Weed: adventures of a dope smuggler

Jerry Kamstra has been smuggling marijuana from Mexico into the United States since the early 1960s. In 1966, which smuggling 200 kilos of mota (the choicest part of the marijuana plant) into Arizona from Michoaca, he was arrested by U.S. Customs. He was sentenced to two years in the federal penitentiary. His sentence was suspended and he was placed on five years' probation. Sometime thereafter, while Kamstra was living in San Francisco, he was approached by Life magazine to take one of their photographers, Eugene Anthony, into the heart of Mexico to do what no gringo had ever accomplished--to go up into the mountains where marijuana fields flourish and to photograph them and the campesinos who tend them the offer was too attractive from Kamstra to reject, although he knew the journey was fraught with danger. He sneaked out of San Francisco to avoid his probation officer and returned to Mexico. This highly readable book is about marijuana and marijuana smuggling but it is also about Mexico itself. What started out as a simple photographic expedition turned into a major smuggling operation involving a ton of marijuana and the hair-raising means--ocean and air--used to bring the weed into the States. This absorbing story reads like an adventure novel--but it's all true.--From jacket flap