Speaker 1: School of Humans. Do you want to join me here?
Speaker 1: Whence you be seated, please, Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen,
Speaker 1: I would like to summarize for you the meeting that
Speaker 1: I have just had with the bipartisan leaders, which began
Speaker 1: at eight o'clock and was completed two hours later. I
Speaker 1: began the meeting by making this statement, which I think
Speaker 1: needs to be made to the nation. America's public enemy
Speaker 1: number one in the United States is drug abuse. In
Speaker 1: order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary
Speaker 1: to wage a new, all out offensive. Depending on your
Speaker 1: age or interest in history, that voice and speech may
Speaker 1: sound familiar to you. This is a press conference with
Speaker 1: President Richard Nixon, also known as Tricky Dickey. Nixon was
Speaker 1: elected president in nineteen sixty eight, and in June of
Speaker 1: seventy one, Nixon declares public enemy number one drug abuse.
Speaker 1: Drugs and the people who distribute them are the most
Speaker 1: dangerous enemies to the public. The war on drugs has begun. Now,
Speaker 1: drugs are put into categories based on how dangerous they
Speaker 1: are thought to be LSD and pot. The foundations of
Speaker 1: the psychedelic Revolution of the nineteen sixties are considered the
Speaker 1: most Dangerous Schedule one. So Nixon increases federal funding for
Speaker 1: drug control agencies and proposes super strict measures like mandatory
Speaker 1: prison sentencing for drug crimes. Nixon also creates the d EA,
Speaker 1: the Drug Enforcement Administration in nineteen seventy three. And in
Speaker 1: the middle of it all is my dad building up
Speaker 1: his smuggling business in Marine County, California. This is disorganized crime.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Rainbow Valentine do Young, free and groovy,
Speaker 1: making it up. We rolled along, rolling along far Country,
Speaker 1: the Golden Ganging Dot, New York State, making it up
Speaker 1: as we roll. It's the summer of nineteen seventy three
Speaker 1: and we are living in Mill Valley. You're nestled in
Speaker 1: the red wood. Just a hot producer tip. When you
Speaker 1: blow your nose, put some space between the storytelling and
Speaker 1: the nose blowing so I can cut it out. I
Speaker 1: didn't even think about That's why, ah, Dad. One day
Speaker 1: we'll figure out how to record perfectly. So in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy one, when Nixon declares the war on drug dealers
Speaker 1: and drug abuse, my dad has been living with my
Speaker 1: mom and her small daughter, Vertica for a while, taking
Speaker 1: on the role of father and he needs to start
Speaker 1: providing for his new family. Anyway, I needed to make money.
Speaker 1: I wanted to make money, and so I started doing
Speaker 1: smaller time deals ten pounds of this or twenty pounds
Speaker 1: of that or whatever. And so if you're doing it's
Speaker 1: quite a small time selling a satchel here, say it, right,
Speaker 1: you know, a box full of ten pounds of this
Speaker 1: or and you'd sell it? Announces maybe, no, never, I
Speaker 1: didn't do that, but I would sell at least a
Speaker 1: pound that. It's you're still sort of larger. You're never small, right.
Speaker 1: He goes over to a dealer's house who is the
Speaker 1: boyfriend of one of my mom's North Beach belly dancer
Speaker 1: friends from the early sixties. Now, this guy sells pot,
Speaker 1: acid coke. He's a reasonable sized dealer. My dad's at
Speaker 1: his house and he and a bunch of other smuggler
Speaker 1: type guys and music guys are playing cards when and
Speaker 1: there's a knock on the door, and all of a sudden, well,
Speaker 1: these cops come busting in. So they arrest me, along
Speaker 1: with everybody else, and my dad has a gram of
Speaker 1: coke in the pocket of his sergeant Pepperesque jacket, which
Speaker 1: was a gift from the film producers of Alice's Restaurant,
Speaker 1: Arlo Guthrie's nineteen sixty nine cult classic that my Dad
Speaker 1: was an extra. Luckily, the coat is hanging on the rack,
Speaker 1: so when it's seized by the cops, my dad is
Speaker 1: literally not in possession of any drugs. Dad sacrifices his
Speaker 1: precious coat in exchange for freedom, and to this day,
Speaker 1: he still misses it and I always look for it
Speaker 1: in the San Francisco thrift's stores. My dad and the
Speaker 1: rest of the gang are hauled down to the jailhouse,
Speaker 1: but the cops let him go with a warning that
Speaker 1: he'll get a summons. Says he didn't have any drugs
Speaker 1: directly on him. He was just hanging out with a
Speaker 1: drug dealer, and luckily Dad and I former filmmaker and
Speaker 1: candlemaker from New York, was in a relationship with one
Speaker 1: of the most well connected people in San Francisco, my mom.
