The bit that’s often quoted, which I think is the bit you’re referring to, is when I was with my ex-wife and we were sitting opposite a bank, and she said, “I remember depositing something in there.” I would give a chunk of money to my ex-wife whenever I made a load, and what she did with it was her business. So it was she who forgot she had 30 grand in the bank, not me.

James Thompson: Which was a lot of money then. I’d be taking her round all the banks with a metal detector, waiting for it to go off.

Brian Rose: What was the money laundering situation back then? A complete lack of attention to it?

Howard Marks: There wasn’t any law against it when I first started. You could walk quite legitimately into any bank with a big suitcase full of money, and some countries, in particular Hong Kong and Switzerland, encouraged it. “Please put this into my account.”

Brian Rose: A numbered account? Maybe they want some ID?

Howard Marks: The numbered account is more for books and films, really. Every account has a number, and you could have any arrangement you wanted with your bank manager. “If I whistle three times, please deposit it.” They were amenable to anything. Switzerland, Hong Kong, Luxembourg too, and the Caribbean offshore places. It was very, very easy, and there was no law against it.

James Thompson: Through the cannabis dealing you start off doing that, and then with the fraud and the IDs you have to become a master of disguise, and know a lot about where you put money. Obviously money laundering has changed a lot and it’s harder to do, but you have to become proficient in lots of other ways for the business to reach its full potential.

Howard Marks: Yes, you pick up lots of tricks on the way, of course. Certain forms of money laundering work just as well today as they always did. If you inflate sales receipts and stick a bag of cash in there.

Brian Rose: Would that be the one factor that would keep you from doing business today like you did 20 years ago, the money laundering?

Howard Marks: Oh no. I’d be able to launder money. It wouldn’t be flying into banks with a suitcase, but you can swallow cash in just about any business, particularly second-hand cars or stamps or coins. There are loads of them.

01:06:30 Why he never moved into cocaine

Brian Rose: You were known as a cannabis man your entire career, and you must have met people who encouraged you to move into other products. Why did you never do that?

Howard Marks: There wasn’t really any pressure or even temptation to move into, say, cocaine, which would have been the obvious choice. There were a number of reasons. The source countries I used for cannabis were not generally source countries for cocaine.

Brian Rose: Pakistan, Afghanistan.

Howard Marks: Yes. Opium, potentially. And cocaine in Colombia; I did smuggle marijuana from Colombia, so the potential was there. But I couldn’t even satisfy the demand for cannabis. It never got close to being satisfied in the UK or in America, anywhere.

Brian Rose: Can you explain that from an economics perspective?

Howard Marks: Just supply not meeting demand. There was so much demand, so why venture into something else? And there were some moral objections too. I was all right about cannabis. I sincerely believed it wasn’t harmful at all, in any way. I only felt it had positive effects. I’ve taken cocaine a few times now. The first time I took it was when I was about 50, after I came out of prison, and it seemed to me then that people who took cocaine just behaved like idiots and thought they could do things that they couldn’t, whereas people who took cannabis were a bit scared, a bit paranoid, which means a bit more caution. And I wasn’t entirely convinced then that it didn’t have a potential for harm. So I just wasn’t tempted, and certainly there wasn’t anyone saying, “Right, we need you to smuggle cocaine.”

James Thompson: It’s a whole different set of people, not only the people who take it but the people supplying it. It’s a different programme completely.

Howard Marks: Yes. A lot of people think, “But you were only smuggling this much, rather than a container full,” but it’s not a question of money per unit volume. The only real criterion is money per unit time: how much you make this week. And I could always make it.

Brian Rose: So deal to deal, you were doing lots of deals and big deals, and the fact that your deals took up more volume didn’t matter.

Howard Marks: It didn’t make any difference.

James Thompson: It’s more about the bandwidth in your brain for making the deals.

Howard Marks: Yes. And there are various other considerations, such as security. Which is easier to make disappear, a suitcase of cocaine or a container? And to complete the list of objections: in cocaine, almost everyone who deals it makes their profit by mixing it up with some impurity, and I’m not happy with that. If it did become a cocaine deal, I would prefer to put £100 on it, a margin on it, rather than dilute it or mix it with some poison. Any structure that seems to favour that way, I wouldn’t be happy with.

01:10:06 Legalising all drugs, David Nutt and decriminalisation

James Thompson: What do you feel about legalising not only cannabis but all drugs, for that kind of reason? I know it’s a big question.

