For millions of people across the world, lighting up a joint is no more controversial than having a cup of tea. But in Hash Wensley Clarkson explores the dark and sinister side of this multi-billion pound business: one fuelled by a brutal underworld network of dealers, drug barons, bent cops and even terrorists. Sex, intimidation, bribery and murder are all employed in a quest for vast profits.
Travelling from the lawless Rif mountains in Morocco to darkened warehouses in Spain, protected by heavily armed gangsters, this is a revelatory roller-coaster ride through the secret world of Hash.
Pedestrian at best, repetitively themed based fiction at worst. I kept reading in the hope that the author would turn a corner and start to provide an opinion, insight, evidence or anything of substance.
Having finished it, the book reads more like a novella of thin imagination than a supposed journalistic work of investigation, assessment and "an inside story".
‘Hash’ is a fact-based insight into the world of the production, movement, trade, and various uses of a particular material. The names used when discussing the substance are commonly; Marijuana, Cannabis, or Hash, depending on the stage of its existence and use. Wensley Clarkson does an excellent job of taking the reader from the Rif Mountains in Morocco on a journey of discovery. For hundreds of years the plant was produced, but only in our modern times has it been responsible for so much death and heartbreak. Hash is one source of revenue for an underworld which is prepared to deal in anything that will turn a profit. This book puts the product firmly in perspective. Hash is a commodity which may not be worth dying for, but it is worth killing for. My own interest was to further my knowledge, so that I could write about the product with more authority; in my Glasgow-based crime novel, ‘Beyond The Law’. Mr. Clarkson’s work most definitely assisted me greatly with my own, for which I thank him. ‘Hash’ is worth reading if only to dispel myth and rumour, and I congratulate Wensley Clarkson on the readability of his book.
This book doesn't go through the pros and cons of marijuana. The author slates it purely because of the type of people involved in the industry and even then all the people he mentions in his books are crooks. I feel like there is a lot of racist undertones too, this made me cringe as I read the book on my commute in multicultural London.