Speaker 1: My mom was a quiet, beautiful powerhouse in the inner
Speaker 1: circle of the San Francisco music scene. At this point,
Speaker 1: she's a jeweler for San Francisco rock Stars. She knew
Speaker 1: everyone in the San Francisco sixty scene. From the rock
Speaker 1: stars to the smugglers, to the lawyers, because all she
Speaker 1: knew was huge time lawyers. She didn't know he's small time. No, no,
Speaker 1: she didn't, right, she knew all these guys, these guys
Speaker 1: who represented yeah, smugglers busted for five thousand pounds of
Speaker 1: pot or whatever it was, or this or that. Now,
Speaker 1: even though he got off, this arrest taught my dad
Speaker 1: an important lesson. If he was going to be a smuggler,
Speaker 1: he had to start taking it much more seriously and
Speaker 1: become a true professional, you know, and now and talking
Speaker 1: about it, I could say, Okay, you've been You've given
Speaker 1: up your child stuff. I was conscious enough to learn
Speaker 1: to be aware and cautious about parts of things. Getting
Speaker 1: busted is a smuggler's worst nightmare, and in the early
Speaker 1: seventies it becomes a much more common experience because Nixon
Speaker 1: has declared drugs public Enemy number one. Remember, just a
Speaker 1: few years ago, LST was perfectly legal, but now busting
Speaker 1: drugs and smugglers is an American priority. They are the enemy.
Speaker 1: In order to defeat this enemy, which is causing such
Speaker 1: great concern, and correctly so, to so many American families,
Speaker 1: money will be provided to the extent that it is necessary,
Speaker 1: under the extent that it will be useful. The criminalization
Speaker 1: of pot has a very long and very deliberate history.
Speaker 1: It started in the early nineteen thirties at the end
Speaker 1: of alcohol prohibition, and it leads to today when pot
Speaker 1: is categorized as a Schedule one drug. Schedule one drugs
Speaker 1: are substances, chemicals, and drugs that are defined as drugs
Speaker 1: with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential
Speaker 1: for abuse. Incredibly, cocaine and methamphetamine also known as crystal meth,
Speaker 1: are Scheduled two. One of the leading experts on the
Speaker 1: history of pot criminalization is my dad's friend, Bill Panzer.
Speaker 1: Bill Panzer has practiced law in California for over twenty
Speaker 1: five years and has been my dad's go to pot
Speaker 1: attorney since his longtime attorney, civil rights activist Bernie Siegel,
Speaker 1: passed away. Cannabis has been used, you know, for five
Speaker 1: thousand years, at least met medicinally, and in this country.
Speaker 1: What happened was, you know, we had alcohol prohibition in
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties, and when that got repealed, there was
Speaker 1: a guy named Harry Anslinger who had been working on
Speaker 1: alcohol prohibition for the federal government helping to enforce alcohol prohibition,
Speaker 1: and when that was repealed, he was appointed head of
Speaker 1: the Bureau of Narcotics, which is the forerunner of today's
Speaker 1: DA Viewer of Narcotics. As a small, little federal agency,
Speaker 1: didn't have much of budget, didn't have much power, and
Speaker 1: he basically wanted to have a job for himself, so
Speaker 1: he decided that since alcohol prohibition been repealed, he was
Speaker 1: going to go after cannabis when alcohol is re legalized.
Speaker 1: This guy, Harry Anslinger, the former prohibition enforcer, was probably
Speaker 1: concerned about his job security and he purportedly starts spreading
Speaker 1: fictional stories about pot, allegedly with the help of William
Speaker 1: Randolph Hurst, the newspaper baron and purveyor of yellow journalism,
Speaker 1: which is journalism based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration. Now,
Speaker 1: according to many historians, billionaire Hurst was on board to
Speaker 1: help spread lies about pot all things pot related because
Speaker 1: Hurst had invested heavily in the timber industry in order
Speaker 1: to make his newspapers, and hemp fiber was proving to
Speaker 1: be more durable and a cheaper way to make paper
Speaker 1: than timber. Not cool for timber investments. So he and
Speaker 1: his newspapers allegedly become instrumental in spreading graphic, histrionic, murder
Speaker 1: rape stories about cannabis. These high school boys and girls
Speaker 1: are having a hop at the local soda fountain. Innocently,
Speaker 1: they dance, innocent of a new and deadly menace lurking
Speaker 1: behind closed doors, marijuana, the burning weed when its roots
Speaker 1: in hell. Now. The most famous piece of antiweed propaganda
Speaker 1: is Reefer Madness, which is actually quite amusing. The nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty six film is a megamelodrama about pot smoking high
Speaker 1: schoolers whose theatrical descent into pot smoking addiction includes hit
Speaker 1: and run, rape, murder, suicide, hallucinations in total madness Smoky
Speaker 1: with the sole destroying refer they find a moment's pleasure,
Speaker 1: but at a terrible price debt, violence, murder, suicide. With
Speaker 1: help from the nation's newspaper billionaire Baron, all Harry ann
Speaker 1: Slinger has to do is convince states to pass anti
Speaker 1: cannabis laws, because at the time, the Fed still don't
Speaker 1: have the power to do that. So in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: Harry embarks on a ruthless anti marijuana pr campaign, starting
Speaker 1: in the Southwest. At that time, cannabis was usually known
Speaker 1: as hamp or India hamp or cannabis, and he started
