A bad career move
Talk about a cautionary tale. We’ve got one for you today in our nonfiction section from Hugh Yonn, a Florida writer who reflects on the inadvisability of becoming a big-time marijuana dealer.
His short story, ‘Shoulda Robbed a Bank,’ is an account of Yonn’s own experiences, and while the title may seem a bit on the flippant side, the story raises serious questions about America’s drug laws.
I know, I know, all drugs are risky. And, no, I don’t want my surgeon or airline pilot smoking weed. Of course, I don’t want them drinking booze, either. Because while marijuana can lead to addictive behavior — as can caffeine, sugar or, for that matter, food in general — alcohol is a hard drug that can lead to physical addiction.
And there are other risky behaviors to which most of us have legal access — namely, possessing handguns.
So is a man who’s hiding three pounds of marijuana on his person more of a threat than a man who’s hiding three pounds of a loaded .45-caliber automatic under his jacket? Or, to carry the example to the extreme of Yonn’s case, is a man who flies a load of marijuana into this country — even six tons of it — more dangerous than a man who endangers everyone in your neighborhood bank by demanding money at the point of a gun?
A supply-side economist might argue that the marijuana importer is the only one meeting a demand — that of the nation’s millions of marijuana users — while I don’t know of any banks that want to be robbed.
I’m just asking. You decide.
Yonn was a supply-sider of sorts himself when he got into the marijuana import business: He wanted to increase his supply of what he calls “toys”: cars, boats, motorcycles, airplanes and antiques.
“I may have been able to find the same satisfaction with a nice Matchbook collection,” he writes. “Then again, maybe not.”
Yonn, 61, a native of Jacksonville, Fla., worked in the field of sales until a divorce in the 1970s led him to a bartender’s job in Delray Beach, Fla., where he met what he calls the “customer base” for his marijuana sales.
His ill-fated shipment — he said it was going to be his last since it would have netted about a million dollars — ended when he was arrested aboard his aircraft on a North Florida landing strip.
He was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison. Even though good behavior cut that to about five years, Yonn saw bank robbers who served less time than that.* By the way, he earned one of his two associate degrees while in federal custody.
That was all about 20 years ago, and he’s now in the real estate business in Grant, Fla. Check out his story in the nonfiction section.
Other new offerings today in our Works sections:
• Chapter One of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. On a numbing winter morning, Tess Dyer’s marriage of 11 years ends in a brief proceeding that her husband doesn’t bother to attend. Then, in a local cafe, she is called a whore. She looks beyond the borders of her small town to an even smaller one.
• Another short story in the fiction section from James L. Fox, the self-styled Mojave Hermit, although this tale does not involve prospectors or other likable desert rats. ‘Feeding Frenzy’ is about a young survivalist, turned into a terrorist by bad experiences with the news media, and a veteran detective who must stop him. It is Fox’s longest — and darkest — offering to date.
• Chapter 13: Stockton Street of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard and Ginny finally consummate their love, and Gerard gets serious about her expectation that he will be a writer, wandering across the country in search of subjects to write about until a phone conversation with her brings him rushing back to San Francisco.
• Chapter 19: Boarding Call of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing. After several months of conversations between an alien ship in the New Mexico desert and a team of scientists, preparations are made for the ship’s departure for its home world with 200,000 humans aboard.
– Sid Leavitt
NOTE:
*In fact, when Yonn researched the federal system, he found that incarceration for large-scale marijuana offenses averaged 34 months, for armed bank robbery 22 months.
Posted in Uncategorized |
May 18, 2008 at 1:11 pm
I’m of two minds about legalizing marijuana.
While I think that decriminalization would both increase federal revenue through taxation and weaken organized crime and make it less dangerous for law enforcement officers (my brother in law knew some of the RCMP officers killed in the Rochfort Bridge grow-op shoot out in 2005), from personal experience I also know that marijuana is both addictive and while not necessarily a “gateway” drug, it can and does turn a lot of people into inactive wasters.
Also, the establishment looks for ways to keep its population subdued…a tranquilizing narcotic like pot, legalized and banalized by social acceptance and easy-access distribution, would make for a lot more passivity from people at a time when they should be especially questioning their government and the corporations that control government.