Howard Marks: Generally, I think that any recreational drug so far discovered would be safer for society if legalised and controlled, rather than put squarely in the hands of the criminal fraternity. Of course, if a drug was synthesised or discovered that made you kill people or rape kids if you took it, obviously they should make it illegal, whether it’s natural or not. But I haven’t come across one, except possibly alcohol, which is the only one that’s legal.

Howard Marks: To be perfectly honest, there’s a bit of me that thinks about a drug like heroin, where the amount you need to get high is quite close to the amount that can kill you. If those two amounts are close to each other, that makes it a dangerous drug. So I think a bit about that one. Maybe it’s about where these drugs would become available. You could have cannabis in the greengrocer’s, but perhaps with heroin you’d have to sign on and go through a procedure where someone’s keeping tabs on you, otherwise you don’t get your heroin.

James Thompson: And you’d get pure heroin. It’s not going to be cut. It’s got to be better doing it that way than some guy going, “See you later.”

Howard Marks: Of course.

Brian Rose: I think you were talking to David Nutt about that, about the dose that gets you high being very close to the dose that kills you.

Howard Marks: That’s right. David first brought it to my attention. That was one of the criteria in the scale of harms chart that he devised, the nearness of those doses.

Brian Rose: David’s going to be here in May.

Howard Marks: Oh, he’s a lovely man. He’s great.

Brian Rose: For people who don’t know David, what part of government was he in before he got sacked?

Howard Marks: He was chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, I think it’s called. He was effectively sacked because he claimed that cannabis and ecstasy were safer than tobacco and alcohol, and mainly because he said that riding a horse is more dangerous than taking ecstasy. People seem to forget that he actually showed that. He looked at all the people who crippled themselves riding horses, looked at all the people who died as a result of taking an ecstasy pill, and showed beyond any doubt, to every statistician’s satisfaction, that riding is more dangerous.

James Thompson: And with ecstasy, it’s hard to talk to someone like Leah Betts’s parents and have this kind of conversation, obviously. But the reason it did what it did was because it was cut with something that reacted with something else.

Howard Marks: That’s right, or when too much water is taken afterwards. I’ve debated with Paul Betts. Leah’s father was a thoroughly okay guy, and you can only feel sorry for someone who’s lost their daughter.

Brian Rose: This is the girl who died from ecstasy?

Howard Marks: Yes. It was the first ecstasy death, or ecstasy-related death, really. I’m sure if a car ran over one of my children I’d feel the same; the emotion is in there. But most deaths with drugs have been caused by prohibition rather than by the drugs. We’re all used to only seeing prohibition at work. We haven’t seen legalisation at work.

James Thompson: And prohibition only makes things worse. I can’t see how people can’t see that, when you really look into it and see what actually happens.

Howard Marks: I know. Perhaps at the time the authorities were deciding what to do about drugs, prohibition, perhaps even the war on drugs, made more sense when first implemented. But now we know it doesn’t work. It just makes things a lot worse, with unforeseen casualties. Prohibition of drugs is a relatively recent social experiment, and a disastrous one. That’s obvious to most people.

James Thompson: With the internet and people getting more information, I hope it’s a generational thing.

Howard Marks: I think it is largely a generational thing, yes.

James Thompson: But there’s that documentary, The House I Live In, which shows the industry behind it. You’ve got the police, you’ve got certain prisons which are paid for. You’ve got all these things that would go if drugs were legal.

Howard Marks: The entrenchment of its illegality in society, yes. There are all sorts of consequences, such as those you mentioned, the probation service. A lot of people’s living now is clearly dependent on drugs being illegal, and you can’t blame them for not wanting to lose their jobs.

Brian Rose: That’s why you’re against decriminalisation. Is that right?

Howard Marks: Not against it, but I would see it as a step towards legalisation, or as the mood of the country moving towards that. But to allow the consumption of something and keep its supply illegal is, to me, clearly irrational.

Brian Rose: Back to the David Nutt argument. It’s still very dangerous, there’s still an inflated price, still criminal dealing on the back of it. It doesn’t really address the problem.

Howard Marks: No. And the other thing is that if it is decriminalised, then people will be taking it who wouldn’t have taken it before.

Brian Rose: Do you think so?

Howard Marks: Probably. Many law-abiding people, and there is a general feeling that democracy is an okay thing, which requires one to obey the will of the majority, which means you’ve occasionally got to listen to two idiots rather than one wise man. Some people simply will not smoke because it’s illegal. If it was decriminalised they might think, “Obviously the message has come across that it’s all right to do it.” So demand will increase, which means supply has to increase, which means you’re further criminalising the thing in the areas that matter.

