Blood Lines: How Europe’s cocaine habit funds beheadings and radical Islam

This is not another story about how drugs can screw you up. This is a story about how Europe’s appetite for drugs screws up the lives of hundreds of millions of others, writes Alex Perry

It begins with a speedboat. The pilot is crawling upriver. The scenery suggests an estuary. Aside from the grassy bank where the soldiers have parked their pick-ups, the river has no shore, just ankle-deep mud flats shelving up to a curtain of mangrove, behind which lies an endless, still and inky swamp.

The pilot spots the soldiers, turns in, cuts the power and glides. The soldiers, 25 of them, wade into the water up to their waists.