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The year is 1980 and I’ve just crossed the Georgia state line from Florida on Interstate 75 in a big Buick with special shocks. I’ve got 300 pounds of marijuana in the trunk and I’m smokin’ a joint when a Georgia Highway Patrol car deposits himself directly behind me. Please. No. His flashers slash my rear view mirror where I watch the next 20 years of my life pass instantly.Was it the steady 55-mile-per-hour speed limit I’d maintained that gave me away? Or did they deliberately let me cross the state line as a tactic to secure aninterstate transport conviction? Before I can nudge the wheel to pull over, letalone answer the questions in my head, he grabs the left lane, stomps hispedal, and starts to disappear. My tears dry on my cheek and my sense of reliefis in direct inverse proportion to his fading flashers. What did I do with thatdoob?* * *Risk and reward, it’s central to life. From our first breath, we’re betting we’re goingto get another and learning to avoid the smack on the ass that induced it. Some of us learn more quickly than others and males often have their learningexperiences negated by the effects of drugs. The most powerfuljudgment-impairment coursing the veins of males is the hormone testosterone.“Hey everybody, watch this!” Is there a better explanation? I call ittestosterone poisoning.As with drugs, combinations of hormones can intensify the effects of each. If you combine testosterone and adrenaline, you’ll get a 25-year-old impaired enough to risk a frightful prison sentence to savor the I-did-it satisfaction ofadrenal glands emptied by drug smuggling. The money’s not bad either.* * *I used to go water skiing with a friend of my older brother. “Doug” had a driver’s license and a car with a trailer hitch and I had use of a small family boat. We were a good team in pleasure as well as in business nearly a decade later. Doug was always an entrepreneurial type. He bought a bunch of jeans and opened a clothing store.After that he owned a bar with some friends. They would shut off the cashregisters at around eleven o’clock in the evening and pocket all the proceedsuntil two a.m. Stealing from themselves kept their accountant puzzled and the taxman confounded.Doug and my brother weren’t nearly the potheads I was at the time, but Doug knew I was entrepreneurial, bright, and most importantly, trustworthy. He needed a “mule” and offered me the job. He would drive to southern Florida in his Camaro and Iwould fly down after he arrived. The Buick would be loaded when I got there andafter resting a day or so, I would drive it back to Ohio with Doug following inthe Camaro. Presumably this was to insure against mechanical failure in theBuick and to keep me from driving off with $120,000.00 worth of bud. Only laterdid I realize it was Doug’s risk management tactic. If anyone was going to getpulled over with 300 pounds of weed in his trunk, it wasn’t going to be Doug.The only thing worse than having your mule drive off with your weed is havingthe cops drive off with it after they’ve locked your ass in the slammer.He’d pay me five bucks a pound or $1,500.00 for two days work, all expenses included, plusI could sell as much of the weed for as much as I could as fast as I could. Iremember making a grand a week, so I must have sold 50 pounds a week because I marked up each pound by 20 bucks. That’s not bad money nowadays; it was big money 31 years ago. How big? According to The US Inflation Calculator,$1,000.00 a week in 1980 is equal to $2,741.77 in 2011 dollars. That means a legal gig today would have to pay me $192,472.25 a year to equal what I earnedin 1980 tax-free and would place me in the top 5% of wage earners easily. “I’m sick of going out to eat. All we ever do is go out to eat.” my girlfriendcomplained. What does a woman want?Besides my mom wondering how herson with no job had a paid-for car and a new camelhair jacket, I had to watchfor nosey neighbors. I took the hide-in-plain-sight tactic with mine. “Goldie”was a talkative and corpulent welfare mother with three kids whose bedroomwindow was separated from my kitchen window by the width of my driveway.Instead of being secretive, which would have tipped her off, I continued to chatwith her regularly. We were friendly, but she would have loved to have turnedme in just to read her name in the paper. I wondered if the clerk at the Krogerstore found my purchasing 15 boxes of gallon Ziploc bags at once unusual ornot. Maybe she thought I caught a bunch of fish.