"Their profit margins are bigger than oil and gas. Most people don’t know this,” explains Alyssa Arbuckle, Associate Director of a digital humanities lab at the University of Victoria.

The 2015 book Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, is a New York Times bestseller. It's also a scathing account of the trillion dollar, global drug war's many policy failures. The book’s author, Scottish-born journalist Johann Hari, has traveled to over 18 countries to investigate drug criminalization.