I’d like to think I got into selling pot with the best of intentions. I was a freshman in college and one of my friends had some weed he needed to sell to buy his books. Seeing as how it was at least a step closer to the right thing–he’d stolen his textbooks when he couldn’t afford them the semester before–I figured I should too.
I had worked in a cafeteria for a year before college and had saved what I considered a substantial amount (more money than I would see for a long time once I started smoking pot). The people I’d be selling to were close friends, happy to fund our ad hoc scholarship. There was minimal risk; I would make back the initial investment plus a small profit for my time. And that’s exactly what happened.
Getting to live in that Milton Friedman fantasy world was the best part about dealing. It was the most perfectly rational and benevolent universe, the best of all possible worlds, and it provided a hallucination strong enough to obscure whatever real-world problems made this your smartest option.
The second best part about selling pot was the money. No, that was probably the third best part. My girlfriend and I smoked too much to make much profit (the eternal problem of the small-time pot dealer), and what was left over went toward boarding her horse. I guess there are smarter things to do with money than get high and pay a horse’s rent, but she loved the horse and it made her happier than the antidepressants that didn’t do much except make her suicidal when she tried to go off them, so that was how we lived.
The second best part was feeling like an upstanding member of my little platoon of potheads. Some drug dealers, if you can imagine, are less than scrupulous. They charge inflated prices when they know that supply is low or give you short bags when they know you’re desperate. They do all the things non-illegal businesses do to maximize profits and I found it disgusting. My plan, insomuch as “sell some weed….uh….$$$” is a plan, was that I’d deal fair bags at fair prices and make up the reduced margins through repeat customers. And I would be able to balance the books of my conscience with the knowledge that my friends wouldn’t be victims of the profiteering frat boys who were their other option.
So, I became a drug dealer, though that sounds a lot more grand than I deserve. I was the lowest of the low, what law enforcement calls a “peddler.” I wouldn’t even have gotten caught–well, I wouldn’t have been caught the way I was–if I hadn’t been swept up in an investigation of people moving orders of magnitude more weight than myself. I sold grams or eighths of ounces (3.5 grams) to people who intended to smoke pot immediately. I bought ounces from mid-level distributors, who in turn bought pounds from guys in NYC, who in turn worked in the quantities of drugs that make national news.
The people in NYC had an apartment where the walls were stuffed full of bricks of weed. Like a weed version of Candy Land, I imagined, except that there were men with guns watching you closely. At least that was the report from the two guys who made the drive every couple months to bring back a package looking like a party sub made out of solid weed. Between trips, those guys slept on our couch. They were essentially homeless, except that their bottomless drug supply was accepted as a payment in kind for couch-renting.
—
I was working at Exxon when the cops raided our apartment looking for them. A SWAT team broke down our door with a battering ram and tossed our rooms.
As my roommates explained this over the phone my first fear was that the cops were on their way to Exxon to arrest me, too. I’d have to explain to my bosses–a co-op of mechanics who owned the shop and who I respected immensely–why their parking lot was full of flashing lights. But that didn’t happen. I sat there stewing in adrenaline until nine when I got out the mop bucket, counted receipts, and went home. The cops left a warrant at the house telling me what I was charged with. Apparently I wasn’t worth the time it would take to drive across town.
When I came home my bed was buried under a pile of clothes, a pile of drawers, and the polaroid pictures my girlfriend had been taking for years. One of them was of her naked; until then no one had seen it but us. We talked about what to do next. We shared a room and sold from our shared stash, but since it was only my name on the lease it didn’t make sense for her to get in trouble. I would be the official drug dealer. She, like the rest of my roommates, would get “first offender status,” which meant the charge would be wiped from their records after doing some community service. I would be treated more harshly.
The next day I told my parents. They were more sad than angry, although they were also angry. I made the case that what I was doing was not morally wrong; that America’s prohibition on marijuana had its roots in Hearst-era racism and sensational fearmongering. They pointed out I was going to cost them thousands of dollars and probably hurt my employment prospects.
That was a good point and one I had not adequately considered in choosing to become a drug dealer. I was nineteen. There were very few things outside of aesthetic theory that I considered adequately.
—
I got a lawyer who seemed to deal only in plea bargains that didn’t require him to work very hard. I cannot recall him as other than Henry Winkler in Arrested Development–a mane of white hair, a messy office tucked in a sagging Victorian, solicitous to the point of being neurotic. He got me down from felony intent to distribute to misdemeanor intent to distribute just by being a lawyer and having a relationship with the DA’s office.
