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Hello and welcome to The Spectator Books Podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator,

and this week I'm joined by the journalist Toby Mews,

whose new book is called Kilo, Life and Death

Inside the Secret World, the Cocaine Cartels, and there's some absolutely hair-raising stuff in it.

Toby, welcome. I want to stop asking. How did you, you know, how did a nice boy like you find

yourself knocking around with, you know, drug lords and gangsters and killers and so forth

in Colombia? Well, I moved to Colombia to set out to become a foreign correspondent. I actually

left London, left university in London. Then my first stop was in Argentina, but I really, I wanted

to be that foreign correspondent. And to me, at that moment, that meant being involved in conflict. That was part of

the idea of being a foreign correspondent. And Columbia at that moment was going through this vicious

civil war when I arrived. And obviously, in the background, was this cocaine trade that was funding

the civil war. And just over years, I just built up this range of context

within that world. And I kind of wanted to show, I wanted to show the other side, the kind of the

eccentricities, the deep, dark weirdness of the cocaine trade. And I thought that's, I think, I know

people have the rough outline of Pablo Escobar's life, but I don't think they knew about

the witches, the superstitions, the rituals. And I kind of wanted to show that what I had seen in my

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