* * *Bulk marijuana comes in bales wrapped in plastic held with duct tape. Each bale has something like #56, 48.7 lbs, #27, 36.5 lbs, etcetera, written on the duct tape. This is business; they’ve got to have some inventory controls Isuppose. I mopped the vinyl kitchenfloor of my bungalow and like a kid at Christmas, started unwrapping bales andbreaking them apart. I had pot from cabinet to cabinet two feet thick. “Getthis shit outta here!” my girlfriend exclaimed. That’s the idea, babe.Bulk marijuana is as dry as ajailer’s joke. This is an opportunity to make more money and increase thequality of the smoke. An industrial spray mist bottle of water weighs about twopounds and will resurrect about 50 pounds of weed quite nicely. At $800.00 fora bottle of water, and I need six of them, the economic incentive to remoistenbeckons with the subtlety of a twenty-dollar streetwalker.Every time I read about someone busted with a large amount of dope and a large amount of cash, I just think “Dumbass.” The first thing they teach you at drug school is to never keep your money and your dope in the same location for this very reason. If the worst happens, at least you’ll have money to mount a decent defense and believe me, you’re going to need it. You don’t want a publicdefender. I paid a bank teller friend in pot to count and keep my cash at herplace. She was fast and professional and we remain friends to this day.* * *After a while on the dark side and coming back again, it’s kind of amusing to hear people complain about how stressful their jobs are. If you screw up theMcGillicuttey account what’s the worst that will happen? You’ll get fired?Fired? Big deal. Lose that attaché case with the quarter million dollars in it anda firing will feel like a toddler’s kiss on the cheek. A commercial pilot couldsurvive a plane crash that killed hundreds of his passengers but unless he wasdrunk, he isn’t going to go to jail for it. The stakes are much higher in theillicit trades, as are the rewards. Job stress? You can’t feel the meaning ofthe words until you’ve been illegal.That’s not to say the folks I worked with weren’t some of the nicest in the world.Virtually all were middle class business owners with families. It’s just therisk/reward thing again. The profits are lucrative and tax-free especially whencompared to the hurricane shutter business. There are exceptions. Doug andanother associate ventured to the Philippine Islands once to try to put a potdeal together. They met some guys in a bamboo hut in the jungle and werepromptly relieved of $5,000.00 at gunpoint. Oopsie.Then there was the time Doug loaded the Camaro, eschewing the Buick and mule, and had car trouble. He made it to a mechanic who fortunately never needed to look in the trunk. I can’t decide if Doug has the biggest balls of any guy I’ve ever known or is just insane.I recall the election of Ronald Reagan not for any particular political reasons, but because the vote tallies were on the evening television of a regular customer when I dropped off eleven pounds.* * *Getting ripped off is the second worse thing that can happen to a pot dealer. The first, of course, is getting busted because you not only lose your inventory for which you owe lots of money, you face the likely possibility of a jailsentence. I was never busted for dealing, but I did get ripped off. I “fronted” (loaned marijuana for promise ofpayment upon subsequent sale) a friend three pounds and he never paid me forit. The bastard fell off a roof several months later and was permanentlyparalyzed from the waist down. Karma’s a bitch I guess. My buddy Artie Johnsonkilled himself on his motorcycle owing me 168 bucks.Long before my volume dealing days,I did get a visit from an agent of the local Metropolitan Drug EnforcementUnit. A guy named Jeff Huenfeld, who had played on a baseball team with my older brother who was killed in Vietnam, knocked on my door and flashed his badge. He was firm but friendly and together we pulled up the five-foot-tall marijuana plant I had growing in my backyard. He was going to let me slide on the plantif I’d just roll over on some associates. “No thanks”, I told him. Iappreciated the break, but I’m not a rat.He came back several weeks later with the whole Metropolitan Drug Enforcement Unit.Guns drawn and screaming, they surrounded my house and kicked in the frontdoor. When I asked to see a warrant, the back of a nark hand smacked theglasses off my face and someone said, “There’s your fucking warrant, asshole.”They held my roommate at gunpoint and confiscated my girlfriend’s