Snowblind

Talking of books,this one was doing the rounds in Jacere,Cabedello,Brasil in 1988,its a classic,please not to be taken seriously but what a brilliant tale!

Snowblind: A brief career in the cocaine trade is a semi-autobiographical novel written by American author Robert Sabbag in 1976.

Partly biographical, the story centres around a small-time cannabis dealer called Zachary Swan who turns his hand to smuggling cocaine from Colombia into the US. Set in the 1970s before organised crime took over the cocaine trade, it is based primarily in New York and Bogotá and features a variety of colourful characters. Unlike other smugglers at the time Swan concocted a vast array of scams designed both to evade customs officials and protect his 'employees' from prosecution, all of which are highly imaginative and entertaining.


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Robert Sabbag: Snowblind
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Robin Askew



Snowblind - Robert Sabbag



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If Howard Marks is Mr. Nice - a lovable, educated former cannabis smuggler who didn't touch anything harder on principle – then Zachary Swan was Mr. Somewhat-Less-Nice. A harder sell to the liberal middle-classes than Marks's entertaining raconteur, Swan was an American cocaine smuggler whose meticulous scams became the stuff of legend in the '70s. One of the true classics of drug literature, Snowblind has been in and out of print many times since it first appeared in 1976. This welcome new edition from Scottish counter-culture specialists Rebel Inc boasts a rambling, adulatory introduction from Marks (". . . the world of international dope dealing is fun," he vouchsafes once again, adding, perhaps unnecessarily, "It's fucking great!") and an afterword (actually written ten years ago) by Robert Sabbag, recalling how, as a young and ambitious newspaper hack, he was reluctantly persuaded to write the book that made his name.

Too old to be a hippy and Republican by inclination, Swan was a smuggler of the old-school, motivated more by greed than the politico-chemical fervour of the times. His swift transition from dope to coke resulted from a calculation of the vastly increased profits to be made from Colombian nose candy. (In an amusing digression, Sabbag reminds us that we should never underestimate the contribution made by illegal drug dealing to his nation's numeracy: "The United States of America effectively converted to the metric system in, or around, 1965 – by 1970 there was not a college sophomore worth his government grant who didn't know how much a gram of hash weighed.")

These being comparatively more innocent, pre-freebase times, Swan didn't carry a gun until late in his brief career and never shot anyone, had a moderately enlightened attitude towards women by the antediluvian standards of the time, and – unusually – devised each of his cunning scams with a loophole that allowed his often unwitting 'mules' to walk away, much to the frustration of the Feds.