I don’t really know how I got started,” he says. “I just got myself a little bit of quantity, and I wanted to smoke for free, basically. And I figured if I can get a couple of my friends who smoke with me, if they want a bag, I’ll just give it to them for a little more than I pay. They get a good deal, and I’m smoking for free.”

The smell of incense intensifies as we walk toward the living room, but the mild odor of burnt marijuana grabs my attention. Two people, a man and a woman, are sitting on the couch, their eyes glued to the television. They say “hi,” then turn around and begin to stare at the television again. Jay, who asked that his name and those of his friends be changed because of the nature of their activities, picks up his dog, Mario, and looks him in the face.

“He only smokes KB,” Jay says, referring to a potent form of marijuana known as Kind Bud. “Why don’t you sit down here, and we’ll do this.” He points to a small bar in the room adjacent the living room. Several 1920s-style marijuana propaganda posters hang on the blue, sloppily painted walls. Jay takes a seat behind the bar. A poster of a man grinning and holding a joint hangs behind him with the caption, “Marijuana: Hey, at least it’s not crack!”

“So what do you want to know?” he asks, grinning, his eyes glazed over. Slightly purple circles lie beneath his eyes, his face is dead pale and his moppy, frizzy brown hair is scattered about. I tell him I want to know about selling marijuana, and his smile widens. He lights up a joint that appears to have already been more than half smoked. He offers it to me, but I decline. “I never really did anything in high school,” he says. “I rarely smoked, and I never dealt or anything. The first time I got high was when I was 15, but I would only smoke maybe once every three or four months. Right before I came to college, I progressively started smoking more.”

Jay fidgets on the stool, bouncing off it as if he just remembered something he had to do; then he sits back down immediately. He looks uncomfortable, and his voice is soft and full of mumbles. He says he’s always paranoid because people he knows are in jail for selling drugs.

“A lot of people close to me, higher-ups — really higher-ups — have gotten busted,” he says. “Two personal friends of mine are in jail, and they went down just for weed. My original dealer got busted with 400 pounds. Actually, it was two counts of 200 pounds, because he had it in two separate storage lockers. I’m sure he talked because he was looking at 20 years, and he’ll probably get out in two. He was two steps down from the main source, the grower, which was the Mexican mafia.”

Jay looks down at the yellowed joint, which has stopped burning, and he throws it in the ashtray. Smoke lingers around the bar, grayish light rays forming through the clouds.

“There’s times when you’re getting rid of pounds in a week, you know, making a couple thousand dollars like it’s nothing, not even noticing it — it just keeps coming in,” he says. “Things are just moving too fast, and that’s when people get fucking stupid, and they get greedy and they get caught. That’s why I don’t really fuck with it too much anymore, except for favors to my friends.

“I’m not going to jail for weed. That’s fucking stupid.”

Jay ‘s voice rises as he begins ranting about how much he hates the current laws on drugs.

“You can get it anywhere,” he says. “You can bust however many people you want — it’s never going to get to the point. Everything the lawmakers are doing right now is working in reverse. The ‘war on drugs’ is supplying drugs. If they were really smart, they’d just make it legal and make a profit.”

He stops and looks at me. “I’m sorry, what were we talking about?”

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