When jails become drug dens

When jails become drug dens

Mangalore Today News Network

By Dr. G. Shreekumar Menon

Mangaluru, August 1, 2024: Regular reports appear in the media about raids being conducted in different jails across the country resulting in recovery of mobile phones, SIM cards and of course drugs. Drugs being consumed inside high security prisons, has inherent risks of a very grave nature. The public hardly gets to know about life inside prison, sometimes some glimpses are depicted in movies, which need not reflect the actual happenings. "Marching Powder", is a memoir of a British drug dealer’s nearly five years inside a Bolivian prison, exposing a cocaine empire functioning ruthlessly inside San Pedro jail. The book was released in 2003 and became a bestseller and a cult classic, having sold over 600,000 copies, and even got a detailed mention in the Lonely Planet guidebook. It is a fast-paced and entertaining tale of drug trafficker Thomas McFadden’s years behind bars, in the San Pedro jail in Bolivia. The drug trafficker, along with co-author Rusty Young, who was backpacking in South America at that time, exposes the grisly happenings, taking place inside San Pedro jail.

The book starts off with McFadden at the La Paz airport, waiting to smuggle drugs through the Customs when he gets arrested. With this, his ordeal starts. He is tortured by the drug police, and later shifted to the San Pedro prison. He finds to his shock and disbelief that the inmates have to pay for everything there, including the taxi fare to reach the jail and an entry fee to have the honour of going inside prison!
Drugs play a huge role inside the prison. In fact, San Pedro produces the best cocaine in all of Bolivia, and it comes dirt cheap. Unable to take the squalid and tough life inside, many inmates turn to drugs - including the hero, McFadden.

McFadden soon learns how to survive, and even thrive, in an atmosphere where some inmates keep pets and rich criminals have free access to every conceivable pleasure, that money can buy. McFadden soon entertains many crooked prison officials who turn up at his private cell to snort lines of cocaine or coke. By chance, he stumbles on an additional source of income when he begins giving tours of the prison to foreign tourists, a trade that lead to his name getting mentioned in a Lonely Planet guidebook that attracts the attention of his co-author, Rusty Young, who was backpacking in South America at that time.

Intrigued, Rusty Young, joined one of Thomas’s illegal tours. They formed an instant friendship and then became partners, in an attempt to record Thomas’s experiences in the jail. Rusty bribed the guards to allow him to stay inside the prison for nearly three months, sharing a cell with Thomas and recording one of the strangest and most compelling prison stories of all time. The result is ‘Marching Powder’.

Newly convicted, Mc Fadden arrived at the prison only to be told he needed to rent or buy a cell, and if he had the money, he could have a very nice cell with all modern comforts.  The prisoners run the prison. They are in charge of job and food distribution, there are makeshift cafes, food booths and little shops. Their families are allowed to spend time, including nights with them! It is a brutal place full of violent men administering depraved justice including public executions. The prison staff just seem to handle the interface between the prison and the outside world. Mostly they are extremely corrupt, so anything is available to a prisoner with money, to splurge.

The focus of the book is on McFadden’s prison tours, a novelty that even Lonely Planet recommends! He would bring in tourists and they would pay an official entry fee to enter. To stay longer or spend the night, they would then pay a bribe. For most foreigners, this was the experience of a lifetime. Many ended up trying cocaine in prison, which McFadden supplied.

The author, Rusty Young, does not show up at all until the last few pages. The book itself is written as if McFadden is writing an autobiography, and he has no regrets about smuggling cocaine around. Smuggling drugs around the world since the tender age of 15, McFadden has been successful in destroying hundreds of lives around the world before he landed in Bolivia. It is like a Karmic punishment for him.

Life in San Pedro is like being in a slum area, something like Mumbai’s Dharavi. It has its own economy and its own class system. With poverty-stricken prisoners most of whom end up in prison in the first place due to poverty, being expected to finance themselves and their families completely, it is no surprise that crime thrives in the prison even more than it does on the outside. Prisoners taking out mortgages on cells, imbibing in the purest cocaine in the world, restaurants run by prisoners and even a cat that is a cocaine addict!  

San Pedro prison could claim the dubious distinction of being the International University of Cocaine, where anyone could study under some of South America’s leading professors: laboratory chemists, expert juggling accountants and unscrupulous businessmen. McFadden decides to capitalise on the knowledge and experience of his fellow inmates by offering guided tours to wide-eyed, curious visitors, like Young, and these visits become a big part of how he manages to stay positive throughout most of his time inside, though he is also hit by periods of depression for his seemingly hopeless plight.

It’s deeply saddening to see how important money is to simply staying alive in San Pedro and the impact it creates for the prisoners - and their families - who live there. The thriving corruption that Thomas relentlessly exposes is something that none can envisage occurring - a prison that produces cocaine; allows tourists to visit and stay illegally overnight; has its own property market for cells; everything being reliant on hefty police bribes.

While thousands of struggling Bolivians make their livelihood in the controversial coca leaf plantations, the majority of them have never seen as much as a gram of the white powder that has made their country infamous. Marching Powder is a true story of helplessness, dejection and succumbing to destructive cocaine, inside South America’s strangest Jail.

The huge seizures of drugs being made across India on a daily basis, is also resulting in many hardcore drug peddlers, entering into prisons, bringing with them details of underworld contacts dealing in drugs, expertise in cooking-up crude drugs and hard cash that can be made from depressed prisoners. Sometimes terrorists, fundamentalists and Hawala operators also get imprisoned. It is almost like a job-fair for recruiting future drug addicts, peddlers and money launderers. The example of San Pedro jail is a warning that if jails become a whirlpool of drugs, it can become a place of collapsed values, and over a period of time can emerge as a national security threat.

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Dr. G. Shreekumar Menon, IRS (Rtd), Ph.D. (Narcotics)

Former Director General of National Academy of Customs Indirect Taxes and Narcotics & Multi-Disciplinary School Of Economic Intelligence India; Fellow, James Martin Centre For Non Proliferation Studies, USA; Fellow, Centre for International Trade & Security, University of Georgia, USA; Public Administration, Maxwell School of Public Administration, Syracuse University, U.S.A.; AOTS Scholar, Japan. He can be contacted at shreemenon48@gmail.com