A few years before I was busted, a car full of high school students got caught skipping class to smoke a bowl. The kids whose parents paid for lawyers got a lighter punishment than those whose parents could not. Everyone in my town knew this story and took from it one of the few, though not surprising, lessons of the drug trade: you will be treated differently if you have more money. My parents knew this–hell, they knew each of those kids and their parents–and insisted on helping me pay for a lawyer.
Punishment included a hefty fine, court fees, losing a few hundred dollars that the cops seized as evidence, and the cost of paying for drug therapy sessions. I didn’t really mind the therapy–it included acupuncture every few weeks–except that it was expensive and sessions were at the end of the day when I was tired from working at the horse farm.
Other educational aspects of my sentencing included AA meetings and a state-sponsored class on the badness of drugs and alcohol. The teacher was a cop who bragged in a collegial way about how he could drink more than us on account of his “fat gut.” He was, as much as I hated to admit it, pretty cool. After another day at the farm I fell asleep during a video and almost cried when he told me I would have to retake the class. But when he saw that I wasn’t being intentionally disobedient, he cut me a break and just let it go. At this point I stopped trying to make sense of cops and accepted them as inscrutable beings of terrible power, like aliens in The X-Files.
First I went to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, thinking it would be the better fit for me. Not so. Most of the people there were recovering meth and cocaine addicts whose experience I could not relate to. There was a man crying with joy because he baked a cake. It was a cake for his daughter’s birthday. He had missed the first ten years of her life because he was devoted to meth instead of her. I now have a daughter I would give up anything for, so I can only imagine what kind of addiction he was going through. And there were people drinking several cups of coffee even though the meeting was after eight pm. What kind of person drinks more than one cup of coffee that late at night? It’s madness.
So I switched to Alcoholics Anonymous. Those meetings were great. I went on Sunday morning when they had donuts and coffee and it felt like church. One time I recognized a co-worker from years before, an older man who saw me reading A Clockwork Orange and told me that Earthly Powers was the superior Burgess novel (which is true). At the time I was confused by the huge coin jangling against his manager’s key ring. Now I knew it was a twenty-five year chip. Coming out of that VFW building I wanted to be better person just because it felt possible.
Paying for everything was difficult and unpleasant, and my parents were right about the employment thing. I would probably be a high school teacher today if I hadn’t marked myself as a drug dealer, which is frowned upon in schools. For a few months after going on probation I had intense nightmares as my brain adjusted to the absence of THC. But those stopped and I found I was a lot better at talking to strangers than I had been in my shoegazing stoner haze.
—-
Since then I have only smoked a handful of times. Even small amounts of pot make me intensely anxious, which I do not enjoy. In a final “Time Enough At Last” twist, I now live in California and can buy all the pot I want (and at low prices standardized by an abundance of supply). But I don’t want it, and with the kind of horrific violence the drug trade fuels across the border I’m glad I don’t have to wonder whether I’m buying from Humboldt or Juarez.
Still–it’s hard for me to reflect on my series of mistakes without seeing them within the long blighted shadow of U.S. drug policy. Thomas Nagel calls it moral luck: if I had lived in California instead of Virginia, none of this would have happened, but there is nothing morally relevant about happening to live in Virginia. And I got off easy. Millions of people, disproportionately young men of color, are sucked into the prison-industrial complex under the auspices of the war on drugs.
So I can’t say that I learned my lesson, at least not the one the government wanted me to. Selling pot should not be a crime. There’s just no argument that is consistent with the legal rationale for prohibited substances and our extant medical knowledge of marijuana. Because marijuana happened to be outlawed and I did not want to be punished, I should not have sold it. That’s the closest I can come to a mea culpa.
I want to have learned more. I want this story to end the way good stories do, where suffering is justified as the price of knowledge. But there’s nothing in me where an epiphany should be. The harder I dig to find some way in which being punished made me better, the more my gall rises at the suggestion that this corrupt apparatus operate for a second longer than it already has. The punishment it doles out is not edifying because there is no rational goal towards which it hopes to move us. The state simply bears down on you for a while, long enough to renew its coffers and appearance of purpose, and then it relents. Hopefully you have the resources–the good luck–to rebound when it’s over. I did. Many people do not.
I learned that the state is powerful. That is the only lesson taught in the prosecution of the war on drugs. I have no interest in using drugs anymore, and nothing of permanent value was taken from me.
Tags: a party sub made of solid weed, aesthetic theory, arrests, dealing, drugs, getting high and paying a horse’s rent, greg you had so many jobs working at a horse farm dealing drugs and the gas station, not thinking things through, weed
PAYING A HORSE’S RENT
THE PARTY SUB ANALOGY
greg ilu so much
There are many, many amazing things about this piece, but I want to especially note my appreciation for being introduced to the phrase “moral luck.”
i’m so happy i could do that!! yeah its a pretty crucial analysis of how arbitrary conditions allow some people to appear “better” than others.
