Thai Stick: Surfers, Scammers, and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade
ISBN: 9780231535564
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Columbia University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Marijuana industry -- Thailand; Drug traffic -- Thailand -- History; Smugglers -- Thailand -- Biography;

Historian Maguire (Law and War) and former drug smuggler Ritter delve into the world of the international marijuana trade of the 1960s and 1970s, tracing its quasi-utopian roots to its suppression during the War on Drugs. Utilizing hundreds of interviews, the authors reveal how early entrepreneurs bringing high-quality marijuana into the United States sincerely believed that these drugs could provide epiphanies otherwise inaccessible; making fortunes by supplying illicit drugs was, for them, a case of doing well while doing good. Such sums of money attracted genuine predators, from ruthless drug lords to brutal pirates. In addition, the hapless transcendental entrepreneurs found themselves faced with an American government marching grimly towards an enforced prohibition on all illegal drugs, hard and soft. The authors are sympathetic to the loftier goals of the soft drug pioneers while acknowledging the realities of uninhibited capitalism; grand ambitions often led to a dank prison cell or an unmarked grave. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Peter Maguire is the author of Law and War and Facing Death in Cambodia . He is a historian and former war-crimes investigator whose writings have been published in the International Herald Tribune , New York Times , The Independent , Newsday , and Boston Globe . He has taught law and war theory at Columbia University and Bard College.



Mike Ritter dropped out of the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1967 and set off on the Hippie Trail to Afghanistan and India, where he began smuggling hash and marijuana in 1968 and continued for eighteen years. He recently graduated from the University of Hawaii with an undergraduate degree in astronomy and physics.



David Farber is as a professor in the Department of History at Temple University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and is the author or coeditor of several books, including The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism and Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America's First Encounter with Radical Islam .

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