Thai Stick

Bangkok sits on the left bank of the Chao Phraya River. Westerners know it by that name, while Thais call it Krungthep, and it has drawn smugglers and adventurers since the late 1700s. In the 1970s it played the role of a modern Casablanca for a new crowd of fortune hunters: surfers chasing the next season, idealistic hippies, and dangerous men still carrying the war in Vietnam with them.

Getting a load of Thai sticks from the farms of the northeast to buyers in America required steering through one of the most intricate smuggling routes ever used in the drug trade. Before the mid-1970s, most of the marijuana Americans smoked came from abroad, and almost none was grown at home. Few people remember this, and little has been written down, so the knowledge survives mainly in the recollections of the elusive people who took part.

Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter are the first historians to record this underground business. Working from hundreds of interviews with smugglers and law enforcement officers, they follow each step of the operation: the purchase, the transport, the return voyage, and the unloading. The book also portrays the colorful characters who turned a small GI venture into a professional trade worth enormous sums, and it tells the story from the smugglers' own side.