Brian Rose: Are you hopeful about what’s happening in the States?

Howard Marks: Oh yes. I have a tendency to be too optimistic. That’s just a life force.

Brian Rose: You said you still keep thinking that cannabis will be legalised next month.

Howard Marks: Yes, for the last 50 years.

Brian Rose: What do you think the drug landscape will look like in 30 or 50 years? If we could just hibernate and wake up, when the new generation comes in?

Howard Marks: Well, of course I would think that all drugs would be legalised by then, but that’s what I thought 30 to 50 years ago. I don’t think we would wake up to that.

James Thompson: They’ve got a bit of a loophole now where they’re changing the molecules of things, and that makes it something else, like mephedrone. So you’ve got legal illegal drugs.

Howard Marks: Yes, it’s a race really. There are all the underground chemists adding molecules to this, that and the other. But the American legislature has a way of dealing with that. It just says anything that has that kind of effect on you is illegal, no matter what it is. If you start framing the law in terms of the effect rather than the substance, you will be able to make all sorts of things illegal.

James Thompson: I wonder why they don’t do that here, then.

Howard Marks: There probably is a move to try to do that, but it would leave the authorities vulnerable to someone saying, “This guy’s getting a high from bungee jumping, the same effect as if he took acid.” It would be difficult under British law.

01:19:30 Dealing with the Mafia without violence

Brian Rose: You always dealt in cannabis, which, as you said, is more of a peace-and-love thing, not even a drug, something you thought everyone should have. But you were still dealing in major quantities around the world. You had tension when something was coming into Shannon Airport. Ultimately you were dealing with big players, Mafia organisations, the IRA and so on. It’s always seemed strange to me that you never had a violent incident with anyone, because with that much money being exchanged it seems to happen in any organisation. How did you avoid that? You were always known as a solid businessman and a very good guy, which I guess is the key to doing any good business.

Howard Marks: That doesn’t apply just to illegal business. It applies to anything, I think. And running across the Mafia isn’t restricted to illegal business either. Whether you’re a fashion designer or a motor car manufacturer, particularly in Italy, you will run across the Mafia.

Brian Rose: We’ve seen it in Japan, with one of their big camera companies and the Yakuza. It’s so interwoven in Japan, it’s one and the same.

Howard Marks: For sure it is. So that’s going to happen anyway. If you rise to the top of any organisation, or on the way up there, you’re going to come across some criminal organisation that’s put its fingers in there.

Howard Marks: Getting back to my own dealings with the Mafia. It was the people who ran the Gambino family who ran JFK Airport in Queens, which is where we were bringing it in. Before they started bringing in dope with me, they’d perhaps be nicking videos, stealing stuff and selling it, fencing it, Goodfellas kind of stuff.

Brian Rose: Not organised stuff, just clipping pieces here and there.

Howard Marks: Skimming, basically. Skimming with products as well as money. And they would not invest a penny, so there was never any question of them losing any investment.

Howard Marks: I would get stuff on credit, or pay for it, and send it to them. They would keep 25% of it until I’d sold the other 75%. That was their cut. Once I’d sold the other 75%, I would just give them the money for the 25% they were holding. Not that it would occur to me to rip them off or cheat them in any way anyway, but I couldn’t. They had it secured. If I went completely mad and thought, “Right, I’m going to rip them off for all I can,” there was no way I could.

James Thompson: So that would literally be your ticket to do business in that area. Would they be doing anything, sorting out runners, a place to keep it?

Howard Marks: No. They would deliver it, and then I’d sell the 75% and give them the money for their 25%. They were quite happy to wait. They were sitting on an asset. And they wouldn’t cheat either. I found them utterly honourable people to deal with, absolutely.

Brian Rose: And you never thought to yourself, “Howard, you’re getting involved with the Gambino family. What are you thinking?”

Howard Marks: No, I loved that element of it. I was aware of it, and I used to be fascinated with organised crime as a kid, reading about it. So I was very aware that this was heavy, but I just found it very, very satisfactory and comforting.

James Thompson: Fair enough. And as long as you went by the rules, they’re making money for nothing.

Howard Marks: Yes. And I was definitely more useful to them alive than dead.

James Thompson: Which is always a comforting part, I would imagine.

