Here’s a link to the author Richard Stratton’s TED talk. Powerful stuff; his story is ironic, pulse-quickening, and very powerful. He is also tremendously media-savvy: http://bit.ly/txf2015stratton

Fasten your seatbelt: this is Goodfellas meets Catch Me if You Can — a true tale of high-stakes smuggling from pots outlaw years. SMUGGLER’S BLUES is in league withSmokescreen, Snowblind, and Can’t Find My Way Back Home — classics, all.

Richard Stratton was the unlikeliest of kingpins. A clean-cut Wellesley boy who entered outlaw culture on a university trip to Mexico, he saw his search for a joint morph into a thrill-filled dope run smuggling two kilos across the border in his car door. He never looked back. Stratton became a member of the Hippie Mafia, traveling the world to keep America high, living the underground life while embracing the hippie credo, rejecting hard drugs in favor of marijuana and hashish. With cameos by Whitey Bulger and Norman Mailer, SMUGGLER’S BLUES tells Stratton’s adventure while centering on his last years as he travels from New York to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to source and smuggle high-grade hash in the midst of civil war, from the Caribbean to the backwoods of Maine, and from the Chelsea Hotel to the Plaza as his fortunes rise and fall. All the while he is being pursued by his nemesis, a philosophical DEA agent who respects him for his good business practices.

A true-crime story that reads like fiction, SMUGGLER’S BLUES is a psychedelic road trip through international drug smuggling, the hippie underground, and the war on weed. As Big Marijuana emerges, it brings to vivid life an important chapter in pot’s cultural history.

Richard Stratton wrote the novel Smack Goddess during his eight-year term in federal prison. He is now an acclaimed filmmaker and screenwriter whose feature film Slam and documentary Crude won prizes at Cannes and the Berlin Film Festival, respectively. A writer and consultant for HBO’s Oz, he was the creator, writer, and executive producer of Showtime’s Street Time. He is the founder of Prison Life, the editor and publisher of High Times, and a contributor to Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, Details, Newsweek, and Playboy. He lives with his wife and children in New York City.

"Smuggler's Blues is an adrenaline rush, a high-stakes ride from Maine to Lebanon to the Caribbean. . . . This book will get under your skin, enter your blood stream, and mess with your head.” —T. J. English, New York Times, best-selling author The Savage City and Havana Nocturne

"There is no one who both knows the deadly world of international drug trafficking and who can tell the tale in such a stylishly compelling way, than Richard Stratton, a man who walked the walk and lived to tell about it.” —Michael Levine, former undercover DEA agent and author of the New York Times bestsellers Deep Cover and The Big White Lie