Speaker 1: in the Southwest, where they were prejudiced against the Mexican
Speaker 1: migrant farm workers who called it marijuana. He with the
Speaker 1: help of William Randolph Hurst, who made up these stories
Speaker 1: about like Mexican farm workers that would smoke the marijuana
Speaker 1: and then rape the farmer's daughter and chop up the
Speaker 1: farmer and his family would hatchet. They started making up
Speaker 1: these stories and putting them in the local papers to
Speaker 1: try and drum up, you know, anti Mexican, discriminatory kind
Speaker 1: of attitudes and get behind making marijuana illegal. I have
Speaker 1: some friends who insist on calling pot cannabis. They never
Speaker 1: used the word marijuana, And when Bill told me about
Speaker 1: Harry's very intentional smear campaign, I understood why marijuana is
Speaker 1: a word specifically chosen to spread and incite racism. Now,
Speaker 1: while they couldn't make cannabis illegal, Harry and Slinger and
Speaker 1: his growing team of cannabis prohibition enthusiasts found ways to
Speaker 1: make it impossible for people to legally possess it. Nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty seven, they came up with this great idea that
Speaker 1: although we can't make marijuana illegal. We can set up
Speaker 1: attack and require people have tax stamps and then just
Speaker 1: not print any tax stamps. That was the first attempt
Speaker 1: to make it federally illegal, and that stood until I
Speaker 1: believe it was nineteen sixty eight. In nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: Tim Leary got busted driving into the United States in
Speaker 1: his Volkswagen with his family from Mexico. They had a
Speaker 1: little bit of weed on them. Ah. This is the
Speaker 1: same Timothy Leary, former Harvard professor drug activist Millbrook affiliated
Speaker 1: LSD pioneer who we talked about in the last episode. Okay,
Speaker 1: So Leary gets arrested and takes this case to the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court, stating that the nineteen thirty seven Marijuana Tax
Speaker 1: Act is unconstitutional. Leary challenged the Marijuana Tax Act and said,
Speaker 1: it requires you to incriminate yourself, requires me to self
Speaker 1: declare that I am growing or possessing cannabis, and that
Speaker 1: would violate the Fifth Amendment. And the Supreme Court agreed
Speaker 1: and knocked out the Tax Act of nineteen thirty seven,
Speaker 1: and in response to that, Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act.
Speaker 1: President Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act CSA into law
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy calling for the regulation of certain drugs
Speaker 1: and substances. Now, the CSA outlines five schedules to classify
Speaker 1: drugs based on their medical application and potential for abuse.
Speaker 1: Schedule one drugs are considered the most dangerous, as they
Speaker 1: purportedly pose a very high risk for addiction with little
Speaker 1: evidence of medical benefits. They also come with the longest
Speaker 1: prison sentence. Schedule one was supposed to be a temporary
Speaker 1: placeholder for cannabis, and even a Nixon appointed committee advised
Speaker 1: that cannabis should not be a Schedule one. They didn't
Speaker 1: know what to do with cannabis, so initially they put
Speaker 1: it in Schedule one with the agreement that they were
Speaker 1: going to appoint a committee to research cannabis and report
Speaker 1: back to Congress as to where it really should be scheduled.
Speaker 1: That committee appointed by Nixon was headed by Schaeffer. Now
Speaker 1: that's Raymond Schaeffer, a Republican who had served in the
Speaker 1: Senate and was the former governor of Pennsylvania. And the
Speaker 1: Schaeffer Commission to testimony looked at the science on it
Speaker 1: and everything, and they came out of the report that
Speaker 1: it should not be in Schedule one that the most
Speaker 1: dangerous thing about cannabis was getting arrested for it. This
Speaker 1: was surprising because nobody expected that result, because this was
Speaker 1: a conservative committee that was basically hand picked to come
Speaker 1: back and say that it's the evil weed. The report
Speaker 1: Schaeffer presented to Congress was called Marijuana a Signal of Misunderstanding,
Speaker 1: and in it he calls for the decriminalization of marijuana possession.
Speaker 1: It even favored totally ending marijuana prohibition. But then the
Speaker 1: White House just ignores it, suppresses the report and pretends
Speaker 1: like it never happened. Somewhere I think I heard they
Speaker 1: only printed up four hundred copies of it, the minimal allowed,
Speaker 1: and that was it. Why was Nixon so anti getting
Speaker 1: this information out? Like, what was that stake for him?
Speaker 1: I mean, Nixon hated hippies and black people and Jews,
Speaker 1: and he was hippies and black people and Jews who
Speaker 1: smoked marijuana. Real God fearing Americans drank alcohol. So Harry Anslinger,
Speaker 1: the marijuana prohibitionists, got his way. Pot and pot smugglers
Speaker 1: like my dad were officially public Enemy number one. I'm
Speaker 1: Ramo Valentine, you're listening to disorganized crime we'll be right back.
Speaker 1: This is the environment in which my dad started taking
Speaker 1: his smuggling career much more seriously, when marijuana had been
Speaker 1: totally vilified, even though a Republican Commission chairman reported that
Speaker 1: the most dangerous thing about marijuana was getting arrested for it.
Speaker 1: Over the next two years, Dad's building up his business.
