I think you can use fiction to get inside people's minds.

How much more money do we have to waste, how many more families have to be destroyed, how many more people have to be killed before you summon the courage to tell the truth to the American people?

What happened with the opioid epidemic is the Mexican cartels made a very deliberate, corporate decision to undercut the price of opioids. What they discovered was they could increase production, increase potency and decrease the price, and sell it for a third of what the Big Pharma could, or street dealers could, for Big Pharma pills. North America, and to a slightly lesser extent Europe, is being flooded with this Mexican heroin as a direct result of the attempt to undercut American pharmaceutical companies.

Ridley Scott obviously an iconic director, he's made some fantastic films. Obviously a very smart, very tasteful, thoughtful guy. So yeah, I'm in good shape; got Ridley Scott with The Cartel.

I'm a jazz guy and a Bruce Springsteen guy. So I wanted something more current, and edgier, and angrier. So I asked my kid to educate me about hip hop; he has an encyclopedic knowledge of it. And he did so. I found it to be much richer than I would've thought. I think some of the poetry in it is really spectacular. I threw rap into the book. I think I mentioned Kendrick Lamar. I'm really into Tupac these days. I love Nas, N.W.A.

The Force deals a lot with the heroin epidemic, which I'm sorry to know people are experiencing in Canada.

A lot of times, writers are told write as big as you can, and that's not untrue. But at times I think it's better to write as small as you can, to start scenes with little personal details or people who are doing average every day human things. That, to me, lets the average reader into that person's life. "Yeah I eat breakfast. I take a shower."