01:23:40 Stage fright, regrets and getting caught

Brian Rose: Howard, a lot of fighters, and I’m sure James can attest to this, have these big adrenaline rushes in a fight, and then when they’re not fighting they don’t always know what to do. You’ve effectively retired from smuggling. So how do you get up in the morning? Where does the adrenaline come from? Do you need it the same way?

Howard Marks: Yes, I do need it, and the area I get it in now is basically stage fright. I’m on stage several dozen times a year.

Brian Rose: You were on stage last night in London.

Howard Marks: Yes, for example. And for the half an hour before I’m on stage, anyone can smell the adrenaline on me.

James Thompson: Facing an audience? Thirty minutes before, it’s almost like you’re facing a death squad?

Howard Marks: No, it’s like I’m facing a border. I know I’m not risking anything like as much. I’m not risking the rest of my life in prison, I’m risking looking like an idiot in front of four or five hundred people. But that’s bad enough. So that’s where I get it now. I can smell it in my sweat, and it’s the same smell, the smell of fear or the smell of adrenaline.

Brian Rose: You have to be thankful for that, right?

Howard Marks: Yes, I am.

Brian Rose: Is it after the show that you get the endorphin rush, or during it?

Howard Marks: During the show, when I’m actually doing it and pulling it off.

James Thompson: So you made a living out of transporting weed from A to B, and now you’re making a living talking about it. What’s the number one question you get asked most often? Just in case we haven’t covered it.

Howard Marks: The questions most commonly asked are, what’s my favourite dope, and do I have any regrets? They pop up every time.

James Thompson: And what are the answers?

Howard Marks: My favourite dope is the strongest possible hash from places like Nepal. And I have no regrets now, because I’m happy now, so I can’t possibly regret whatever got me here. But I know what’s meant by regret, so I can give a long answer and talk about the regret I felt, lots of times in prison, of course. But I always finish by saying I have no regrets now. I certainly wouldn’t want to put the clock back and risk it not being as good as it is now.

James Thompson: Is there nothing you would do differently, or just not get caught?

Howard Marks: Not really. I think the getting caught bit was an important part of my being happy now. Really, it was probably the best thing that happened to me.

01:26:51 Crime fiction and forgetful creativity

Brian Rose: You’re a fiction writer now. You had Mr Nice, which was a legendary book, and you’ve written a couple of other autobiographies. Why fiction? It’s not easy to write fiction, I’m sure.

Howard Marks: No, it’s not. This was partly advice from the publishers. There’s a limit to how many autobiographies one can write, really.

Brian Rose: Some people write ten of them.

James Thompson: And they’ve had probably a tenth of your life.

Howard Marks: You could write a wonderful autobiography of one day, it’s possible, but I didn’t feel I could do that. So fiction popped up, particularly crime fiction. Plus, and I mustn’t forget this because it would be dishonest to, there was a lot of talk of laws coming in to prevent authors profiting from their previous criminal activities by writing about them. It’s unlikely that could ever be applied retrospectively, otherwise we’d have to put Nelson Mandela back in prison or something. But if I’d written Mr Nice now, they could say, “Okay, you can write the book, but you’re not making a penny out of it.” The authorities could try to claim that money because it’s based on illegal doings. It’s not on the statute books, but it’s been proposed and might be.

James Thompson: I can definitely see the Americans doing something like that.

Howard Marks: So that made me think more seriously about writing crime fiction. But then I realised that if I wrote it from the point of view of a Welsh kid who went to Oxford and became a big dope dealer, I would actually be profiting from my past, or it would be difficult to prove that I wasn’t. So I wrote it from the point of view of someone who’s the exact opposite of me, a female undercover drugs cop. It’s in the third person. So I think I’ve covered my arse on that. But obviously I draw on experiences from my criminal past.

Brian Rose: The first book was Sympathy for the Devil, and you’ve just released The Score.

Howard Marks: Actually the release is next week, I think April the 4th officially, but obviously it exists in some form now, with review copies circulating. It can be ordered now.

Brian Rose: And this is going to be a trilogy?

Howard Marks: Yes, it’s a trilogy.

Brian Rose: You have to write trilogies these days, right?

Howard Marks: We do, particularly in crime fiction. I don’t know why. Possibly because of Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. He wrote three books, all of which were published after he died. And I don’t know how long this Scandinavian crime fiction dominance is going to go on for, with Jo Nesbø doing his stuff. They’re very good. So a trilogy is a normal thing. The crime publishers don’t expect the first one to sell to any great extent. They usually recommend you go on Twitter and Facebook about it and keep your fingers crossed that you’re going to stay alive until the next two come out. So it’s a trilogy deal, and I’ve got another book in mind after that, not using the same undercover female cop.

