Kelly Slater has optioned the rights for Thai Stick. Photos: (L) Kelly Slater/Instagram/Thai Stick
A few months ago, I asked Gerry Lopez about drug smuggling. Specifically, I asked him whether the rumors that many of the larger surf companies were originally founded on drug money. His answer was a fantastic mix of bobbing, weaving, and saying something with substance, all at the same time. But it didn’t REALLY answer my question, so it still remains a question.
What isn’t a question, though, is whether or not surfing and drugs have a long and storied relationship. While surfers aren’t all drug users, the stereotype comes from a lot more than just Hollywood’s version of the surfer–in the broader public’s eye, it was Spicolli who painted surfers with a drug-addled brush. But back in the ’60s all the way through to the ’80s, smuggling weed went hand in hand with surfing. Thailand, at the time, was two things to surfers: close to incredible waves, and the home of the best pot in the world. The American domestic drug trade didn’t really include marijuana yet, and almost all of it in the United States was smuggled in by guys like Mike Ritter. Along with Peter Maguire, a historian, he wrote about it in detail in a book called Thai Stick: Surfers, Scammers, and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade. And Kelly Slater, who has been sticking his fingers into every pie from the clothing industry with Outerknown to energy drinks with Purps (which, oddly enough, is another name for a certain strain of marijuana) is now cooking up a silver screen pie. With the current conversations around legalization, there’s no better time to do it. Slater revealed that he recently optioned the book for film and tv rights.
“We have begun work on a documentary film and several parties are interested in making an episodic tv series about it,” he wrote on Instagram. “This is a history they certainly don’t teach you in school but an important and significant cultural phenomenon that occurred mostly undocumented. It took the professional historian and former smuggler 15 years to complete and it is based on thousands of hours of interviews. They document everything you didn’t know about pot smuggling from the late 60’s thru early 80’s, diving into every aspect of the game from personal to political. Even #TimothyLeary and #RichardNixon make cameos.”
Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter met when Maguire was penning a book about prison in Phnom Penh. In the course of their conversations, Ritter told him that he was smuggling Afghani hash in the late ’60s before moving into Thai weed in the next decade. It’s an interesting story, to say the least. But it’s really not one most would associate Kelly Slater with. The 11-time world champion has long been a promoter of healthy living–and he still is. He’s also a promoter of great stories, which Thai Stick certainly is.
“As an innocent kid growing up in Florida,” he wrote on social media, “I knew nothing about this stuff but heard lots of stories about the surfing/smuggling connections related to people I knew. I was always intrigued hearing about the guys I considered to be #RealLifePirates. A lot of what I know now comes from the pages in this book and corroborates things I heard as a kid. With the current atmosphere around #MarijuanaLegalization and the connected topics, it seems timely to bring this thing to life. This in no way condones drug use or dealing of any sort. But it does bring into question inconsistencies around drug laws and philosophical questions about personal choice and outlawing nature.”
Slater and a team have already started production on the documentary film, so keep an eye out for its release.
