Thai Stick

The Movie

Sour Milk Drinkers:

I had to take a brief hiatus to finish my next book with Rickson Gracie, Comfort in Darkness, and to finish shooting my documentary film, Thai Stick. This movie grew out of the 2013 book that I wrote with Mike Ritter, Thai Stick:  Surfers, Scammers, and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade.

After six options and more than a decade’s worth of “development deals” with Hollywood’s good, bad, and ugly, in 2023 I made a vow not to “hop on” another insipid Zoom call or sell another option. Instead, Mike Ritter and I assembled a small, talented team of filmmakers, and we began making our feature length Thai Stick documentary with independent financing. 

Rather than reenactments or special effects, Thai Stick draws on our vast archive of photos, video footage, and taped interviews.  Over the past 30 years, Mike Ritter and I traveled at our own expense to Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, France, Germany, Australia, Hawaii, South Africa, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, and all over America to interview retired smugglers, Thai growers and Thai fixers, Khmer Rouge veterans, DEA agents, CIA operatives, and many others.

Peter Maguire with retired Thai smuggler, Robert “Todd” Kimball

Following the lead of British scholar E. P. Thompson, we captured the voices of a voiceless group that were conspicuously absent from history.  Because Mike and I were both trained at Columbia University by oral history pioneer, the late great Ron Grele, we always attempted to follow his strict academic guidelines for life histories.  Unlike journalistic interviews, most of our interviews run two to five hours long; some run as long as twenty.  We have close to one thousand hours of tapes in our archive that cover nearly every aspect of the black market marijuana trade.

Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter at Chaucer’s Books in Santa Barbara

“True crime” is a strange, one-sided genre that consists mostly of law enforcement fairy tales (American Gangster) and self-serving, Mr. Big soliloquies of greatness that omit all but the heroic narrator’s myopic perspective (Blow). Although there is a substantial body of work on marijuana, little has been done on the intricacies of smuggling by the men who were involved. During our initial review of the subject, Ritter and I were stunned by the many significant factual errors in books like The Underground Empire, Reefermen, The Hunt for Marco Polo, and others. This should not have come as a surprise, I now realize. Members of this underground economy do not typically draw attention to themselves, much less write letters to the editor.

The history of the Thai marijuana trade (1965-1990) is both interesting and telling because it is one of the few unequivocal victories in the War on Drugs.  But what did the U.S. government actually win? There was no reduction in either the supply or the demand for marijuana in America or anywhere else.  In fact, quite the opposite was true. By the mid-1980s, pot was the number one cash crop in the United States thanks to a huge demand and an artificially high price. As everyone from economist Adam Smith to the Thai politicians who were pressed by the U.S. government to crack down on marijuana pointed out, political laws will always be less powerful than the economic law of supply and demand. It is clear that the U.S. government didn’t just lose the war on pot, they lost the War on Drugs. America today is the most drug addled nation on Earth.