Brian Rose: Do you enjoy the writing? Do you get the same rush?

Howard Marks: I don’t get the fear. It’s how I write, I suppose. I’ll designate a day as a writing day, and I will sit in front of a screen until I’ve written a thousand words, even if they’re crap. I might be able to remix them into something later on, and I hope that what writers call a roll will kick in during those thousand words. Sometimes it doesn’t, of course, and it’s a depressing business.

James Thompson: It’s got to be lonely.

Howard Marks: And you can be distracted. You try to do the housework or anything other than face the reality of a blank screen. But when the roll does kick in, and I find smoking cannabis helps that tangential thinking, it’s one of the most enjoyable things in the world. Without that fear thing, it’s not an adrenaline thing.

James Thompson: You’re creating something. You’re making something out of nothing.

Howard Marks: Particularly if you smoke dope, because you’ve forgotten everything.

Brian Rose: You’ve been quoted as saying that forgetfulness is the germ of creativity. Can you explain that?

Howard Marks: Yes, and I can give an example of it too. It’s the germ of creativity simply because you’ve got nothing else to rely on. Once you’ve forgotten everything, what can you do? You’ve just got to create something. And I think there’s a parallel. During the 1920s, jazz was mainly performed by black musicians in the States, and they could play every instrument perfectly and a load of tunes. But they used to be quite big stoners, and they’d go up on stage having clearly forgotten almost every tune they’d ever heard. So they had nothing but creativity to rely on, and that created the improvised solo. I think it was a fundamental component of that. Now it’s an accepted form of music and of creativity, but a fairly recent one.

James Thompson: I love writing. I write a lot, and sometimes I’ve got so high that I’ve thought I’ve nailed the truth, but the side effect is I’m going to forget it. The higher you get, the more you’re going to forget it, not even the next day, and it’s gone.

Howard Marks: I think there’s no way to avoid that. You will forget some of them, but let’s hope you remember the important ones.

James Thompson: I think if you keep an open mind, you’re going to remember so much good stuff. Don’t be scared that it’s gone.

Howard Marks: Never be scared. Just keep doing it.

01:34:57 Ecstasy, acid, psilocybin and death

Brian Rose: Are you still involved with dance music? I know you said that whenever a man comes out of prison he should take ecstasy with his children.

Howard Marks: It sounds rather a glib thing to say, but it just happened to be the case that I was locked up during the period of ecstasy’s popularity, so I hadn’t taken it before I went to prison. And there was very limited music one could listen to in prison. Indiana radio stations aren’t known for much beyond country and western.

Brian Rose: And hip-hop?

Howard Marks: Yes. The black guys would dominate the TV, largely for baseball and football, but also for the hip-hop, and I used to like that. I suppose penitentiaries were cradles of hip-hop in a sense. A lot of it came out of there. But I hadn’t heard the other stuff that was going on over here, the trance and so on. And music was very much my first love of the big three. I was hooked on music before I was hooked on sex or drugs. So I came out and asked my kids, “What’s been happening on the music scene?” And they said, “You’ll never understand unless you take one of these little fellas.”

James Thompson: Did they have one on hand?

Howard Marks: No, I’m characterising it. Unless you take an ecstasy, you’re not going to understand. So I made arrangements to get very, very pure ecstasy and take it with them, and it was a wonderful experience. Obviously there’s no sexual thing involved with one’s own children, but I hadn’t seen them for some time, and emotionally I caught up with them. It was very, very important. It was crucial. I remember thinking then that a dad coming out of prison should just be with his kids and take this. It will get things out. And of course I understood the music as well after that.

Brian Rose: What about psychedelics? In the movie you take some acid, which at that time was legal at Oxford?

Howard Marks: Yes, it was 1965 or 66. Acid didn’t become illegal in this country until 1966. I took my first in 1965, and hardly anyone knew what it was then. Again, an elite Oxford thing, in an Oxford college, with a friend of mine who later became a very eminent professor of epidemiology. The funny thing is, I took it every day for quite a long period before discovering that it only works every three days, because of the tolerance.

James Thompson: You’d just go about your normal functions?