Speaker 1: How any freelancer will tell you, business is based on
Speaker 1: who you know. And for the next few years, my
Speaker 1: dad got to know more peeps and Marine in San
Speaker 1: Francisco through his partner, my mom. He met people through
Speaker 1: music bands like The Grateful Dead. He was part of
Speaker 1: a weekly poker game with Elton Kelly, Stanley, Mouse, David Gets,
Speaker 1: and Big Daddy Tom donaghue, the rock and roll record producer,
Speaker 1: promoter and rock and roll disc jockey. Anyway, Big Daddy
Speaker 1: Tom Donahue had a Mill Valley mansion with a non
Speaker 1: stop party twenty four seven, and my parents would go
Speaker 1: hang out, make friends. That's how freelance business works. Biga
Speaker 1: New York City transplant amidst the pot industry of Marine County, California,
Speaker 1: was a major asset. My dad is a people person
Speaker 1: who stays in touch with all his trust to childhood
Speaker 1: friends still in New York. They loved getting high, making money,
Speaker 1: and turning people on good pot. A thriving smuggling business
Speaker 1: for Marinto New York organically evolves. Parents and big sister
Speaker 1: moved from San Francisco to San an Salmo and Marin County.
Speaker 1: Most of the musicians and big dealers are living in
Speaker 1: Marine And as my dad says, he melted into the
Speaker 1: scene such a hippy thing to say. I love it.
Speaker 1: I being very fortunate in the scene that I came
Speaker 1: right into was at the top of the top. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I was just introduced to big time people
Speaker 1: and so that was that was life in the direction
Speaker 1: I guess I chose. Pot was and still is part
Speaker 1: of the fabric of the culture of northern California. It's
Speaker 1: as common and intrinsic as church is to the South,
Speaker 1: film to La or corn to Iowa. So my dad
Speaker 1: was getting busier making real money. He did a quick
Speaker 1: deal involving pink coke. The manufacturers of the cocaine had
Speaker 1: made an error and the entire batch was pink. It
Speaker 1: wasn't white. It was so good pink because they had
Speaker 1: fucked up how they processed it. Apparently I didn't know
Speaker 1: this then, but they're they're, they're, they're presenting it as
Speaker 1: rose cocaine, you know whatever. My dad sold a kilo
Speaker 1: of rose cooke in one day and made four thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: Four thousand dollars in nineteen seventy two is the equivalent
Speaker 1: to over twenty four thousand dollars today. This is the
Speaker 1: only time my dad says he sold coke. After this experience,
Speaker 1: he vowed he'd never do it again because the coke
Speaker 1: guys were sketchy. So the smuggler and I, he really
Speaker 1: loved that I got rid of it. The next thing
Speaker 1: he did was invite me down to He was from
Speaker 1: La so he says, hey, come on down, we'll talk
Speaker 1: about more stuff. What I do remember is going down
Speaker 1: there and staying at his house and sleeping over it,
Speaker 1: and in the middle of the fucking night, he comes
Speaker 1: roaring through carrying a gun because he thought he heard
Speaker 1: somebody fucking coming through the door, which he didn't. Nothing happened,
Speaker 1: but that that was it for me, you know intern,
Speaker 1: Holy shit, guns, fuck this. And all these guys involved
Speaker 1: in this whole scene were older guys. They all scared
Speaker 1: me anyway, because they were adults and these are not
Speaker 1: my These are not people I want to be around.
Speaker 1: You're dealing with guns, you know. Fuck this? Yeah, your
Speaker 1: world was not good. Integrity, handshakes, friendship, music, well, so
Speaker 1: to speak. Listen, there were plenty of pot dealers who
Speaker 1: were major fucking Slee's bag assholes. Also, I mean there
Speaker 1: was lots of money rolling around, and consequently, you know,
Speaker 1: good people were good people and bad people were just
Speaker 1: But I very clearly you know that was it for me.
Speaker 1: Side note, Pot being a schedule one drug feels so ridiculous,
Speaker 1: a complete odds with a collective opinion of my parents,
Speaker 1: my parents, friends, and my friend's parents, also known as
Speaker 1: the Psychedelic Pioneers aka the counterculture Insider, because all hippie
Speaker 1: elders agree that cocaine and heroine destroyed the joyful, peace
Speaker 1: loving world famous San Francisco counterculture scene. So you saw
Speaker 1: the scene, the music scene destroy destroying by artistic heroes,
Speaker 1: by cocaine and hard drugs. Yeah, hard drugs, cocaine and
Speaker 1: hard drugs. Of all these people who were all these
Speaker 1: you know, I look at the whole what I look
Speaker 1: back on now and look at what happened in San Francisco,
Speaker 1: and this whole thing exploded and then got destroyed. It
Speaker 1: exploded with acid, exploded positively and amazingly with acid, and
Speaker 1: it was completely poisoned by hard drugs, which was despicable.
Speaker 1: We listened to the dead behind the backstage, and the
Speaker 1: cocaine was disgusting, and you know, and it was all
Speaker 1: the shit. I grew up with very strong anti cocaine
Speaker 1: and anti heroine rule drug rules, no cokeer heroine. But
Speaker 1: you can totally smoke pot or like lsd yes just
Speaker 1: come to us mushrooms. Great division quest Back to pot.
