Thai Stick

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 For millions of American baby boomers, mere mention of the words Thai Stick conjures potent memories of a magical time, of days and nights that were as a dreamscape. And those words also evoke questions. Where did that stuff come from? How did it get here? Why was it so wickedly devastating? What happened to it? Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter answer those questions and much more in this rollicking story of swashbuckling surf punks gone wild. At once cutting-edge research and candid autobiography, the authors unravel the heretofore hidden history of the trans-Pacific cannabis trade in a way that only those who were there possibly could. This globe straddling tale rolls from Southern California surf shops to the beaches of Baja, from Maui to seedy bars in Thailand and on into the jungles of Laos, and from communist extermination camps in Cambodia back to DEA Headquarters in Washington. Along the way, we are introduced to a cast of real-life characters who are stranger than fiction, and who earned their place in the annals of American crime by chasing their own dreams across the high seas and back again, creating a billion dollar black market industry in the process, sometimes at the cost of their freedom, and sometimes at the cost of their lives. -- Craig Etcheson, War Crimes Investigator