period-cramppills because they were in the wrong prescription bottle. While some ransackedthe house, pouring shampoo over the towels they tossed in the tub, others satat my table and ate the French fried shrimp I had prepared for dinner. “You’rea pretty good cook, man”.They were so busy pouring shampoo, eating my supper and ransacking my house they missed the pound or so I had stashed under the shelf covering the tub faucets but did find the ounce in my dresser. As the jail doors slammed shut I recognized a voice in the next cell as an associate I refused to rat on. We were all sweptin one day.I faced cultivation and possession charges,but the charge that concerned my attorney was “Obstructing Official Business.”That’s the one they threw in for my asking for the warrant, pesky Constitutionand all. Fifteen hundred dollars in lawyer retainer fee later, they droppedeverything but the possession charge and I paid a $50.00 fine.Agent Huenfeld attended a party hosted by a mutual friend over a decade ago. He apparently expressed regret for his gestapo-like tactics and those of his police associates.Like any other business, I am responsible for my subordinates and this will be my economic undoing. “Jerry” called one morning, explaining that the 18 pounds I’dfronted him had been sprung from the trunk of his Rivera the night before. I went over and saw the trunk lid languishing permanently open, the lock punched neatly. It reminded me of a pretty girl too drunk to keep her skirt fromblowing up in the wind after she’d fallen, her legs askew. Jerry didn’t have the money he owed me forthe pot, but that made no difference to the people I owed. Losing seven largeto cover for Jerry was incredibly painful; it was all my operating profit andcapital. That’s almost twenty-thousand in today’s dollars. Although I didn’t know it at the time, it wasthe best lesson of my business life. I still had the things that mattered mostto me, my freedom, my family, friends and girlfriend. I realized it was onlymoney and that I could just make more.* * *I’m quite anxious to release most of my essays to the world through the Internet, but with this one I’m more circumspect. This and the pornography I wrote and posted under a pseudonym. What if I want to run for city council one day and my opponent digs up this thing? Will it be perceived as romantically as wenostalgically view old Uncle Bob, the heroic rumrunner during Prohibition?Uncle Bob’s been vindicated by the 21st Amendment to the Constitution. Will myvindication come upon decriminalization, medical use or legalization? Historyis replete with vindicated lawbreakers. Nicholas Copernicus was jailed forinsisting the earth revolved around the sun 600 years ago. John Brown killed afew innocents in his quest for the abolition of slavery. Or will my futureopponent try to make the case that since terrorists make money from drugs, I’msomehow one of them? I’m arguing that it is the prohibition itself driving theprofits in the drug trade. Were legalization enacted tomorrow the terroristswould be out of business, their profit incentive eviscerated. If you’ve ever inhaled some imported marijuana, you’re as guilty as I am.In Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, author Ander Monson says of his juvenile delinquency: “In my life, there is a tension and pride in recollecting mycriminal past. I can’t avoid it. I am proud of these transgressions…They arewhat I’ve done whatever claim to glory or ignominy…I’m not exactly penitent,nor am I flat out apologetic.” Monson has the excuse of youthful indiscretion;I can make no such claim although we share the ambivalence and pride of ourexperiences. He is not a felon through the generosity and foresight of thejuvenile criminal justice system. I am not a felon through training, luck andskill.I couldn’t drive a load of weed today if you paid me a million dollars. I don’t have what it takes anymore, even though my doctor said my testosterone levels are normal for my age. Just like the tempting cuties at college that I keep off limits,the urge to earn a large amount of cash relatively quickly is easilycontrolled. As we age, our perspective of risk, reward, and the fear of gettingcaught changes and make us more conservative. The tragic life cards dealt bythe hands of fate remain invisible to the younger players. Their friend Artyisn’t dead yet. I could have done twenty years in prison thirty years ago; nowthat’s a life sentence. It’s a young man’s game, and I played it with a young man’s heart and hormones. Both elude me now.