Howard Marks: Sometimes, yes, trying to figure out what else I was eating. But it’s simply a three-day tolerance. I had a couple of bad trips too, and since then I’ve been very, very respectful. I don’t see it so much as a party drug. It’s more of a cerebral kind of masturbation. I take it about once a year now, just to reinvent myself and update myself.

Howard Marks: And Professor Nutt, whom you say you’ll be seeing very soon, regards it as one of the safest drugs going. Psychedelics, and LSD particularly, are very safe, partly because of the thing I mentioned, the three days. It clearly isn’t addictive. If it doesn’t affect you the next day, it doesn’t have that crack kind of element.

Brian Rose: We had one of his colleagues here who is running tests at Imperial College with an MRI machine. They’re giving people psilocybin and watching what happens in the brain.

Howard Marks: That’s right. David is particularly concerned about the morbidity that affects old people. People do start getting worried about death when they get to about my age, and people are living that much longer, so there’s far more morbidity around. He’ll do randomised trials properly. He knows what he’s doing, he’s a proper scientist. And things like psilocybin might stop old people being miserable because they’re going to die.

James Thompson: They should sell it on a commercial. “Are you miserable?”

Howard Marks: It’s necessarily the case that one is either going to die young, a tragic death of some kind, or crumble to bits. That’s the best you’re going to get, to crumble to bits, and anyone who doesn’t realise that clearly needs psychiatric help.

Brian Rose: It’s going to happen. They’re giving it to terminally ill patients in the States now, psilocybin in a hospital environment, and they find that people get their heads around their mortality and accept what’s happening to them, and can live their life without being paralysed by knowing they’re going to die.

Howard Marks: Which is very important to me, increasingly so, obviously. It’s an obvious problem which needs a solution, and nature is providing it. There’s a strong case for it being made.

Brian Rose: Do you think about death?

Howard Marks: Yes. I don’t know how often other people think about it. I’m not thinking every day, “Oh Jesus.” But I have always thought about it from time to time, and I’m not worried or afraid of death. I sometimes worry about the process, I suppose. I wouldn’t like to be eaten by lions. A terrible way to go.

01:42:04 The live shows and the travel bans

Brian Rose: What’s next for you over the next few years? You’ve got the third book coming.

Howard Marks: Yes, the third book. And if my crime fiction career doesn’t seem to have kicked off, I’ve got one more semi-autobiographical thing that I’ll do.

Brian Rose: I think it’s great you’re writing, by the way, because you don’t have to. You’re really pushing yourself.

Howard Marks: I enjoy the process and I’m happy to. And just talking about age now, there’ll come a time when I’ll get too knackered to stand for four hours on a stage.

Brian Rose: Can you talk about your shows? I didn’t want to see yours last night, because I wanted to not know you very well for this show, but I want to come and see one. How often do you perform, and what is one of your shows like?

Howard Marks: The frequency is irregular, but it would be at least 50 a year, usually in clusters: one every night for a few weeks, then time off to write, then one every night for another period. It’s not the same show I’ve been doing for the last 15 years. It evolves a lot. Essentially there are two different types of show: one with a projector, where I make full use of multimedia with sounds and visuals, and the other just straightforward stand-up, without a projector.

Brian Rose: Like stand-up comedy.

Howard Marks: Yes, a reasonably successful stand-up comic, which is not the normal kind of progression.

Brian Rose: There’s not much you do that’s normal.

Howard Marks: It grew out of book readings, really. The standard way of promoting a book is by reading an extract out loud in a bookshop, which is about as sterile and clinical and boring and lacking in entertainment as you can get. I don’t think any author has written a sentence thinking, “I wonder what this is going to sound like when I read it out loud in Waterstones.” No one thinks like that, so it’s bound to be crap, really. Quite a few people realised this, like Irvine Welsh, Nick Cave and Roddy Doyle, and started doing readings in pubs, clubs and festival tents, anywhere other than a bookshop. I simply got on that bandwagon, to be honest.

James Thompson: And you made it more interactive. Because you’ve had so much going on, it seems silly not to let people ask questions and tell bits of stories.

Howard Marks: It’s just an evolution of that, really. The book has been written to be read, so it should at least be modified if you’re going to read it out loud. It just doesn’t sound right otherwise. So the shows have grown out of that and shot off in various directions. I’ve got a safety net, I call it, of about ten different sketches I could do at any time, and I’m still working on the next one.

Brian Rose: Do you still light up on stage?

Howard Marks: No, the smoking ban really put an end to that. Even though I think I could get away with it, because the law states that it’s illegal to smoke while performing in public unless smoking is an integral part of the act, and I think I could qualify. But there hasn’t been a precedent yet.

