Blueberry Bud

 “The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing – an Almost True Account” by Matt Taibbi & Anonymous, 2021

Rack this book up as one of the funniest of 2021.  Perhaps not intentionally, but if you want to know how to run an illegal weed business, ‘Anon’ has it stacked.  Taibbi just puts it into clever words.  It’s the rules, you see.  In fact, if you follow these rules, it might help with any illegal activity, even political kinds.

• ·        “Don’t attract attention to yourself.”
• ·        “Stay off the internet.”
• ·        “Don’t let them know where you live.”
• ·        “Don’t mess with guns, but know people who do.”
• ·        “Always have a lawyer or two.”
• ·        “Under promise and over deliver.”
• ·        “Always carry an Allen wrench.”
• ·        “No business at night.”
• ·        “Have a white guy with you.”
• ·        “Always have a job.”
• ·        “Don’t write anything down.”
• ·        “Deal with people you know.”
• ·        “A loss isn’t a loss, it’s a lesson.”
• ·        “Plan for the worst.”
• ·        “Get your money and get out.”

And so on.  Anon made hundreds of thousands of dollars as an intelligent entrepreneur buying, running and growing weed in the pre-Obama years.  He sold in 15 states, ran weed out of Vancouver, then California, handled grow-houses, a national network of distributors and only went to jail for a year once. That jail sentence was not for marijuana, but for being a passenger in a car that injured a kid on a bicycle.

Anon stayed away from heroin, cocaine and meth, instead started out selling mushrooms (psilocybin) in his upper middle-class high school to ‘white’ kids.  Anon was a dark-skinned, middle-class kid, smarter than the rest by far.  No gold chains, tricked-out cars or ghetto obviousness.  He was making more money than his father even then. But when he got to his black college, he realized his compatriots didn’t do mushrooms.  So he switched.

Taibbi tells his story, as Anon perseveres through jail, a broken Vancouver Vietnamese connection, his turbulent romantic relationship and the creeping corporatization of legal weed.  He teaches his distributors his tough rules, though they are not as disciplined as he – nor could they be. One of his distributors eventually turns informer.  One of his key California grow sources gets out as legalization approaches.  He works at Marriott Hotels, turning the staff into connections. He later starts getting into politics as a ‘hobby’ – working for gay marriage in the black community just to understand how organizations work or don’t work, all for $5 an hour.  He drove his BMW to that job. In 2016 he promotes Hillary Clinton to his fellow marijuana entrepreneurs like an idiot, even though she was against weed - because Trump’s Jeff Sessions was a KKK-man.

Blueberry Bud

It is clear that illegal drug dealing is a way to make money in an economy stacked against service workers, against black workers, against pink collars.  Waiters and waitresses, bartenders, hotel cleaning crews and everyone with a sub-living wage job becomes open to the idea.  

Taibbi calls Anon “Huey Carmichael” after Huey Newton and Stokely Carmichael.  Anon himself says:  “I never believed in America enough to be disillusioned.”  “People in America think racism is in a word or an image.  It isn’t.  It’s in money.”  “I believe in money.  So does America.  Beyond that we don’t have a relationship.”  Anon points out that the police don’t investigate cases, they rely on snitches.  He used decoy cars in car caravans transporting weed, playing on racist stereotypes to throw off cops. He used casinos to launder cash. And always put the stash in a locked trunk!

Buy this book for your weed dealer or yourself.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  "Griftopia" and "The Divide" (both by Taibbi);“The Truth About the Drug Companies,” “Drug War Capitalism,” “Lost Connections,” “Dallas Buyers Club,” “The Marijuana Manifesto” (Ventura); “American Made,” “The Long Strange Trip,” “Budding Prospects” (Boyle); “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” “Let Us Now Praise the Dead,” “The Harder They Come” (Boyle).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

July 12, 2022