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Review [published December 2001]
Robert Sabbag: Snowblind
Robin Askew
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
BUY Robert Sabbag books online from and
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, prefreebase
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.
It’s the mechanics of these ingenious smuggling
schemes that provide the most pleasure. Increased
security measures mean that many of them couldn’t
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