Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter discuss and sign "Thai Stick"

Diesel, A Bookstore in Brentwood welcomes co-authors Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter to the store to discuss and sign their new book, Thai Stick, on Wednesday, November 6th at 7pm.

Bangkok, Thailand has been home to smugglers and
adventurers since the late eighteenth century. During the 1970s, it
became a modern Casablanca to a new generation of Western treasure seekers, from
surfers to wide-eyed hippies to Vietnam vets, who shipped "Thai sticks" from northeast Thailand farms to American
consumers. This meant navigating one of the most complex smuggling channels in
the history of the drug trade, but, until the mid-1970s,
the vast majority of marijuana consumed in the United States was
imported, and there was little to no domestic production.

Peter
Maguire and Mike Ritter are the first historians to document this
underground industry. Drawing on hundreds of
interviews with smugglers and law enforcement agents, the authors
recount the buy, delivery, voyage home, and product offload. They
capture the eccentric personalities of the men and women who transformed
the Thai marijuana trade from a GI cottage industry into a
professionalized business,
unraveling a rare history from the smugglers' perspective.