About
Smuggling Jesus is the true story of Hank Cooper — a Jewish Canadian with a chemistry background, an island childhood, and an extraordinary hunger for adventure. At sixteen, Cooper was smuggling cocaine out of Bolivia during a political coup. By his twenties he had partied with Pablo Escobar's cousin in Cali, Colombia, delivered cocaine to David Bowie backstage in Boston, and survived a near-disastrous attempt to smuggle drugs out of Thailand — where the penalty for foreigners was 35 years in prison. But this is more than a crime story. It is a story of transformation. After turning his life around, Cooper became an outspoken advocate for drug policy reform — using the hard-won wisdom of his own experience to argue for harm reduction and compassion-based approaches to addiction. Smuggling Jesus is raw, funny, dangerous, and ultimately deeply human.