We were at the Thai place on Lark Street, after Timmy had walked over from Assemblyman Lipshutz’s office at the end of his work day and I’d taken a cab from the train station in Rensselaer back into Albany.
“You can actually get a little bit of a high from a strong curry,” Timmy said. “It’s the chili peppers.”
“So when you were in the Peace Corps, were the Indians you worked with all chillin’ and groovy? The ones in your poultry development project—were those farmers constantly getting the munchies and eating all the eggs?”
“You don’t get that kind of a high from curry. Donald, when you order your curry Thai-spicy instead of farang-spicy, don’t you get a little buzz?”
“No, just a little sweaty.”
“Actually, I can see it happening now. Something is dripping off the end of your nose. Unless after your long, tiring day that’s beer that you carelessly sucked up into the wrong hole in your face.”
I used my napkin and said, “It really is an eye-opener, Wenske’s book. The wars in Weed Wars is exactly the right word. We often read about the drug violence in Mexico, but we don’t really hear much about the U.S. gangs and their ruthlessness with their own people and the deadly turf battles. It’s like Prohibition and the criminal life in the twenties, except worse, because of the technology—cell phones and tracking devices and the easy access to automatic weapons. Nobody knows exactly how big it is. Estimates on the reefer trade in the U.S. range from ten billion to a hundred and thirteen billion dollars a year. Law enforcement tends to exaggerate the size of it to keep their own multibillion-dollar industry prosperous, but there’s no doubt that it’s gargantuan.”
Timmy helped himself to more rice and a spoonful of the robust curry. “I believe what you’re telling me,” he said, “and I will read this book that seems to have made such an impression on you. But it’s hard to think of what’s-his-name, that old blacksmith in Half Moon who sells pot to the smokers we know, as being part of a monstrous criminal enterprise. He’s just so unthreatening and…laid-back.”
“The lowest-level local retailers often are. It’s the next level up where it gets dicey. It’s the mules and the wholesalers who take on the greatest risks, and they tend to be a hard-bitten bunch. And the sums of money at play are so huge that a lot of the people involved will do just about anything to hold on to their market share. Torture, dismemberment, cow-pasture executions—they’re not all that rare. In the weed business, you can’t just hire a lobbying firm and buy off a few elected officials with campaign donations to protect your interests.”
“Not yet, anyway.”
“How long will it be until we get to that point? Twenty years?”
“Maybe. Though the pressure to legalize pot and regulate sales and tax the heck out of it like alcohol and tobacco will keep looking better and better at budgeting time in the Legislature. It’s really a question of who’ll have the courage to propose it first—and then find out to his or her relief and amazement that the electorate thinks, well, yes, okay, we guess it’ll be all right with us.”
“It’ll be like the end of Prohibition when relative calm returned to the urban landscape and the bootleggers all went straight and became semi-respectable burghers.”
“And,” Timmy said, “they could start planning for their sons to become president of the United States.”
“Was Nixon’s mother a rum runner? I thought she was a Quaker.”
“You know who I mean. I wonder who’ll become the Joseph P. Kennedy of weed kingpins with an eye on the White House?”
“That’s all a ways off, if you can believe Eddie Wenske’s book. The war-on-drugs establishment is too well entrenched. Their livelihoods depend on their maintaining the Reefer Madness myths about pot. It’s a shame the founding fathers hadn’t gotten mellow and added weed to the Bill of Rights. It would have made a nice substitute for the Second Amendment as it was written. Whatever social problems cannabis entails, it’s certainly preferable to living in a country that has more guns than people.”
Timmy said, “In his book, did Wenske come down on the side of legalization?”
“By implication, he did. He was mainly interested in telling the sordid story behind all the good feeling and then letting readers draw the obvious conclusion. It’s a hair-raising picture he paints. Hair-raising and evocative and detailed. Apparently he went undercover while he wrote the book. It’s full of details like how to avoid getting stopped by the cops on a long mule run from, say, California to Boston. How to obey all the traffic laws and blend in, and how to avoid interstate highways in the states with the harshest laws and the meanest judges. The people who do this all the time get paranoid and tetchy, and Wenske’s portraits of them are both poignant and creepy. They’re generally not people you’d want your sister to marry.”
“Especially not in my case, since my sister is a nun.”
“I meant generally speaking. Not brides of Christ, no. Anyway, I wonder if Jesus ever smoked. Maybe as a teenager. Is there scripture on this?”
Timmy gave me one of his you’re-about-to-go-too-far looks. “I really wouldn’t know. I suppose he observed whatever the acceptable customs of his time and place were.”
“We know he was a kind of vintner. That’s in the Bible.”
He moved into change-of-subject mode. “Wouldn’t it be highly unusual for Wenske to be abducted and killed or whatever by drug dealers? In this country, journalists are hardly ever targeted by criminals. Murdering aggressive reporters is an ugly phenomenon that’s common in Africa and Asia, but I think it’s rare here. Though there was a talk-radio guy in Colorado who was killed because of his views, as I recall.”
“And a newspaper reporter in Arizona who went after a crooked real estate developer, and the crook had a bomb planted in the reporter’s car. That was quite a while ago.”
“Anyway,” Timmy said, “couldn’t there have been any number of other reasons why Wenske might have disappeared? What else do you know about him besides his newspaper reporting and his books?”
“Not much. I’ll be finding out. There’s an ex-boyfriend in Boston, and of course his former colleagues up there at the newspaper. I’m meeting his mother early tomorrow at Starbucks. I saw her briefly in her office yesterday, just long enough to elicit a small retainer and get a few names and phone numbers. She didn’t have much time. She runs a catering business in Colonie and seems to spend most of her time on the phone reassuring people that she remembers who they are and she hasn’t misplaced the menus for their weddings and bar mitzvahs.”
Timmy set his spoon down. “So you’re going to Boston?”
“Maybe later tomorrow. I’ve got a call in to the ex-boyfriend over there, Bryan Kim. And an editor Wenske worked with at the Globe.”
“If it is a drug gang that did something to Wenske, I take it they won’t particularly appreciate your butting in.” Now Timmy was looking a little sweaty too.
I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll be careful. I’m the one who read the book, and I’m the one who knows all too well how dangerous these people can be.”
He didn’t look reassured. “I’ll read Weed Wars while you’re gone. I’ll read it and try not to fret.”
“That would be helpful. Especially the trying-not-to-fret part.”
“Anyway, maybe you were right to think it was an evil gay media conglomerate that did something to Wenske, and people like that will be less risky to go up against.”
“Maybe. Though Marva Beers told me Wenske had described the Hey Look owners as, quote, ‘the feyest gangsters in America, but still gangsters.’ It’s what stoked his outrage and got him working on the new book, an expose of corrupted gay social progress.”
He looked at me for a moment and said, “I hope it soon turns out that Wenske just went to Fiji for some R and R, and word didn’t reach his friends and family because the internet was down. Though I suppose that’s unlikely.”