Laura Miller reviews Tony Dokoupil’s memoir about his father, who smuggled marijuana into the US during the ’70s and ’80s:
The pot Americans smoke today is almost entirely homegrown, sleekly and cleanly bred and raised. By contrast, “my father’s pot was dirty: doused in ocean spray, soaked in fuel, infested with spiders.” But for decades, the heyday of Dokoupil’s father and his cronies, smuggled dope was the only — or at least the best — game in town. Dokoupil offers a history of the American marijuana trade during those years, when smugglers were celebrated as daring counterculture heroes by magazines like High Times, men and women who put their freedom and occasionally their lives at risk to help their fellow freaks get high. Well, and also to make a buck — lots and lots of bucks. For a while, during the Carter administration, decriminalization advanced and legalization seemed imminent, but then Ronald Reagan and his gaunt, piously anti-drug wife took the White House and turned up the heat again with their war on drugs.
In a recent interview, Dokoupil elaborated on what motivated his father to move illegal drugs:
In the late 1970s, 90 percent of the marijuana was coming into Florida. It was primarily Colombian; some of it was Jamaican. My father’s weed would be delivered to an old fishing shack in the [Florida] Keys. … It’s only one road that connects that necklace of islands and everyone knew that that was the road on which marijuana was smuggled into the country. So to smuggle on that road took an incredible amount of tolerance for risk.
So my father, despite being a partner in the operation, volunteered, for $25,000 a shot, to drive Winnebagos of weed out of the Keys and into America, just for the sheer thrill of it. He had no financial reason to do it. He had no operational reason to do it. … But by then he was addicted to the sensation of it, to the risk.
The Dish 