we've got a zombie war on drugs now. You know, we've had 50 years. It's been a failure. We've

now had a last year record overdose deaths in the United States. The level of violence in Latin

America has been in the last 20 years. There's been more than two million homicides in Latin America.

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen.

And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

Our brilliant guest today is a Mexican-based journalist and the author of several books about the war

on drugs, including this latest one blood gun money. Young Grillo, welcome to Trigonometry.

Great to be here. It is great to have you, man. We're so excited. As you know about speaking

with you, this is an issue we were really keen to talk about. Before we get into all that stuff,

tell us a little bit about who you are, how are you where you are? You've had a very interesting

journey through your life, haven't you? Well, I'm originally from the UK. I grew up just near

Brighton. I did a few, a bit of a checkered, a few things I did before I get into journalism.

I played in a punk band for a bit around the Brighton area. It was involved in pirate radio in London

for a bit. And at 27, I went over to Mexico to get into journalism. Originally with a bit of

romantic ideas of like, you know, running around with grillers fighting, you know, fighting

and literally takerships and stuff. Arrived in Mexico in the year 2000 when things had changed

very much and very early on fell into covering drugs, issue of drugs. I grew up in the south,

these were a lot of drugs around then, a kind of bit of an opioid epidemic back then in the 80s.

I knew about four teenagers or young men who died of herinobidosis around those times. So it kind

of is very interesting to me connecting this issue of drug use countries and communities that use

a lot of drugs and countries which traffic and produce drugs. And we just fascinated the beginning

with this kind of glamour and the riddles of the Mexican drug cartels. So I was covering this a lot

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