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Robert Sabbag’s Loaded: A Misadventure on the Marijuana Trail portrays
the golden days of drugs
by JULIET WATERS
 It occurred
to me after reading Robert Sabbag’s Loaded: A Misadventure on the
Marijuana Trail, that Allen Long, the book’s real-life protagonist,
might very well have grandchildren by now. Oh, the stories he must tell
while bouncing them on his knee. Like:Once there was a little American
town called Ann Arbor, Michigan, that had a special law. Any citizen
caught in possession of any amount of pot, whether it was an ounce or
a pound would be fined $5. A local nonprofit community paper, The Ann
Arbor Sun could run a “Win a Pound of Colombian Contest.”
The winning entry was drawn by a county commissioner in a ceremony conducted
at the city hall. It was considered a big prize, worth $350. And in
that town, your grandpa was The Man.
He brought the people better Colombian from a legendary place called
Santa Marta. Colombian so good the citizens would gladly pay as much
as $500 a pound (though the farmers would gladly sell it for $12). They
were nice, the Colombians, maybe too nice. If they hadn’t sold
grandpa pure cocaine at $2 a gram, things might have been different.
But nobody was buying coke back then, and somebody had to use it. And
if grandpa’s plane hadn’t gone down that time on that beach
and that guy Tony A. hadn’t shown up, almost like magic, kindly
offering to ferry the pot to Florida… And if Tony hadn’t gotten
his friends Lonnie and Jimmy involved, maybe Granpa would still be The
Man. But maybe he wouldn’t, because things were way different a
long, long time ago, in 1975.
Or Long could just give them the book. Either way, there’s a magical
fairy tale quality to Loaded. He even ends up in the Colombian town
upon which Gabriel Garçia Marquez based his classic One Hundred
Years of Solitude. Long meets an old lady sitting in a hut lit by candles,
sifting through some of the most incredible pot he’s ever seen,
her walls papered with American money.
Sabbag, who wrote Loaded based on his conversations with Long, is no
Garçia Marquez, but he can certainly spin a tale. Sabbag starts
in the middle, where Long ends up on that beach, hours before his fateful
meeting with Tony A. and flashes back to Long’s younger, more carefree
smuggling days. We end up back at the beach at what seems like a typical
stroke of luck in Long’s remarkably charmed life. Though it’s
actually the first step in his demise.
“This would make a great movie,” Long laughs as he walks away
from Tony’s pal Jimmy, the Miami drug thug who has given Long the
option of handing over his multimillion-dollar pot business, or taking
a bullet in the head. Too bad a lame movie, Blow, is currently stinking
up the video shelves. The drug is different, but the story isn’t
different enough. Not just in the plot of rags to riches and back to
rags again, but in the hero whose tragic flaw (apart from drug addiction,
womanizing and extreme debauchery) is that he trusted too much.
If you’re willing to accept the basic premises of Loaded, it’s
a wonderful story. The first premise, that the drug dealer telling this
particular story was really the only one back then with integrity and
quality drugs. And the second: that the story carries a special innocence
because of the kind of drug being sold. Long, though a raging coke addict
throughout his career, claims he could have sold coke if he wanted.
But he believed, as he told his Colombian friend Ernesto, that coke
hurts people and if he sold coke, “Karma might come back to hurt
me.” Ernesto’s response, typical of the many charming Colombians
we meet: “Allen, if this Karma comes back to hurt you, I will kill
him for you.”
If you could sell lines like these by the gram, Loaded would be a great
investment. :
Loaded: A
Misadventure on the Marijuana Trail by Robert Sabbag, Little, Brown,
hc, 352pp, $34.95
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