Brian Rose: And the show is four hours long sometimes?

Howard Marks: That’s the longest it would ever be, and that would include signing and chatting to people after. The minimum is only an hour, very rarely, and the most common, the median if you like, would be about two hours.

Brian Rose: And if people want to find out where you’re going to be, is it your website?

Howard Marks: Yes, howardmarks.co.uk.

Brian Rose: And your Twitter is OfficialMrNice.

Howard Marks: That’s right.

James Thompson: Do you have a few copycats out there?

Howard Marks: Oh, of course. Particularly on Facebook. I once looked in its early days and I had 14 impostors, and three of them had more friends than me.

James Thompson: You’re doing something wrong. You need to copy them.

Brian Rose: Are you allowed back in the States? Would you ever do a show there?

Howard Marks: No, I’m not allowed. It’s a lifetime ban. I’m what they refer to as an aggravated felon, which sounds pretty tasty and cool, but it just means I did a big drug deal once, so I’m not even allowed to apply. Obviously I’d prefer to be able to visit, but it doesn’t really matter. There’s enough of the world I haven’t been to yet. I sometimes worry, because occasionally I go to Jamaica, or if I should go to Canada, that there might be bad weather and the plane might be forced to land in America.

Brian Rose: And then they would arrest you?

Howard Marks: Yes, because of broken parole conditions. Parole can’t be enforced in another jurisdiction, but if I found myself on American soil for whatever reason, even if they kidnapped me, I would have to serve some time in prison for breaking parole conditions.

James Thompson: So they’ll never let you in, but if you go in, they’ll never let you out.

Brian Rose: I was thinking, how come you haven’t been on the Joe Rogan show? It seems a no-brainer. But I guess you won’t be in LA any time soon.

Howard Marks: It could be done, I suppose. I’ve done CNN occasionally, because you can do down-the-line stuff.

Brian Rose: And you mentioned before we started filming that China is a place you can’t go.

Howard Marks: Yes, because I broke the law in Hong Kong, which is now part of China. America, obviously, because I broke the law there and got a conviction there. And Australia wouldn’t let me in either, even though I’ve never been there.

Brian Rose: They just don’t like your style.

Howard Marks: They tend to rely on FBI records. It really annoyed me, because I’d sold out at the Melbourne literary festival and the Sydney comedy festival, and Kiss FM were backing my application for a visa. You’d think it would be straightforward at that point. They said, “No, not a chance. It would be too much disorder.” I then offered to pay for two policemen to be with me 24 hours a day, pay their wages, everything, so there’d be absolutely no way I could do anything disorderly. They just said no. And then I noticed that Snoop Dogg had been let in. So I wrote again: “Look, come on.” “No, sorry, you can’t come in.” And then of course Cheech and Chong went on tour there, just rubbing it in.

Brian Rose: So they could change their mind at some point.

Howard Marks: They could. I haven’t been told not to bother applying in future. In fact, the reverse: by all means apply again in the future.

James Thompson: It’s ironic when you consider that for the whole country, first of all, you pretty much had to be convicted to get there.

Brian Rose: Have you ever hung out with Snoop Dogg? He’s Snoop Lion right now.

Howard Marks: Yes, he’s gone Rastafarian in Jamaica, but I’ve never hung out with him.

Brian Rose: You guys might get along.

Howard Marks: I’m sure I’d get along with Snoop Dogg. I must find out his connection to Australian immigration.

01:50:46 Sean Penn, the other Howard Marks and Rhys Ifans

Brian Rose: Do celebrities seek you out, or do you live a quiet life apart from your shows and your books?

Howard Marks: There are two who have very actively sought me out. One is Sean Penn. The other is another guy called Howard Marks, who runs Oaktree Capital.

Brian Rose: I saw him when I was googling you. He’s worth billions or something.

Howard Marks: That’s the one. He’s one of the richest guys in the world, and we met each other for the first time yesterday morning, actually, because we were both fed up of seeing each other when we googled ourselves. A terribly nice man. I spent an hour with him yesterday, and he actively sought me out. And Sean did, simply because he read the book and thought it would make a good film, and he was quite instrumental in ensuring that the film actually got made in the end.

Brian Rose: Did he produce it, or introduce you to the right people?

