aka MR NICE

‘WALES TO SOUTH AMERICA’

Date: Saturday 2nd February

Time: 1.00pm

Location: Theatre 2

During the mid 1980s, Howard Marks had forty-three aliases, eighty-nine phone lines, and twenty five companies trading throughout the world.

Bars, recording studios, offshore banks: all were money-laundering vehicles serving the core activity: dope dealing.

Marks began to deal during a postgraduate philosophy course at Oxford and was soon moving large quantities of hashish into Europe and America in the equipment of touring rock bands. The academic life began to lose its allure.

At the height of his career, he was smuggling consignments of up to thirty tons from Pakistan and Thailand to America and Canada and had contact with organisations as diverse as the CIA, MI6, the IRA, and the Mafia.

After many years and a world-wide operation by the Drug Enforcement Agency, he was busted and sentenced to twenty five years in prison at the United States Federal Penitentiary, Terre Haute, Indiana, the site of America's only Federal Death Row.

He was released on parole in April 1995 after serving seven years of his sentence.

Described by the Daily Mail (UK Tabloid) as 'the most sophisticated drugs baron of all time', Howard Marks has worked with the British Secret Service and has been connected with the Mafia, the IRA, MI6 and the CIA.

In 1996 he released his autobiography, Mr. Nice, which remains an international best seller in several languages and was the best selling non-fiction book of 1997. On the subject of his book, he says:

"Through a plethora of media interviews and several public book readings, it became clear that the predominant reason why so many adolescents and university students read and enjoyed Mr Nice was their frustration with the law prohibiting cannabis consumption and trade. Until then, I had no idea of the extraordinary extent of cannabis use by young people today."

During 1997, he performed his first live shows, which discussed his life as a marijuana smuggler and his views on drug use and legalisation. The shows received excellent reviews throughout the national press, and his now legendary one-man comedy show, An Audience with Mr Nice, continues to sell-out at venues throughout Britain and Europe.

Howard Marks wrote a monthly column for Loaded for five years and has written features for the Observer, Daily Telegraph, Evening Standard, Time Out, GQ, and the Guardian. He continues to campaign vigorously for the legalisation of recreational drugs.