Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Narcoworld: Dope Stories’ On Netflix, A Docuseries About The Global Drug Trade, Told From Both Sides

You’ve watched fictional shows like Breaking Bad and Narcos that show the drug trade on both the U.S. and Mexican sides of their shared border. But there haven’t been too many real-life, up-close looks at the drug trade, both here in North America and other hotspots around the world. Narcoworld: Dope Stories gets up close with drug makers and dealers to show just how complex this tug-of-war between the drug trade and law enforcement really is.

NARCOWORLD: DOPE STORIES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A shot of downtown Phoenix, and then a montage depicting the people who make and deal crystal meth on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Gist: Narcoworld: Dope Stories is a four-part docuseries that goes to different spots around the globe to witness the back-and-forth between the people in the drug trade and the law enforcement agencies that try to stop the flow of drugs into their countries or cities. The filmmakers follow the creation of hashish in Morocco and how it migrates from there to Spain and France, how drug gangs and police battle it out in Rio de Janeiro, and how MDMA has become super popular in the United Kingdom.

But the first episode, directed by Steven Grandison, stays close to home: It traces the crystal meth trade that moves meth from the border city of Nogales, Mexico, to Phoenix, 200 miles north. We hear from a meth maker in Phoenix who cooks out an RV, like Walter White but a whole lot less sophisticated, and then we hear from the meth gang leader who buys the cook’s supply. Unlike what we saw in Breaking Bad, he’s not trying to move in on the flow coming from the Sinaola cartel in Mexico; he uses the RV cook’s supply as a backup, in case the stuff coming from Sinaola gets held up by law enforcement or even robbed by stick-up gangs.

We also get to witness how traffickers in Nogales wrap and hide keys of meth to deter being detected as it’s driven across the border. Their methods are sophisticated, including spraying the wrapped and taped-up bricks with a chili pepper spray mixture that hurts the noses of the drug-sniffing dogs the border patrol uses. We get the perspective of the driver, who makes upwards of $5,000 per round-trip to drive the meth across the border without being detected.

On the other side, we see a militaristic unit of ICE use force to invade a suspected stash house in Tuscon, which is between Nogales and Phoenix. We also see the tactics border patrol uses to stay one step ahead of the traffickers driving the keys across the border, a helicopter unit of Homeland Security taking down cartel spotters, and the Pinal County Sheriff’s department invade a dealer’s house. While most of the meth is washed down the shower drain, they find more than enough hidden away to arrest the dealers for intent to distribute.

Our Take: One of the nagging feelings we had when watching the first episode of Narcoworld: Dope Stories is how futile the “war on drugs” seems. The “bad guys” make the drugs and sell them, the “good guys” catch some small-time players with a fraction of the meth that’s out there on the streets, or some operative of the cartel with a low-level job like a spotter. Then the “bad guys” just put someone else in as a replacement. Even if the flow from Mexico stops momentarily, the gangs in the U.S. are business-savvy enough to have backups and methods that keep the things going. Wash, rinse, repeat.

And what made this feeling so acute, despite the fact that we likely knew this reality going in, is that the tone of Narcoworld tells us that we’re not sure where the filmmakers stand in this fight. The tone is very alpha-male, from the industrial-reminiscent soundtrack to the deep-voiced narrator (Michael Beach) making this battle sound more like a video game than a real-life tug-of-war between the drug trade and law enforcement.

We could be magnanimous about this and say that this kind of tone just points out that this truly is a battle. And we’re not going so far as to saying that the filmmakers are glorifying the drug dealers, though we were almost on that train as we saw the drug trafficker driving towards the border. But nothing about this docuseries tells us that this problem is being solved, just that this battle will go on for our lifetimes and beyond, which is awfully depressing to contemplate.

Sex and Skin: Besides a meth-addicted woman — who owns her own business — injecting meth into her forearm, there’s no skin.

Parting Shot: The Phoenix meth dealer tells the director, “About how much more of this do we got, man? ‘Cause, we gotta get back to business. We gotta get back to business.”

Sleeper Star: There are no stars in this show. Law enforcement, of course, is doing yoeman’s work trying to keep this stuff off the streets, but their efforts aren’t staunching the flow all that much.

Most Pilot-y Line: We suspect that the drug trafficker was actually driving a clean car to just use it as an example. It’s very apparent that it’s a different car than the one he stuffed full of meth, and we just think that if the director, who filmed this whole thing, was in the back of a car full of meth, he’d either feel obligated to report it to border patrol or be culpable if the driver was caught. We guess it was hard to find another silver Accord (the car that was stuffed with drugs) to use?

Our Call: SKIP IT. Narcoworld is a fascinating watch, but for all the wrong reasons. It takes too much glee in showing how much of an endless cycle the “war against drugs” is, and it’ll just make you enraged or depressed.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Narcoworld: Dope Stories On Netflix