Marijuana in and of itself isn’t dangerous or bad or necessarily harmful, but how it is used, and how it would be positioned as a product, is where the real potential danger lies.
May 18, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Hey, Sid … I checked the story this morning. You really did some homework, sir. I was muchly impressed with the Lockheed PV 2 superimposed over the pot leaf. Hot dang … I think I’ll get some T-shirts like that.
May 18, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Thanks, Hugh. I especially appreciate your comment about the image of the PV-2 over the pot leaf. Because it was a chore. I don’t have Photoshop (too expensive for my limited use of images), so I had to produce the multiple image with Paint, a rudimentary graphics program that comes with my desktop computer.
Steve, I also appreciate your comments about marijuana, and I share your qualms about legalizing it. But I’m even more concerned about the effects of our ‘war’ on all drugs. I expressed this concern in an email to Hugh, and I’ll repeat it here:
Frankly, I think all drugs should be legal and the government should provide free drugs to addicts.
Among other things, legalizing drugs would free up a lot of government money for treatment, not to mention reduce the rate of crimes committed by addicts to get money for drugs whose price has been grossly inflated by our ‘war’ on them.
Also, legalization — and this is an important point to me — would remove the cachet of taking drugs from those who do illegal things as a form of rebellion. A lot of us in the 1960s and ’70s smoked pot as a sign of protest against what we thought was an overly restrictive society in which a narrow-minded fear of other cultures and societal philosophies — socialism, for example — had allowed the Vietnam War to happen. By the way, I was one of the young men drafted into the Army during that period, although, strictly by luck of the draw, I was sent not to Vietnam but to a border of the Soviet Union to monitor their armored divisions. I gave up pot years ago when I quit smoking cigarettes. (Protesting can be fun, but so can being able to breathe.)
I realize that those who argue against legalization have only the best motives for doing so, but so did those who lobbied for — and got — prohibition of alcohol. We all know how that turned out. I wonder how many people during Prohibition became alcoholics after taking their first drinks as a protest against their previous generation.
Drug addiction is a terrible problem in this country, but it’s one of the legal drugs — alcohol — that is causing the most damage. It’s time to focus more on the effects of all drug abuse and commit a lot more resources to treatment. It’s also time for tough love for addicts. We should let them know that we grieve for them but are willing to say goodbye unless they choose to try for recovery.
I don’t think there’s any other way.
May 18, 2008 at 7:23 pm
“Drug addiction is a terrible problem in this country, but it’s one of the legal drugs — alcohol — that is causing the most damage.”
Absolutely. I see it first hand every day. And I agree with your points regarding the legalization of drugs. There aren’t any easy answers, but I think that’s the best solution.
May 18, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Ooops…forgot to add that I dig the pot plant/airplane juxtaposed picture, too.
May 18, 2008 at 11:59 pm
Thanks, R.J.
Remember that TV ad with the guy holding an egg (’This is your brain’) and a hot frying pan (’This is drugs’)? Even though some counter-culture types later came up with parodies, it was one of the most effective anti-drug ads of its generation.
Well, I’ve got one that would be equally effective and a lot harder to parody:
It would show a group of young people obviously high on both drugs and rebellion. A voice-over: ‘This is your government, and we’ve got drugs. Free. We’ll give you all you want. Because we think you should hurry up and kill yourself before you do it to someone else in an accident or a crime.’
Yeah, I know. Never happen.
May 19, 2008 at 6:15 pm
While I’m surprised to hear that the average time spent in jail for trafficking marijuana is higher than that for robbing a bank, I’m also not surprised. For some reason, America likes to treat violence as the offspring of unsound minds, but drugs as some insidious disease whose pervasion into our culture and into the minds of our youths will destroy the foundations of our country.
May 19, 2008 at 8:28 pm
Thank you, Kevin. I always appreciate your thoughts because they’re always so well-expressed — for example, ‘pervasion,’ a perfect use of the word.
For other word lovers like me, I recommend Kevin’s essay ‘Apostroplural’s’, an eight-page treatise on plurals and possessives that is linked to the May 19 entry of his weblog. His blog, of course, is called — what else? — Words.