Smokescreen: A True Adventure - By Robert Sabbag

All Allen Long had was cunning and a dilapidated DC3; facing him was the might of US customs. But when the cargo is two tons of the world's finest marijuana, the risks are more than worth it. From the writer of the cocaine classic Snowblind, comes a story more high-octane than any fictional thriller. Robert Sabbag recounts how America's most audacious drug smuggler risked everything for a payload of Colombian Santa Marta Gold.

With his drug-smuggling documentary short on financing, moving marijuana seemed the obvious way for cinematographer Allen Long to raise the necessary cash. Millions of dollars later, the film had not been made, but Long's own life as a pioneering pot smuggler had played out like a Hollywood movie... Seat-of-the-pants flights into the Colombian badlands in a vintage C-47, fast boats in Florida, fashion models, a fortune, earned and blown, and numerous near misses with law enforcement... Over the course of his career, in addition to the Mexican pot, the Jamaican ganja, and the Thai weed he managed to smuggle, Long moved 972,000 pounds of marijuana out of the Colombian jungle... A hilarious piece of hair-raising reportage that will keep your pulse racing to the very last page.

"This true-life tale about Allen Long, a frustrated documentary filmmaker... is like a cannabis version of the film Blow, featuring countless near-death episodes in a rickety, marijuana-stuffed DC-3."