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What Happened?
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An Interview with Mike Ritter
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How did it feel that night at Chaucer’s? Euphoric. It was great to be back in Santa Barbara, especially on the book trip. I wanted to stay. Seeing people I knew in high school, people who were very dear to me, was powerful. And just the place itself is powerful. When I smell the sage and the damp of the morning fog hits me, it’s like a punch in the face. How has it been to look at your life through the lens of historical research? What this project has done for me is give me some kind of answer to a question that I have wondered about for most of my life, which is “What happened?” How did a whole generation get to be so crazy? As a kid, I was a motivated student in science with the talent and support to do whatever I wanted. Sure, there was a certain wanderlust in my character, but does that explain it? Conducting these interviews and doing the research for the book has finally allowed me to get a handle on it that works for me. I didn’t set out to become an outlaw. Now I wish I had done more on the inside of society and the law with my life, perhaps become some kind of scientist. But my generation went out in the world to teach ourselves — that was our approach. There were so many obvious flaws in what we were told and in what we were taught that we felt we had to start again from the beginning to develop our own understanding. And this insight, which came from the historical research process, led me to a deeper question than the one I had been asking for so long about myself, because it made me begin to wonder again about the intense reaction that we encountered — the war on drugs. I started to ask why there was this phobia about
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MIKEL ROBERTS
marijuana, what made it such a target? And I saw that ast fall, Thai Stick authors Peter Maguire and even the moral crusaders who drove the thing were Mike Ritter held a book-signing at Chaucer’s not themselves able to articulate their fear. America Books. The crowd in attendance included is a terribly competitive place, and the enduring presquite a few men in their fifties and sixties, ence of a strong military in the culture, the emphasis many of them wearing baseball caps and sporting Hawaiian-style shirts. The scammers were in the house. A large tub of Tecate on ice completed the picture, at the center of which sat Ritter, a tanned, fit 65-year-old with a bright but cautious smile. Surfer-turnedscammer, a brilliant navigator with a mathematical bent, Ritter freely admits to having spent a big part of his adult life smuggling marijuana in some form or another — beginning as a 19-year-old on the Hippie Trail through Morocco to Afghanistan and then Southeast Asia. Ritter grew up ROAD TRIP: Coauthors Peter Maguire (left) and Mike Ritter are seen on their in Santa Barbara, and clearly Thai Stick book tour. Thai Stick has been optioned for screen adaptation by most of the people who were John-Henry Butterworth, who was, along with his brother Jez Butterworth, there had turned out to see the screenwriter on Fair Game, the 2010 film about Valerie Plame that him, to ask him questions, and starred Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. to talk about the book. — CD
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on status both within and outside its borders, was threatened by this thing that could make people not care so much about that kind of status, and about their place in the competition. A thing that makes people not care cuts them to the core.
Do you feel vindicated by the changes to the law that are happening state by state today? Not really. It’s complicated, but I’m not entirely satisfied with what’s happening now. When we started out doing this in the late 1960s, I think we all believed that prohibition would come to an end, and that marijuana would be legal by the time we turned 30. If you had asked the scammers back then, 99 percent of them would wou wo u have said yes, it will be legal any time now. And that’s what I thought, too, but then Reagan tho came cam in, and prosecutors began using usi RICO more, and my feelings shift shi ed all the way the other way, and an I assumed that nothing would ever ev change. Now when I go to California and an see what’s happening, I’m stunned. Whatever blend of activst ism is and demographics that’s led to this, I give credit to the strategists. But medical marijuana? g Paying taxes on marijuana? It all P kind k of annoys me. I don’t think people should have to pretend p to be sick because they want to smoke pot. Part of me is dissatisfied with the new thing because at heart, I’m a smuggler, and I’ll do what I want no matter what you say. I have civil liberties, and you are at fault if you abridge them. I see a situation that’s changing rapidly, and looking back on what came before, and knowing that there are guys doing life sentences for being successful at this business, I feel like the people who made it illegal should be held accountable. ■
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april 3, 2014
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