Chronicle Book Review: The Devil's Drug: The Global Emergence of Crystal Meth by Teun Voeten (2025, Rowman and Littlefield, 303 pp., $34 HB)

[image:1 align:left] In its recently released UNODC World Drug Report 2025, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) warned that "methamphetamine and amphetamine (including "Captagon") continued to dominate the use of and trafficking in synthetic drugs worldwide in 2023." The anti-drug agency added that seizures of illicit stimulants -- mainly meth, but also including other amphetamines and Ecstasy -- reached a record high that year, jumping 31 percent over 2022.

The UNODC report identified Mexico and Myanmar as major sites of industrial meth production. Still, there are other meth hotspots around the world, and Dutch journalist and photographer Teun Voeten has the beat covered with The Devil's Drug. Voeten himself cites a UNODC statistic or two as he tells meth's story, but the dry numbers are heavily leavened with detailed on-the-scene reporting and interviews with users, dealers, cooks, smugglers, cops, prosecutors, harm reductionists, chemists, and social scientists.

Voeten's unique professional pedigree makes him an excellent scene observer, whether it's Dutch amphetamine cooks in the Brabant, Mexican mobsters in Sinaloa, or the open-air drug markets in places as far removed as Tijuana, Kabul, and Philadelphia. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, he has made a career as a war photographer, covering conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Colombia, Liberia and Afghanistan, among others. He has written books on the underground homeless in New York City and the civil war in Sierra Leone. And his PhD dissertation was on drug violence in Mexico.

He spent two years researching this book, and the result is a sweeping global survey of meth's ever-increasing reach. He traces transnational criminal producing and smuggling networks, not only in Mexico and the Golden Triangle, but also in the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and obscure corners of the meth world. The Czechs, for example, have a long history of communitarian speed making going back decades. But that hippie-ish sense of druggie solidarity has faded as the glamor of profits from increased production and sales has transformed Czech amphetamine production into a full-scale commercial enterprise.

While he talks to meth users who manage to manage long-term habits, Voeten seems fascinated with the worst off, the most down-and-out meth users and meth scenes, repeatedly describing tableaux of degradation and debasement among the addicted and homeless of LA's Skid Row, Philadelphia's Kensington, and under the bridges of Kabul. It's almost as if he gets the same kick as when he was snapping photos in war zones back in the day.

But while he writes of compassion for lower-class addicts, he approaches his topic from the perspective of crime, and while he generally shies away from policy prescriptions, his bottom line is prohibitionist: "Consumption and drug-related crime cannot be wiped out unless one opts for a North Korea-style control state," he writes. "But at least it should be kept under control, with an eclectic combination of repressive, preventive, and curative tactics."

He also attacks decriminalization and legalization with a tortured version of Herbert Marcuse's "repressive tolerance," arguing that progressive governments that have moved away from prohibition do so to keep the population sedated. And he seems to have a personal bone to pick with educated drug users: "A white educated elite snorts, and they think cocaine is no big deal since they handle it well (apart from becoming unbearably arrogant, egotistic dickheads) and assume it is true for everyone, a poignant lack of empathy which is particularly endemic in a white liberal elite." Voeten is clearly no progressive on drug policy, and he writes with his hair on fire about the looming menace of meth.

But for all his alarm-ringing, he has done his research, and even readers well-versed in the literature are going to learn a few things about the contours of the global trade and its impact on people and societies. And while he denounces himself as "an old conservative bastard, a kind of Archie Bunker" for criticizing drug consumption, he has a point about the meth business being the ultimate exploitative capitalist enterprise. "It is imperative to formulate a progressive anticapitalist narco-critical discourse," he writes. I'd like to see him get to work on that. But one can be both anticapitalist and antiprohibitionist, too, even if Voeten doesn't.