HIGH TIMES INTERVIEW: Howard Marks

By the mid-’80s, the Welsh-born, Oxford-educated Marks was an “egghead of the underworld.” With a total of 43 aliases, 89 phone lines and 25 companies trading worldwide, Howard was the dope dealer’s dope dealer. At the peak of his trafficking, he was smuggling consignments of up to 30 tons from Pakistan and Thailand to the US and Canada. Following many years of evading capture despite stringent monitoring by the US Drug Enforcement Administration, Marks was finally arrested and sentenced to 25 years at Indiana’s Terre Haute, the site of America’s only federal death row. Since his release on parole in April 1995, having served seven years of his sentence, Howard has embarked on a new career: as a writer and journalist. His 1996 autobiography, Mr. Nice, remains on the international best-seller lists.

Interview by Matthew Hirtes


Your old university friend Dr. John Nicholson mentions visiting your cottage outside Oxford one Friday evening with, and I quote, “the lady I was then living with, for dinner, and eventually got back home into town to discover that it wasn’t, as I thought, Saturday morning, it was Tuesday morning.” How typical an occurrence was that?

Fairly common, I suppose.

Were you one of the 3,000 people holding a smoke-in in Hyde Park in 1967?

Yes, I was at that demonstration. Although I don’t recall that much about it, apart from tying joints to balloons and letting them go when the cops came.

What do you recall of your interactions with MI5 and MI6? You’ve said that labeling them “intelligence” agencies is a bit of an exaggeration.

I didn’t have anything to do with MI5—it was MI6, and even then I didn’t meet very many of their people. I wouldn’t necessarily say they were stupid, just that their choice of career was.

If it wasn’t for your friend Hamilton Macmillan’s proposal to inform for MI6 by opening further boutiques abroad [Marks already used one to cover his drug profits in Oxford], could you imagine expanding your operations as much as you did?

I don’t think it had a great effect. It gave me some front. And it was easier to explain to a jury afterwards that I was actually working for MI6.