Howard Marks: He came over here, managed to get hold of me, and we had lunch together. I told him I’d sold it to the BBC, because I sold it almost as soon as I’d written Mr Nice, for a song, because I didn’t realise it was going to be a bestseller. I just took whatever price the BBC gave me. Then the BBC felt it was a bit too non-PC, and for various reasons they just didn’t do it. Sean wrote a letter saying he would like to possibly direct it, be a producer, maybe act in it, everything: “Please let me champion this film.” I reprinted the letter in the updated version of Mr Nice. The BBC just didn’t take any notice of it at all, because they’re not like a regular production company. They can sit on something forever. The easiest thing for them to do is wait till the bugger dies.

Brian Rose: They’re a quasi-government institution. They tax you, basically. A TV licence is a tax.

James Thompson: Don’t get me started.

Howard Marks: Those are the only two that jump to mind. But the advantage of being a very minor celebrity, as I am, is that you get to meet major ones. If I’m at an event where there are lots of celebrities, quite a few of them will come up, compliment me on my book and make themselves known to me.

Brian Rose: Is that cool?

Howard Marks: Yes, 100%.

James Thompson: To go back to the BBC having the book: is that how the film came about in the end?

Howard Marks: In the end the BBC just relinquished it. They’d bought it off me and paid me for it; I sold my rights to them. There was some complication between TV rights and film rights, because they constrain each other to some extent. They didn’t proceed with it and eventually forgot about it, and it was people like Rhys Ifans and others who forced the issue. The BBC just said, “Okay, just don’t credit us with it.”

James Thompson: I can’t imagine anything worse than someone buying your story, about to make it, and then they sit on it and do nothing.

Howard Marks: Well, it was my fault really, James. I can blame the literary agent, but again, using the same logic, I chose him. The standard thing would have been to sell an option.

Brian Rose: Were you happy with Rhys Ifans’s portrayal of you? Do you still hang out?

Howard Marks: Oh yes. Rhys and I have known each other for 17 years or something like that. Pretty much as soon as I came out of prison, I met Rhys.

Brian Rose: Is it a Welsh thing? You guys are all pretty close.

Howard Marks: It’s more than that. When I met him, he was the singer for the Super Furry Animals, an indie band that’s pretty popular over here.

James Thompson: Before they became good.

Howard Marks: You can say that too. When I met him he was sleeping on the drummer’s floor and doing some pretty minor things, perhaps reading a story on the radio. He hadn’t acted in any films at all, and Mr Nice had been written but hadn’t been published. We got on and talked about our ambitions and aspirations, and at one point he said, “If your book does come out and it’s made into a film, can I play you?” No one had asked me that before. I said yes, and we just stuck to that deal. It was extraordinary. Of course, I thought I was doing a young kid a favour.

James Thompson: And then he goes mega.

Howard Marks: Because we knew each other, we would meet at festivals and go on the razz together, both of us with similar lifestyles. He didn’t have to study me at all, even though he’s very capable of studying people. His portrayal of Peter Cook, I think, was amazing. But he didn’t have to do any of that with me.

James Thompson: He’s had the best kind of study ever, being your friend.

Howard Marks: And if they make a film of him, I’d be the best person to play him. It goes both ways.

01:57:30 Thank you and goodbye

Brian Rose: Howard, we could probably do this for two more hours, but thank you so much for coming.

Howard Marks: You can tell how much I’ve enjoyed it.

Brian Rose: You seem natural with this. We were saying before that you should do your own podcast, so we’ll talk about that later. You’re such a natural, even better than I imagined or expected. Thanks for coming on, and I appreciate your frankness. I’m so glad you’re still on speaking tours. And I’ll put in a word with Uncle Sam and see if I can sort that out.

Howard Marks: Don’t take any risks yourself.

Brian Rose: Colossus, always a pleasure having you. You’re a natural co-pilot, a big man and a big-hearted man. Please follow James at JColossus on Twitter. He’s got an excellent blog, Colossal Concerns, and a YouTube channel, Colossal Collective, with some crazy videos. You’ve got a new video coming out soon with Don Frye. Check out some of his videos. He’s a lot funnier than he looks.

Brian Rose: If you’re listening to us on iTunes, please click and subscribe. If you want to see the extremely good-looking Howard Marks, come to our YouTube channel at LondonRealTV. We’re on Twitter at LondonRealTV and on Facebook, so come and join the party. Namaste. Thank you so much, Howard.

Howard Marks: Thank you.

Brian Rose: And until then, guys, it’s about the journey.

01:59:54 Next episode trailer: The Culture High

[London Real promo removed]