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Welcome to the personal archives of Britain's biggest dope smuggler. For 40 years Howard Marks traversed the globe: an international businessman who became an inmate in America's toughest penitentiary before standing for election in the United Kingdom. Becoming Mr Nice reveals an extraordinary montage of previously unseen material from his roller-coaster life, interwoven with his daughter's incisively researched and deadpan commentary. It includes surveillance footage, intelligence reports, phone transcripts, the business cards and letterheads used as trading fronts, driving licences and passport applications in multiple identities, and cryptic faxes from the Far East. But more than that, it offers a vista onto his many and varied experiences and escapades, through notebooks, personal items and correspondence with the bizarre, wonderful, comic or downright suspicious characters who surrounded him. It includes extracts from a lavishly detailed and hitherto unpublished account of Howard's years on the run (written in confidence for the benefit of his otherwise baffled defence team) together with transcripts from his trial at the Old Bailey, in which he successfully claimed that his involvement in the biggest ever importation of cannabis into the United Kingdom was on behalf of the secret services. Peppered with comic observations from Howard's private letters, this book provides a uniquely personal insight into one of Britain's most remarkable characters

AbstractThis article provides an analysis of the normative framework for Spanish cannabis clubs by contextualizing it within the growing body of comparative constitutional law that recognizes legal obstructions to personal drug consumption as intrusions of the right to privacy. Article 3(2) of the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, 1988 relieves State parties from the Article's obligation to criminalize drug possession and cultivation for 'personal consumption' when doing so would conflict with their constitution or basic concepts of their legal system. Spain relied on Article 3(2) in its decision not to criminalize conduct involving personal consumption. The Spanish judiciary has had to consider the legal implications of collective consumption and cultivation in the form of cannabis clubs. In addition to operating in a grey area of domestic law, Spain's cannabis clubs straddle the blurred boundary in international and European legal instruments between 'personal consumption' and 'drug trafficking'. This article explores the theoretical and doctrinal implications of both Spanish law on cannabis clubs and comparative human rights law on drug use to outline the potential contours of a constitutionally protected zone of privacy pertaining to cannabis use in a social context.