I have complex opinions about the place of law and order and our duties to it as citizens (all of which only apply to UK law as that is the system by which I am governed) which this piece makes me consider yet further.
Good work, Greg.
Go on!
Hmm. OK. Deeply simplified it goes like this:
Law and the process of prosecuting Lawbreakers is essential to the safe and peaceful running of a society. The moral status of laws is neutral – a law can be just and unjust and still contribute to that.
HOWEVER in a reasonable, well-run society, more laws will be just than unjust.
REGARDLESS of the justice of a law, breaking it comes with consequences which as a citizen you must accept. In a well-run, reasonable society, extenuating circumstances will adjust the consequences.
HOWEVER if a law is egregiously unjust it may well be your duty as a citizen to break it. Yet you must still accept the consequences for that. Juries should refuse to prosecute people arrested under unjust laws (this is how homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK. Juries just refused to prosecute)
I am always, however, in favour of lawbreakers accepting the consequences of their actions no matter how unjust the law that they broke or how unreasonable the punishment – in the case of an unjust law accepting the consequences can in and of itself highlight the injustice.
These feeligns are always in flux and being adjusted according to new information, as all opinions about important things should be.
Sorry.
Everyone should know about jury nullification.
EVERYONE.
It’s also part of how some legal barriers to abortion were first challenged in Canada. A doctor (Henry Morgentaler) openly ran safe but illegal abortion clinics, and multiple juries refused to convict him.
But he did end up in jail for a while anyways, and he’s said that he was willing to go to jail for his actions, so I think he fits in C.B.Blanchard’s ideas.
(Facts in this comment are from Wikipedia, because somehow we didn’t cover this in high school history, so I blame the internet for anything I’ve gotten wrong here.)
I agree! This is one of the problems I had with Edward Snowden. Excellent to be a whistleblower, but if you want your action to really be as effective as possible, don’t go to Russia and China after your whistle=blowing act! Either stay in the US and face the consequences, which might potentially really force a big change in the system — as you say, “highlighting the unreasonableness of the punishment” and the unreasonableness of the state’s actions, painful as that may be — or else at the very minimum just go to Iceland and avoid prosecution and don’t make it look like you’re seeking asylum in states that might reward you for information about US intelligence.
In general, I would agree; the problem is that the US is, from the world’s point of view, one of the worst places to be in prison, and the prisons are places where people die or are driven permanently insane, through torturous regimes of extreme isolation (adseg, or solitary confinement, where people are confined 23.5 hours a day in a closed concrete box, with no reading or writing materials and no contact with other human beings at all. The half hour is spent in a recreational yard where, if they’re very lucky, they may get their half-hour in outdoor dog kennels, small strips enclosed on all sides by chain-link fence, where they can actually see the sun or stars or clouds and talk briefly and quietly with other humans. If they are unlucky, they get a slightly larger fully-enclosed concrete box.
In the same way as I would not have faulted Solzhenitsyn as a credible voice if he had managed to escape the GuLag, I have a hard time expecting anyone to submit themselves to a ridiculously punitive and health-dangerous US prison system, on the off chance that they’ll get to be the Mandela of the digital age when our grandkids figure out what a piece of shit we’ve created.
Y (L/100km) MV, of course.
greg be honest did you ever try feeding weed to the horse just to see what would happen
mallory, the horse didnt live with us. it lived in a barn a ways down the road.
im also pretty against getting animals high against their will. one time some guys got my cat high and she didnt like it and i was about as mad as I get. HOWEVER my dog loves to eat weed. during this time in my life she would eat ANY weed left within her reach. She would go in your purse and eat your weed. didnt seem to affect one bit.
No no for sure, it’s definitely bad, I just feel like it would be funny to do to a horse but of course you’re right, it would be wrong.
I agree that feeding weed to a pet or blowing smoke in its face is seriously fucked up and uncool, but I used to have a rabbit that loved fan leaves so much, no matter where we put our scrawny little bagseed pot plant, he would jump/climb to new heights to reach it and drag entire branches back to his cage. And when we smoked he would hop up and stick his face in the clouds we exhaled. After either activity he would take epic naps, sprawling and flopping magnificently and appearing extremely chillaxed. But now we have two new rabbits who don’t seem to be interested in weed at all.
Yay, for everything about this piece, and for you sticking up for your cat’s abstinence.
yeah, this is great! almost like a continuation of the supergreat DUI series which I am hoping will never end despite their saying it would in that interview.
And I really appreciate and relate to the description of cops as “inscrutable beings of terrible power, like aliens in The X-Files.”