Speaker 1: It's nineteen seventy three and my parents are living in
Speaker 1: Mill Valley near the library. They're a house up a
Speaker 1: steep hill with over fifty steps to the front door.
Speaker 1: A load called lime green Mexican comes in and Dad remembers,
Speaker 1: the lime green is wonderful pot. Lots of pot that
Speaker 1: flowed in was like it. Literally they called it bricks
Speaker 1: because they were they were pressed. So it was such
Speaker 1: poor pot to begin with, and it was pressed in
Speaker 1: these presses that came in bricks, so you'd have a
Speaker 1: two pound brick. So it ran the gamut of quality
Speaker 1: and quality control was really important, and at that point
Speaker 1: in life and time fifty years ago, the most popular
Speaker 1: we all knew of and liked was a very light
Speaker 1: green lime green Mexican sativa. It was light, it was
Speaker 1: almost gold green, and was a very nice uphead with
Speaker 1: no physical characteristics. So that was like the legendary lime green.
Speaker 1: My dad remembers hauling fifty pound bales of lime green
Speaker 1: Mexican up the fifty plus steps to the front door.
Speaker 1: He did at least five hundred pounds of lime green,
Speaker 1: so that's a lot of steps. I remember carrying these
Speaker 1: giant garbage bags, fifty pound bales up to the house
Speaker 1: and then it'd be rolling out. But because of where
Speaker 1: we lived, nobody could see it anyway, and it was
Speaker 1: on a quiet, secluded street even though it was close
Speaker 1: right downtown. So these bales would move up, they'd move down.
Speaker 1: It was very funny, you know, jeez. I go back
Speaker 1: to that time, I'm twenty six years old or twenty seven,
Speaker 1: twenty six, twenty seven, you know it, gentle times and
Speaker 1: lovely pot and just living in that same year, in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three, my dad lands his biggest trip so far,
Speaker 1: remember trips or deals from start to finish. It's the
Speaker 1: big Panama Read trip. This trip, my dad moves the
Speaker 1: seven hundred pounds of Colombian pot. So my parents named
Speaker 1: this load Panama Read, which was a kind of generic
Speaker 1: term for various kinds of pot. Panama Read was later
Speaker 1: made famous by a song written by Peter Rowan in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three Animal on his later on at summer
Speaker 1: camp in the nineteen eighties, Peter Rowan showed up and
Speaker 1: he taught Panama Read to all the campers, and of
Speaker 1: course I took it literally. I thought it was about
Speaker 1: a cowboy. It's a pretty good song. It's pretty catchy.
Speaker 1: Now here's how the first Panama Red trip worked. It's
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three. My mom is pregnant with me, my
Speaker 1: big sister is between four and five, and my dad
Speaker 1: gets a hold of seven hundred pounds of pot from
Speaker 1: a Big Bay area smuggler. They're living and working out
Speaker 1: of the rental Mill Valley house with the fifty plus
Speaker 1: steps to the front door. My dad met the Brooklyn
Speaker 1: Boys through Nicki Sunshine, the East Coast Acid King, and
Speaker 1: the Brooklyn Boys would come over, pay my dad for
Speaker 1: the product and take it to New York City in
Speaker 1: big old cars with big trunks, Chevies or Plymouths. They
Speaker 1: would buy it outright, drive it to New York City,
Speaker 1: and then come back for more. The first Panama Red
Speaker 1: trip of seven hundred pounds earns my parents fifteen thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: which is the equivalent to more than eighty two thousand
Speaker 1: dollars today. So my dad is working with people who
Speaker 1: are surprisingly organized for disorganized crime and meticulous. Each box
Speaker 1: is expertly packaged and exactly ten pounds. Just love this
Speaker 1: pot because it was beautiful, absolutely beautiful, and it was
Speaker 1: really upper stuff. It was just very pretty stuff, well
Speaker 1: well manicured, well manicured into little buds, and they it
Speaker 1: smelled beautiful, It smelled like chocolate. And it was so consistent,
Speaker 1: which is a pretty unusual thing with hippies doing pot trips.
Speaker 1: Consistency is not what they were known for in the
Speaker 1: early days, necessarily, and so we ended I ended up
Speaker 1: doing seven hundred pounds of it. I remember these numbers
Speaker 1: because it was that was a lot of it seemed
Speaker 1: like a really pretty good amount of pot. Explain how
Speaker 1: this happened and where you picked it up? How did
Speaker 1: you get it? I don' understand right. So there's fishing
Speaker 1: all over the West coast, so fishing fishing boats and
Speaker 1: then fishermen. Different of these guys are approached and a
Speaker 1: main boat would come up and be thirty miles fifty
Speaker 1: miles offshore, and then a smaller fishing boat would meet
Speaker 1: it wherever and off float onto the smaller boat. You
Speaker 1: could fit ten thousand pounds on not huge boats. It's
Speaker 1: good size, but not huge boats. So when it came
Speaker 1: off the boats onto the trucks, it would go to
Speaker 1: a central warehouse generally, unless it was so big it
Speaker 1: had to go to several different warehouses. And then from
Speaker 1: there I would be dealing with people who had who
Speaker 1: were at that step who had to warehouses and then
Speaker 1: moved to meet or others like it. To celebrate the
Speaker 1: completion of the first Panama Red Trip, my parents embark
Speaker 1: on a vacation to Hawaii and leave five year old
Speaker 1: verticat Grandma's house. Giddy on financial success, they splurge on
Speaker 1: a helicopter ride from Mill Valley to the San Francisco Airport.
