Mike Power

Investigative journalist

London

Freelance writer specialising in the drugs trade, author of Drugs 2.0 – The web revolution that's changing how the world gets high. Clients: The Guardian, Mail On Sunday, Reuters, the BBC, Lonely Planet, and more.

Mike Power

Investigative journalist

London

Lab-coated pills: testing Ecstasy in Holland
With users in the UK dying from ecstasy tablets containing PMA, are Dutch pilltesting strategies the way forward? Or are users lulled into a false sense of security? Mike Power investigates
Drugscope
Drugs 2.0 - Review: Drugscope
"Power supplements well-written context with some old fashioned journalistic scoops. He manages to talk to the people at the heart of the online drug industry – the sellers, the producers, and the psychonauts. "
Drugscope
PMA deaths UK
Experts believe a wave of deaths in the north-west have been caused by PMA passed off as Ecstasy
Drugscope
Molly: Everything but the girl
Many US drug-users think they love MDMA. But they are being sold a different chemical.
Mixmag
KIller pills: Myth or murder?
This is not just another drug scare story. ‘Ecstasy’ pills containing PMA are killing clubbers in the UK. Find out how to make sure you’re not next, and why the government should be doing something about it. All across Britain the revulsion has been palpable. In February, consumers trusting their supermarkets to sell them what they pay for, found they had been dining on horsemeat rather than beef.
Mixmag
Drugs 2.0 Observer review
The web has transformed drug use in profound and unsettling ways, finds Carole Cadwalladr.
The Guardian
Cocaine smuggling in paradise
Panama's Kuna people have a lucrative sideline smuggling cocaine dumped overboard by Colombian smugglers
Reuters
The new club drugs hitting London
Whatever London club owners say in public, in private many will admit that drugs keep their dance floors full and their businesses in profit.
London Evening Standard
Featured
Inside a Chinese drug lab – exclusive
In a filthy Shanghai laboratory, chemists make batches of mephedrone - and a new incarnation of the 'plant food' linked to the deaths of British teenagers. Never heard of the drugs Eric-1 and Eric-2? That's the point.
Mail On Sunday - Live! Magazine. Reportage
Featured
Rise in legal highs is fuelled by drug prohibition
Mike Power: Stand-ins for drugs such as MDMA and cannabis are on the rise, while lack of quality control of all street drugs puts users at risk.
The Guardian
Featured
From a Chinese factory to UK households
Attempts to control synthetic drug trade resemble futile efforts made by record labels to control digital piracy decade ago.
The Guardian
Cocaine Knights
The perimeter fence of the cocaine eradicators' makeshift camp in Pueblo Lindo, central Colombia, is ringed with watchful soldiers. The dawn air crackles with radio chatter and static from the lookout points and snipers.
Sunday Herald
How the war on cocaine is being won
Uncompromising policing, the perverse economics of narcotics and one dealer rendered the drug about as stimulating as a cup of coffee.
Mail On Sunday - Live! Magazine. Reportage
Colombian death squads in La Macarena
These plaques mark the graves of anonymous victims of Colombia's civil war. Human-rights groups maintain that government death squads carried out the killings - and we're funding them.
Mail On Sunday - Live! Magazine. Reportage

Mike Power is a British freelance investigative journalist specialising in drugs and technology.

His book Drugs 2.0 was published by Granta in 2013 in the UK, and 2014 in the USA and Germany, and documented a new digital frontline in the war on drugs, revealing how users and dealers have outmanoeuvred law enforcement and created a global, online black market in narcotics.

His reports around the emergence of so-called “legal highs” - recreational drugs manufactured in Chinese laboratories that are legal in most countries - have prompted complex policy debates in the UK and beyond. His in-depth research into the Dark Web, Tor, Bitcoin and cryptomarkets predicted accurately the explosive growth in digital drug dealing that we have witnessed in the past three years.

His "Drugs Unlimited" report for Matter.com documented an undercover mission to produce and import to the UK a new, legal drug – using only a laptop – and won the 2014 British Science Writers Association's prize for the best investigative journalism.

Power offers colourful reportage and research on this topic, from undercover infiltration of clandestine labs in Shanghai, to treks through Colombian coca fields, and frank debate with cryptomarket drug dealers, and argues the case for a wide-ranging and radical rethink of all drug laws in the digital age.

Power has reported extensively from Panama and Colombia for Reuters, and his clients include The Guardian, Mixmag, Matter.com, Deutsche Welle, The Mail On Sunday, The Sunday Herald, Lonely Planet, Dazed & Confused, Granta, The London Evening Standard and many more.

Mike Power

About

Mike Power