Loaded: A Misadventure on the Marijuana Trail Hardcover – January 3, 2002
by Robert Sabbag 
 
Do you think you have the balls it would take to risk your life for a million dollars?

Allen Long certainly did. Balls like a bull elephant's -- with charisma and cunning in the same large measure. But he needed to know that those around him could handle pressure. After all, they'd be violating Colombian and U.S. airspace in a dilapidated DC-3 and landing on jungle mud-tracks in bandit country. They'd have to avoid detection by America's most tooled-up law enforcement agencies and remain wired and vigilant at all times.

They'd be pioneering dope smugglers -- doing it with aplomb and panache like no one else. Their leader, the irrepressible Long, was interested in only the best, Colombian Santa Marta Gold, the Beluga caviar of marijuana. He and his merry band of smugglers were responsible for upping the quality and quality of weed smoked in North America for several halcyon years in the early '70s. And they did so in the most outrageous and remarkable fashion.

From the writer of the drug-smuggling classic Snowblind comes a true story more hair-raising, high-octane, and heart-pounding than any fictional adventure thriller, as he relates the high times and fast living of America's greatest marijuana smuggler.

Take a seat. And hang on for the ride of your life.
 
Amazon.com Review
This is a story from the long-ago days of Colombian marijuana smuggling--long ago, because most of the pot now smoked in the United States is grown domestically, and the top narcotics import from Colombia is cocaine. Author Robert Sabbag tells the tale of Allen Long, who got involved in this unsavory business in the 1970s because he wanted to provide high-quality cannabis for his buddies and also for the sheer adventure of it. Some readers will find Long a disconcerting protagonist--he's a drug smuggler, after all--though it may appeal to advocates of drug legalization and readers of High Times. Sabbag essentially romanticizes Long's activities, such as when he writes about the "rather consoling absence of gunplay" that marked the business of marijuana smuggling in its primitive past. The storytelling is adequate, but parts of Loaded are plainly padded. Here's a bit of sample dialogue: "This is really great pot." "You like that?" "I don't think I've ever smoked anything better." A better and more hardheaded book on Colombian drug smuggling is Mark Bowden's Killing Pablo. --John Miller
From Publishers Weekly
When Sabbag's Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade came out in 1998, cultural icons like Hunter S. Thompson, Robert Stone, Norman Mailer and Nora Ephron hailed it as a classic study of America's drug obsession; their endorsements helped it achieve both cult status and commercial success. Sabbag's latest, despite its strong narrative drive and flashy, occasionally psychedelic writing style, probably won't elicit the same response. For one thing, Sabbag's hero this time is no Zachary Swann, Snowblind's larger-than-life coke dealer: Allen Long is a would-be filmmaker, a child of middle-class respectability from Richmond, Va., who "was born the year Harry S. Truman was elected to the American presidency, and was first arrested for marijuana possession the year Bob Dylan released Blonde on Blonde." For another, marijuana trafficking lacks the inherent drama of the cocaine trade. But most of all, there's the problem of historic distance, which Sabbag's writing fails to overcome. "The book presents a story from out of a time and place fogged in not only by the passage of years, but by an atmospheric shift in the political and cultural spirit of a generation," Sabbag writes in his acknowledgments. Add to that unfortunate lines such as "Like that of almost any man whose Christian name is a definite article, [dealer] El Coyote's image was simply that nobody really bought it," and readers are left with what feels like a message in a bottle from a place they left behind long ago. (Jan.)Forecast: With press junkets planned for the author and Long and a first serial excerpt going to Rolling Stone, this chronicle of crime and ingenuity should generate early hype. It's hard to imagine another round of blessings from the hip elite, though, for this rather disappointing follow-up to Sabbag's earlier success.
 
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
 
3.10