Speaker 1: It's about a forty minute drive from Mill Valley to
Speaker 1: the airport without traffic. Who takes a helicopter for that
Speaker 1: short a journey. Well, that's exactly what the helicopter meet
Speaker 1: and greeters thought. Anyone taking a helicopter has to have
Speaker 1: a lot of money. And my twenty seven year old
Speaker 1: dad doesn't look like an old moneyed Californian with his
Speaker 1: giant jewfro an ARTSI handembridered cowboy shirt and leather fringe jacket. Oh,
Speaker 1: he was clearly part of the bohemian hippie counterculture. Okay,
Speaker 1: so my dad is psyched for Hawaii and he decides
Speaker 1: to bring some party favors with him on this trip. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I thought, okay, well I'll bring a little bit with me,
Speaker 1: and I brought, oh, I don't know, a couple of
Speaker 1: grams of pot and a couple of capsules of mescaline
Speaker 1: and maybe a tiny amount of hash. And I actually
Speaker 1: I wrapped it all up and I hid it in
Speaker 1: a nut cracker doll. Who brings the nutcracker doll to Hawaii?
Speaker 1: I mean absurd? Right, Well, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: macadamia nuts in Hawaii. A holiday nutcracker is never on
Speaker 1: anyone's tropical vacation packing list. So my parents get off
Speaker 1: the helicopter, walk into the terminal and encounter some bad luck.
Speaker 1: We land at the airport and walk into the terminal
Speaker 1: and there's there's this place there where they they're absolutely
Speaker 1: going through your luggage like you just got back from
Speaker 1: from the Golden Triangle or something like that. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're they're inspecting it, like you're going through customs from
Speaker 1: who knows where. They're going through my luggage and they
Speaker 1: find this thing and they open it and they and
Speaker 1: they open it and what's this? I don't know, you
Speaker 1: know what you're supposed to say? It's drugs? They say, okay,
Speaker 1: young man, welcome with us. So Taffy is is what watching?
Speaker 1: While I'm getting busted. I hold my dad off in
Speaker 1: handcuffs as my mom watches from the other side of security.
Speaker 1: My mom pops to action and calls her rockstar pot
Speaker 1: lawyer and the bail bondsman. Okay, So, after successfully smuggling
Speaker 1: almost a ton of pot across the country, my dad
Speaker 1: gets busted on his home turf for a couple of
Speaker 1: grams of pot and a few hits of mescaline, which
Speaker 1: is a nature forward psychedelic drive from Poti. I just
Speaker 1: finished selling seven hundred pounds and I get busted for
Speaker 1: two grams. That is dodging a bullet. My friend I
Speaker 1: ended up having to I pled guilty to some misdemeanor
Speaker 1: pot But they started out by wanting a felony for
Speaker 1: the psychedelics, for the one capsule of mescaline or something
Speaker 1: like that, and eventually a deal was cut to where
Speaker 1: I would get four weekends in the Redwood City jail.
Speaker 1: My dad gets sentenced to four weekends in jail, which
Speaker 1: I didn't know was the thing, but yes, it is
Speaker 1: jail on the weekends. It's like a month long weekend workshop,
Speaker 1: but you go to jail instead of the ceramics studio.
Speaker 1: I'm making shop or writing a retreats. When I served
Speaker 1: the sentence, I would Taffy would drive me down and
Speaker 1: I check into the jail. I would take I can't
Speaker 1: remember if I would get so stoned or some sleeping
Speaker 1: pills or something. The place was like a zoo. They
Speaker 1: put me in this tank with all these mother rapers
Speaker 1: and father rapers, and you know, and here I am
Speaker 1: there and I didn't even talk to these people. And
Speaker 1: I guess there were bunks in the place, but the
Speaker 1: place was so crawling with people. They left the lights
Speaker 1: on all the time, and I didn't have a bunk.
Speaker 1: I ended up sleeping on the dining table. And the
Speaker 1: fucking guards they were really assholes. They would I was
Speaker 1: supposed to get out at six o'clock on Sunday evening,
Speaker 1: and they would fuck around and they just sort of
Speaker 1: played games, and I got out whenever. It was maybe
Speaker 1: an hour later, half an hour later, and Taffy would
Speaker 1: be waiting down in the middle of Redwood City at
Speaker 1: the jail. Whatever you go, gets Chinese food in the
Speaker 1: city on the way home. Probably this is a very happy,
Speaker 1: go lucky story the way my dad tells it. And
Speaker 1: in the next twenty years, my dad's smuggling career grows,
Speaker 1: along with increasingly serious prison sentences for pot. Pot sentencing
Speaker 1: laws and my dad are like contrary fraternal twins, both
Speaker 1: growing in the pot industry in totally opposite ways. The
Speaker 1: more successful my dad grows as a pot smuggler, the
Speaker 1: more serious the pot laws grow. You're listening to Disorganized Crime.
