THE CARTEL’s signing tour/media campaign is the biggest of Don Winslow’s career and after two months, he is still going strong. Last week, he appeared on National Public Radio’s FRESH AIR for a feature interview with host Terri Gross. Below is the complete interview. Don talks about many of the same things he did when we talked, but also talks about El Chapo, the Mexican kingpin that recently escaped from a Mexican prison.

Here is Don talking about the slave labor that goes into making the pot that so many Americans enjoy:
What you have now in the immigrant community are more Central Americans than Mexicans and they make this long and dangerous journey up through Central America up through Mexico to get to the American border. A lot of them don’t make it. They are kidnapped by the cartels, often murdered, the men, on suspicion that they might join a rival cartel and might be used by a rival cartel. The women and the girls are very often taken and forced into farm labor and/or prostitution. So I don’t want to harsh anybody’s high, I wouldn’t tell an adult what he or she should do, however, I think that we ought to know the provenance of these drugs that we’re taking (I say “we,” I don’t do any drugs), and know that there’s a high probability that other people paid in pain and suffering for that party you’re having.