High Times: The Extraordinary Life of a Joburg Dope Smuggler written by Roy Isicowitz and Jeremy Gordon (published by Jonathan Ball) is an archival part of South Africa’s colourful cannabis history.

This is an extract from the book from the Mail and Guardian from 30 July 2024.

"It was the spring of 1989 on a farm owned by Adrien Dubois, just north of Montreal. Michael [Medjuck, the Joburg-born former King David High School pupil who became one of the biggest hash and weed smugglers in North America] and Adrien, the second-youngest of the 10 notorious Dubois brothers, were sharing a spliff in the cab of a dusty yellow bulldozer.

Down below, Barry was supervising the interment of hundreds of construction boards in a hole as large as an Olympic swimming pool.

Adrien and his brothers — all except one — had controlled drug trafficking, loan sharking, prostitution and extortion in downtown Montreal until six or seven years earlier, when he had been arrested and tried for the murder of one of the Irish McSweens, formerly allies but by then enemies of the Dubois family.

Adrien was eventually acquitted on the murder charge — after several years and at enormous expense — but the incident had broken the Dubois stranglehold on serious crime in Montreal. He went into semi-retirement after his acquittal, retaining only his string of strip clubs and his hash business.

Lounging with Michael in the cab of the bulldozer, pulling deeply on a joint of pungent Afghani Black mixed with tobacco, Adrien Dubois was a happy man. Michael and his team had just pulled into town with 36 tons of Afghanistan’s best, the largest consignment he had ever received. His position as hash strongman of Montreal, itself the hash capital of North America, was going to be safe for a long time.

It wasn’t only its enormous size that distinguished the new consignment. It was also the way in which it had been transported. Michael’s crew had come up with a way of camouflaging the hash while in transit that augured well for future business.

Transporting dope had never been so safe, or so it seemed.

The idea had first occurred to Barry, Michael’s troubleshooter, who was having doubts about the size of the shipment. Not that he was having second thoughts about smuggling dope — he had absolutely no problem with that — but he was concerned about driving so much of the stuff, virtually unconcealed, over some 5 000 kilometres from Vancouver to Montreal and across five provincial borders.

Just a single gung-ho cop had to stop one of the drivers and ask to see his cargo for the whole thing to go down the tubes. Sure, the hash was inside trailers with legit cargo in front and on top of it, but even the Canadian cops — hardly the sharpest bullets in the magazine — were hip to that one already. Barry needed to find a better solution and he wouldn’t let go until he had found it.

His idea came to him while he and the others were offloading the hash from the yacht that had delivered it, using their standard tug-and-barge technique. Among the barges he had seen while going up the coast were several carrying massive loads of construction timber, a mainstay of the residential construction business. Each load was 2 or 3m high and as much as 8m across.

What if they hid the hash inside a load of construction timber?

It would be on flatbeds rather than barges, of course, but the principle was the same. Flatbed trucks loaded with timber were as common a sight on the highways as tugs and barges on the water. Wherever there was building going on in Canada or the US, there was timber.

Cutting the middle out of piles of timber would create a highly secure hiding place for bales of hash. It would be like a 3D picture frame, with tons of dope in the middle instead of family photos. With uncut boards top and bottom and the whole thing wrapped in plastic, the load would be invisible unless literally taken apart.

It would be a hell of a job — his awareness of exactly how much of a job probably blunted by the amount of Afghani Black he was smoking at the time — but it was a truly sweet idea. A fucking far-out idea.He did the calculations and, the next morning, ordered a load of timber. He went for the most common measure of plank, 5 by 10cm and two metres long. If that was the standard, that’s what they’d use. The last thing they wanted was to be different.

It took 1 500 planks of construction timber, three industrial jigsaws, two forklifts, and four or five assistants, almost four days of work and many kilos of energising hash to get the job done. But the result was a thing of beauty. Each bundle of 50 hash-filled planks was wrapped in heavy-duty plastic and secured with strapping bands.Using forklifts, the team loaded the finished bundles on three flatbeds, hitched with cargo straps, and then covered by canvas tarps. The three fully loaded flatbeds standing in line looked so good they could have been a work of socialist realist art.

The last remaining issue they needed to deal with was getting the weight of the loads right. Canada, like many countries, has weighing stations manned by provincial transport inspectors along its major highways.Their purpose is to assess taxes on transported goods and prevent overweight trucks from damaging roads and bridges. Seeing that hashish is a lot lighter than timber, the weight of a hash-filled load would be significantly lower than it would have been had the planks not been hollowed out. Low enough, possibly, to raise the suspicion of an alert inspector.

Splitting the load across three trucks was one way of reducing the risk. The smaller the load, the lower the weight differential and therefore the risk. Additionally, the three trucks left Vancouver at four-hour intervals to avoid creating a pattern.One underweight truck could be an anomaly; three, arriving one after the other, would be a conspiracy. And it goes without saying the fake bills of lading each driver carried — branded Yeoville Lumber — specified the weight of the actual, hash-filled load.

The inspectors would have to know the true weight of a similar load of timber to spot the difference. They never did.In Montreal, four days later, the trucks pulled into Michael’s custom-built cutting and packaging facility – a fortified, 3 800m2 warehouse in the industrial area of Lachine.

The stacks of timber were offloaded onto the loading dock by forklifts and the bags of hashish removed manually from their hiding places. From there, a conveyor belt took them to an upper floor, where the bags were opened and each kilo slab of hash was cut and packaged into retail sales bundles.Half of the bundles were transferred to safe houses throughout the city, while the rest were packed into vehicles for delivery to Toronto, Quebec City, Calgary and further afield. Michael insisted on getting rid of the timber. Barry and Adrien tried to argue with him — it was perfectly good wood and worth a few bucks — but Michael didn’t give a shit about the money.

He didn’t want the slightest bit of evidence left lying around. Cut-up pieces of timber smelling of hash were incriminating. The timber was therefore loaded back onto the flatbeds and taken to Adrien’s farm, where a bulldozer dug a gigantic hole, pushed the timber into it and covered everything up. The smuggle was over."

High Times: The Extraordinary Life of a Joburg Dope Smuggler , written by Roy Isicowitz and Jeremy Gordin is published by Jonathan Ball. Buy it here.