This is great but it makes me want to write things on the internet that must not be shared. Thanks for writing your thing!
I love this. It’s funny how the two fellowships overlap and don’t.
Also “there is nothing morally relevant about happening to live in Virginia” intrigues me.
Although I miss New Orleans I couldn’t live in Louisiana anymore. Like I couldn’t be all buying fair trade coffee while subsidizing Angola Prison anymore. Like that?
As a person who recently failed a HAIR TEST for a job because of pot…yeah, it’s just not that big of a deal and while I feel bad about missing out on the job and I should have known better etc. etc. I really just get angry when I think about how ridiculous it is that I could be an alcoholic and that would be perfectly fine. It’s not like getting stoned occasionally has ever really affected my job performance, but drinking has certainly brought me in late and useless! Ugh, just legalize already.
Hair testing? For work? Ugh. I don’t know why this offends me so much more than “we may randomly pee test you at any time” but it does.
I was prepared to pass a pee test….hair test, not so much and I had zero warning. I kind of regret not just leaving when they told me instead of donating a chunk of my hair to this lost cause. and in case you are wondering, it was for a desk job so there is no chance of any life-altering injuries occurring because I smoked last month!
I work for a company that was just restructured and I had to go through drug testing to be “re-hired”. Luckily it was a piss test and the time span they gave us to take it was long enough that I was apparently able to get the weed out of my system. I had to retake it because my sample was too diluted the first time, but we were in the middle of a heat wave so it didn’t raise any red flags. The most frustrating thing to me is that every other drug is pretty much out of your system within days, marijuana takes the longest to flush out. It was so fucking stressful, I kept thinking HR was going to call me in for a talk.
Fake pee totally works. (So undignified to have to share this? But while we’re under this regime…) I mean for a normal job, not probation or a really special kind of job (where they would watch you in the bathroom and/or do more expensive tests). It was $25 at a local headshop, follow instructions and you’ll be fine. (Problem: may not be inexpensively available in your area.)
Yeah, I didn’t think it sounded like a thing that was legit. But the store that recommended it was a well-established institution, and I needed it on short notice for a desirable temp job and knew cleanses were really unlikely to actually work in that timetable. Others knowledgeable on the subject also endorsed it. And all really was well.
I had a hair test before I started my job. HOWEVER, now, according to their policy, they can't test me unless a manager thinks I'm high at work because I start fucking up or something.
So that's cool.
I just stopped smoking around graduation when I knew I'd be looking.
“Milton Friedman Fantasy World” OMG
I agree! This is one of the problems I had with Edward Snowden. Excellent to be a whistleblower, but if you want your action to really be as effective as possible, don't go to Russia and China after your whistle=blowing act! Either stay in the US and face the consequences, which might potentially really force a big change in the system — as you say, "highlighting the unreasonableness of the punishment" and the unreasonableness of the state's actions, painful as that may be — or else at the very minimum just go to Iceland and avoid prosecution and don't make it look like you're seeking asylum in states that might reward you for information about US intelligence.
I think Earthly Powers is kind of homophobic and messed up, actually. Although I’m still thrilled that someone besides me has read it.
The End of the World News is my fav.
is that true about juries refusing to convict for homosexual acts? I never knew that.
Interesting story. I agree, there are many, many amazing things about this piece, but I want to especially note my appreciation for being introduced to the phrase “moral luck.” Good work, Greg!
This is the tyrant pedant within me, ignoring all your other excellent writing and points, but I would like to point out that the pot grown in Humboldt county is devastating the environment and while it is certainly more ethical than pot that fuels the ongoing daily executions and torture in Mexico, it is still something that a person who wouldn’t buy something made in china or sold at a walmart should turn away from. In addition to deforestation and runoff, they steal water to grow it, and on this west coast, the water for all the people comes from about 2 places and is regulated and doled out in allowances. Which means that it exacerbates the water shortages we’re still failing to do shit about, when someone steals all the water that was earmarked for some tomato fields to grow pot.
Thus spake Captain Buzzkill. The only truly ethical pot is the one your friend’s neighbor has in a pot in his backyard, drinking recycled graywater only.
Fake pee totally works. (So undignified to have to share this? But while we're under this regime…) I mean for a normal job, not probation or a really special kind of job (where they would watch you in the bathroom and/or do more expensive tests). It was $25 at a local headshop, follow instructions and you'll be fine. (Problem: may not be inexpensively available in your area.)
Yeah, I didn't think it sounded like a thing that was legit. But the store that recommended it was a well-established institution, and I needed it on short notice for a desirable temp job and knew cleanses were really unlikely to actually work in that timetable. Others knowledgeable on the subject also endorsed it. And all really was well.