Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America's Strangest Jail

While on a backpacking trip in South America, Rusty Young came across Thomas McFadden, an English drug trafficker who had been imprisoned and was giving tours of Bolivia's infamous San Pedro jail. Inspired by curiosity, the youthful Australian journalist traveled to La Paz and accompanied one of Thomas's illicit trips. After quickly becoming friends, they teamed together to try to document Thomas's experiences in the prison. After bribing the guards to be allowed to remain, Rusty spent the next three months living in the jail, sharing a cell with Thomas and writing one of the most bizarre and fascinating prison narratives ever. Marching Powder is the end product.

It is established in this novel that San Pedro is not your typical jail. Real estate brokers are required to sell their cells to prisoners. Some people own stores and eateries. Women and kids who have family members incarcerated live with them. It's a place where drug lords and crooked politicians reside in opulent apartments while the lowest inmates endure hunger and filth. There's always a risk of violence, and some of Bolivia's busiest cocaine labs are located in parts of San Pedro that are quiet during the day and resound with the sounds of children at night. "Bolivian marching powder" or cocaine makes life tolerable in San Pedro. The jail cat is hooked as well.

Marching Powder, however, is also a story of camaraderie; it takes place in a world where comedy can exist alongside tragedy and where compassion and brutality may share a cell. This is an intriguing story of infiltration into the drug culture of South America written by a cutting-edge travel writer.