Smuggler's Blues
A True Story of the Hippie Mafia (Cannabis Americana: Remembrance of the War on Plants, Volume 1)
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Goodfellas meets Savages meets Catch Me If You Can in this true tale of high-stakes smuggling from pot’s outlaw years.
Richard Stratton was the unlikeliest of kingpins. A clean-cut Wellesley boy who entered outlaw culture on a trip to Mexico, he saw his search for a joint morph into a thrill-filled dope run smuggling two kilos across the border in his car door. He became a member of the Hippie Mafia, traveling the world to keep America high, living the underground life while embracing the hippie credo, rejecting hard drugs in favor of marijuana and hashish. With cameos by Whitey Bulger and Norman Mailer, Smuggler’s Blues tells Stratton’s adventure while centering on his last years as he travels from New York to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to source and smuggle high-grade hash in the midst of civil war, from the Caribbean to the backwoods of Maine, and from the Chelsea Hotel to the Plaza as his fortunes rise and fall. All the while he is being pursued by his nemesis, a philosophical DEA agent who respects him for his good business practices.
A true-crime story that reads like fiction, Smuggler’s Blues is a psychedelic road trip through international drug smuggling, the hippie underground, and the war on weed. As Big Marijuana emerges, it brings to vivid life an important chapter in pot’s cultural history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Featuring encounters with the late David Bowie and Norman Mailer, plus Mick Jagger and convicted murderer and mob boss Whitey Bulger, this memoir by Stratton, a former editor and publisher of High Times magazine, details the author's final years as part of the so-called Hippie Mafia. Beginning in 1980, he rehashes his time smuggling pot around the world and encountering an eclectic and often laughable cast of characters. Stratton went on to spend eight years in federal prison for transporting and harboring marijuana. While there, he wrote the cult classic novel Smack Goddess, and many of the tales of his real-life adventures in search of a massive high and the ultimate payday are absorbing in the same zany way as his fiction, often at the expense of credibility. Most of the individuals he mentions are identified only by nicknames such as Fearless Fred Barnswallow and Jonathan Livingston Seagull (later referred to as Jonathan Dead Seagull). Stratton's liberal use of dialogue casts some doubt on the veracity of his action and sex scenes. There's no doubt that Stratton is a keen and thrilling writer, but he reveals pieces of his own back story the same way he operated as a criminal: on a need-to-know basis.
