Several enterprising young men saw an opportunity. They harvested hemp plants growing wild along fence rows and roadsides in Iowa farmland. They dried it, processed it and blocked it into small units, easy to move. They sold it like cotton candy in New York at the Woodstock Festival in 1969, the three-day, rock and roll, joint toking, Aquarius jam fest of peace and love. Fueled by greed with testosterone for the after-burners, they gathered money in the $1,000s, then the $10,000s. They jumped up to the $100,000s after one bungling run to Jamaica. Only the powerful ganja gods of luck kept them from sinking, starving, getting robbed, killed, arrested, and jailed for life by both the Jamaican and US authorities. Soon, the deals jumped to the $1,000,000s and before long to the $10,000,000s. Truly, marijuana millions.This book tells the Florida marijuana story from the point of view of the participants, the people who lived it from both sides, the smugglers and the narcs, the preachers and the offloaders. Woodstock was just a small initial run. By 1973, the runs were in the tons of Columbian Gold. Eighteen-wheel semi-trucks loaded with hash burned up the interstate highways, reaching every hippie in every corner of America. There was a common feeling that the smugglers were just good ole boys out for a good time like Robin Hood and Little John evading the evil Sheriff of Nottingham. When four people were murdered and dumped down a sinkhole, attitudes changed. By the mid-1980s, law enforcement shut down pot smuggling.Everything in this book is a matter of public record, reported in newspapers, court documents, and in books by others interested in that period and those events, notably by Steve Lamb, Loren G. "Totch" Brown, and Ben Green. Every name in this book is made up. I put the fictional fishing village of DeSoto on Perico Island, a real place. Anyone looking for new dirt will be disappointed. It is not in here. No long-kept deep secrets are revealed. Sit back, enjoy a good read, and learn about the marijuana millions of the 1970s and 80s.
