Smokescreen: A True Adventure - Softcover

Sabbag, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841953792 ISBN 13: 9781841953793

Publisher: Canongate U.S., 2002

Synopsis

Do you think you have the balls it would take to risk your life for a million dollars?" Allen Long certainly did. Balls like a bull elephant's -- with charisma and cunning in the same large measure. But he needed to know that those around him could handle pressure. After all, they'd be violating Colombian and U.S. airspace in a dilapidated DC-3 and landing on jungle mud-tracks in bandit country. They'd have to avoid detection by America's most tooled-up law enforcement agencies and remain wired and vigilant at all times. They'd be pioneering dope smugglers -- doing it with aplomb and panache like no one else. Their leader, the irrepressible Long, was interested in only the best, Colombian Santa Marta Gold, the Beluga caviar of marijuana. He and his merry band of smugglers were responsible for upping the quality and quantity of weed smoked in North America for several halcyon years in the early '70s. And they did so in the most outrageous and remarkable fashion. From the writer of the drug-smuggling classic Snowblind comes a true story more hair-raising, high-octane, and heart-pounding than any fictional adventure thriller, as he relates the high times and fast living of America's greatest marijuana smuggler. Take a seat. And hang on for the ride of your life. "Sabbag is an incisive reporter and a stylish class-A writer.... Smokescreen will undoubtedly keep your pulse racing and adrenaline pumping." -- The Times (London) "Smokescreen is funny as well as scary. It will be enjoyed by readers who have never even shared a reefer." -- The Sunday Telegraph "Sabbag has a wonderful ear for dialogue and Long has some wonderfully outlandish yarns to spin ... extremely entertaining." -- The Observer "This guy Sabbag is a whip-song writer." -- Hunter S. Thompson "Mr. Sabbag is a first-rate writer." -- The New Yorker "An extremely rare cut of dry wit, poetry, rock-hard fact and relentless insight." -- Rolling Stone

About this title

Review

This is a story from the long-ago days of Colombian marijuana smuggling--long ago, because most of the pot now smoked in the United States is grown domestically, and the top narcotics import from Colombia is cocaine. Author Robert Sabbag tells the tale of Allen Long, who got involved in this unsavory business in the 1970s because he wanted to provide high-quality cannabis for his buddies and also for the sheer adventure of it. Some readers will find Long a disconcerting protagonist--he's a drug smuggler, after all--though it may appeal to advocates of drug legalization and readers of High Times. Sabbag essentially romanticizes Long's activities, such as when he writes about the "rather consoling absence of gunplay" that marked the business of marijuana smuggling in its primitive past. The storytelling is adequate, but parts of Loaded are plainly padded. Here's a bit of sample dialogue: "This is really great pot." "You like that?" "I don't think I've ever smoked anything better." A better and more hardheaded book on Colombian drug smuggling is Mark Bowden's Killing Pablo. --John Miller

About the Author

Robert Sabbag is the best-selling author of the drug smuggling classics Snowblind and Smokescreen, and the definitive book on the U.S. Marshals, Too Tough to Die. His journalism appears in numerous magazines, among them Rolling Stone, to which he is a regular contributor. Witness Protection, based on his New York Times Magazine cover story, "The Invisible Family", was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards, including Best Picture.

Edition details

• Publisher: Canongate U.S.
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1841953792
• ISBN 13: 9781841953793
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 406