Thai Stick
Surfers, Scammers, and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade
by Peter Maguire, Mike Ritter
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Pub Date Nov 19 2013 | Archive Date Jan 15 2014
Description
Thailand's capital, Krungtep, known as Bangkok to Westerners and "the City of Angels" to Thais, has been home to smugglers and adventurers since the late eighteenth century. During the 1970s, it became a modern Casablanca to a new generation of treasure seekers: from surfers looking to finance their endless summers to wide-eyed hippie true believers and lethal marauders leftover from the Vietnam War. Moving a shipment of Thai sticks from northeast Thailand farms to American consumers meant navigating one of the most complex smuggling channels in the history of the drug trade.
Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter are the first historians to document this underground industry, the only record of its existence rooted in the fading memories of its elusive participants. Conducting hundreds of interviews with smugglers and law enforcement agents, the authors recount the buy, the delivery, the voyage home, and the product offload. They capture the eccentric personalities who transformed the Thai marijuana trade from a GI cottage industry into one of the world's most lucrative commodities, unraveling a rare history from the smugglers' perspective.
A Note From the Publisher
Mike Ritter dropped out of the University of California at 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.
Advance Praise
"Thai Stick is a remarkable story, rich in untold details about a vastly lucrative yet little known trade."
—Anne McClintock, Simone de Beauvoir Professor in English and Women and Gender Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"An extraordinary work, being at once an participatory anthropology, a detached sociology, a cultural history, a remarkable example of oral history, a series of smuggling stories, and many other things to boot."
—Anders Stephanson, Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation Professor of History, Columbia University
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Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780231161343 |
| PRICE | $27.95 (USD) |