Speaker 1: I'm Rainbow Valentine. We'll be right back. Despite these arrests
Speaker 1: and the ever looming war on drugs, my dad made
Speaker 1: the choice to remain a smuggler. It came with enormous risks,
Speaker 1: but it was lucrative, flexible, and fun. Now, the main
Speaker 1: reason my dad gives for working as a pot smuggler
Speaker 1: is freedom, and the prevailing philosophy in our household of
Speaker 1: freelancers is that money is freedom. My dad and his
Speaker 1: smuggling associates were driven by an even bigger force in
Speaker 1: their line of work. Money is enticing. But the children
Speaker 1: of the nineteen sixties counterculture felt betrayed by the US government,
Speaker 1: a feeling kindled by the ongoing Vietnam War and fed
Speaker 1: by what they saw as the government's hypocrisy and antagonism.
Speaker 1: So my mom told me this hilarious story getting an
Speaker 1: insider's perspective into the FBI in the sixties. One time
Speaker 1: I picked up an FBI agent in Chinatown in a bar.
Speaker 1: If you could believe this, this is a story I
Speaker 1: am here. Yeah, it's like one of the times I
Speaker 1: was living alone, and so I picked him up and
Speaker 1: took him home. Right, he had a trench coat. What
Speaker 1: was under the trench coat though, that was the real question.
Speaker 1: Close he had close up. But this was like nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty six and during that time, and he told, you know,
Speaker 1: we had a trist and then he told me that
Speaker 1: he worked for this this government, and that you know,
Speaker 1: there were rooms and rooms of people listening with like
Speaker 1: microphones to everything going on, and there was a surveillance
Speaker 1: going on. So that sinched it for me, because this
Speaker 1: guy was a real guy. It wasn't like the village
Speaker 1: voice telling you that shit was happening. It was this
Speaker 1: real guy telling me that like shit was happening. That
Speaker 1: was the only time I picked up a guy in
Speaker 1: a bar, though. I want to tell you, my parents
Speaker 1: also saw many of their peers sent of Vietnam or
Speaker 1: they both felt was pointless, classist and maliciously dishonest. Dennis
Speaker 1: McNally or in nineteen sixties counterculture historian from last episode,
Speaker 1: So this really potent thing about anger and the bitterness
Speaker 1: of the nineteen sixties youth and the counterculture. What happened
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties was that there are four or
Speaker 1: five things that, whether you're conscious of it or not,
Speaker 1: as an American, you're taught to believe in. One of them,
Speaker 1: for instance, is that America is uniquely great and wonderful
Speaker 1: and can do no wrong and if it's American, it's good.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that more comes in on all this because
Speaker 1: remember in the nineteen sixties, when I was getting ready
Speaker 1: to go to college and going to college and facing
Speaker 1: the draft. I was the son of a military veteran,
Speaker 1: as most people of my age, because most Americans who
Speaker 1: were service age in the nineteen forties served in World
Speaker 1: War Two and defeated a really horrible foe, and we're
Speaker 1: very proud of that as well they should do. And
Speaker 1: the fact is that the assumption was that if America
Speaker 1: was going to go to war, that it was necessary.
Speaker 1: And that's what got Lyndon Johnson in deep, deep trouble
Speaker 1: my fellow Americans. Not long ago, I received a letter
Speaker 1: from a woman in the Midwest. She wrote, very muster, President,
Speaker 1: in my humble way, I am writing to you about
Speaker 1: the crisis in Vietnam. I have a son who is
Speaker 1: now in Vietnam. My husband served in World War Two.
Speaker 1: Our country was at war. But now this time it's
Speaker 1: just something that I don't understand. This is President Lyndon B.
Speaker 1: Johnson's news conference from nineteen sixty five, where he's defending
Speaker 1: the Vietnam War. Why most young Americans born into a
Speaker 1: land exultant with hope and with golden promise toil and
Speaker 1: suffer and sometimes die in such a remote and distant place.
Speaker 1: The answer, like the war itself, is not an easy one.
Speaker 1: We have learned at a terrible and a brutal cost
Speaker 1: that retreat does not bring safety, and weakness does not
Speaker 1: bring peace. Lennon Johnson decided that he couldn't lose a war,
Speaker 1: and that the idea that America could lose. So he
Speaker 1: kept putting more and more resources in the Vietnam, and
Speaker 1: it became more and more obvious that he was rung
Speaker 1: and that a we weren't going to win the war,
Speaker 1: we had a business being in the war, and so
Speaker 1: forth and so on. So if you're a teenager in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties and you suddenly discover that, gee, the
Speaker 1: government's been lying to us, and then you are forced
Speaker 1: you're you're forced to start challenging all kinds of assumptions.
Speaker 1: One of them is that all drugs are bad, right,
Speaker 1: That was one of the messages from America. And you know,
Speaker 1: people tried pot and I went jeeus makes me eat
Speaker 1: a lot of ice cream. But other than that, you
Speaker 1: know where I don't quite see the damage share And
Speaker 1: that that that left us with um an enormous gap
Speaker 1: in belief in challenging the you know, the the traditional
Speaker 1: American beliefs. My parents grew up in Harry An Slinger's America.
Speaker 1: Remember he was the guy who spread the antimerajuana propaganda
Speaker 1: after prohibition, but their personal drug experiences were the opposite
Speaker 1: of what the government asserted was the truth about marijuana.
Speaker 1: I could say, oh, drugs changed my life. They did,
Speaker 1: but absolutely positively. It opened my eyes to seeing that
Speaker 1: there was more to the real world, to the real world,
Speaker 1: not to some pollucinatory other world. More to the real
Speaker 1: world than just the experience of being where you are
Speaker 1: right at that moment. It brought out as end quality
Speaker 1: of going inside and not outside and letting your boundaries disappear.
Speaker 1: I think it opened up life into art. Thought it
Speaker 1: was soothing in a sea of chaos because it was
Speaker 1: very just. Life is chaos, life is very fearful. During
Speaker 1: a nineteen ninety four interview, President Nixon's domestic policy chief
Speaker 1: John Erlickman suggested the War on drugs campaign had ulterior motives.
Speaker 1: Keep in mind, Erlickman did have a complicated relationship with Nixon.
Speaker 1: Nixon was immediately pardoned for Watergate, and Erlickman ended up
Speaker 1: in prison for a year and a half. However, in
Speaker 1: the interview published in Harper's magazine, Erlickman explained that the
Speaker 1: Nixon campaign had two enemies. Erlichman is quoted as saying,
Speaker 1: the anti war left and black people. We knew we
Speaker 1: couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war
Speaker 1: or black. But by getting the public to associate the
Speaker 1: hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing
Speaker 1: both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest
Speaker 1: their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and
Speaker 1: vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did
Speaker 1: we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course
Speaker 1: we did. Now. My dad and most of his smuggling
Speaker 1: colleagues felt and still feel their work was honorable. They
Speaker 1: felt deceived by the government. To them, the government was
Speaker 1: the bad guy. So if they're subverting the bad guy,
Speaker 1: what harm are they actually doing. I think the government's
Speaker 1: success and rightful righteousness in World War Two led to hubris,
Speaker 1: and hubris leads to a desire for more power, and
Speaker 1: power corrupts, so corruption leads to a pushback at some point,
Speaker 1: because energy isn't stagnant. It ebbs and flows, pulses, moves
Speaker 1: like a fractal laser hippie light show. There is cause
Speaker 1: and effect in a never ending game of ping pong.
Speaker 1: So let's find out how the energy moved in my
Speaker 1: dad's industry. So now it's the early seventies. My dad
Speaker 1: has a life partner, a little kid, his partner's pregnant,
Speaker 1: and he's in his late twenties. He's been doing small
Speaker 1: to medium deals with anywhere from fifty to a couple
Speaker 1: thousand pounds a pot, storing merchandise in the house, and
Speaker 1: working with whoever comes along, people who might be sloppy, careless, stoned,
Speaker 1: or all three. He's been a kid and treating the
Speaker 1: business like a breezy lemonade stand childishly. But in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four, on the dark and stormy night, when my
Speaker 1: parents lost all their money but gained a child me,
Speaker 1: my dad knew he had to change careers or change
Speaker 1: his business model. I lost my complete completely lost my
Speaker 1: self esteem. Taffy and I split up. I thought I
Speaker 1: was so worthless and I failed and I failed my family,
Speaker 1: you know. Coming up in episode four, my dad loses
Speaker 1: everything and is forced to rebuild. I'm Rainbow Valentine and
Speaker 1: you're listening to Disorganized Crime. Disorganized Crime Smuggler's Daughter is
Speaker 1: written and recorded by Me Rainbow Valentine. Our producers are
Speaker 1: Gabby Watts and Taylor Church. Exactly To producers are Brandon Barr,
Speaker 1: Brian Lavin, Elsie Crowley and Me at School of Humans,
Speaker 1: and Connell Burn and Charles Bryant at iHeartRadio. Our music
Speaker 1: is by Gabby Lala and Claire Campbell, with original theme
Speaker 1: by Mark Karen and Me. Special thanks to Peter Rowan
Speaker 1: for the use of his song Panama Red. You can
Speaker 1: follow us online at Disorganized Crime podcast dot com. Right
Speaker 1: novel the story Do It As with Me Tam by
Speaker 1: Stephen Princess of the Red Dreams, Keep It Real, Handshake,
Speaker 1: Seals the Deal, Wrap the Stack, the seal of the Meal,
Speaker 1: and Going Up. These are gold in a Doobie, Young,
Speaker 1: Rich and Groovey Making it Up. We rold along in
Speaker 1: Love Fower Country Roll, Rolling Love fer Country Roll, Rolling
Speaker 1: Love Far Country Roll