You love smoking weed. You keep a bowl in your nightstand, and you store it with a fresh pack for morning. Working at a restaurant isn’t your dream job, but then again what exactly is? You aren’t sure what you want to do for the future, but you have a nice little life. You buy a quarter ounce a week, for 50 bucks, from a guy at your job.

Do you ever stop and wonder how that weed made it into your hands? How that beautiful little bud you pop open and stick in your peace sign grinder made it there? This is the story of how that beautiful, crystal-covered gem you love makes it all the way to you.

In eleven states in this country, this story is easy to tell: the grower sells to the distributor, and the distributor sells to you. The state government taxes the sale, so you’re able to drive home without fear. Unfortunately for the rest of the country, getting you that quarter proves far riskier.

Marijuana used to be controlled by drug cartels who smuggled it in the country by any means necessary. This is why medicinally legal weed in California changed the marijuana landscape forever. Cannabis was able to become a science experiment because growers were able to genetically enhance it without fear of legal repercussions. Over the course of time, the high-quality marijuana being grown in California took over the market. No one wanted low-quality cartel weed, so in order to supply the rest of the country with California-grown marijuana, there were going to need to be risk takers. Back then, high-grade marijuana was expensive. A pound on the east coast was four to five thousand dollars in the early to mid-2000s. This made the reward for successful trafficking very tempting to many people. As time has gone on, and the legalization of marijuana in other states has progressed, the price of marijuana has decreased drastically. The supply has also gone up as people have rushed to legal states to try their hand at growing.

Let me be clear: growing weed is NOT easy. It is a tedious, difficult, frustrating, and sometimes devastating task. It is not as simple as throwing a seed in the ground, giving it some light, and watering it when you remember. Growers don’t get days off; they are legitimate farmers who have to spend up to 16 hours a day with their plants to get the highest quality buds. If you have ever met a big time marijuana grower, they are truly a special breed of people. Because of the rush of people and the constant push to lower prices, growers have taken a huge hit over the years. But the one thing beautiful about legalization is that even in states where the lines of legality are gray, they will just cut your plants down if you’re breaking the rules, rather than send you to prison. This doesn’t mean it isn’t still devastating. Losing your crop is still losing your livelihood. Millions of dollars can be lost depending on the grow.

In legal states the truly top-shelf cannabis buds are still going for $2500-$3000 a pound. This is the weed produced by well-known growers, and it is truly amazing. While some high-end smokers understand this and are willing to pay the price, most people in states still under prohibition just think all weed is weed. They know they want stuff that smells good, doesn’t have seeds, and looks like its covered in crystals. They don’t truly understand the process or why some weed gives you different highs. This is where the marijuana traffickers come in.

I love marijuana. I believe it has medicinal properties, I believe it can help people with opiate addictions, and I believe it is far less harmful than alcohol. What I believe in most is that adults should be able to decide for themselves whether they want to smoke marijuana or not. I don’t think weed is for everyone. Paranoia, laziness, and habitual addiction are real side effects that can negatively impact people’s lives, but having real side effects does not establish a baseline to make other things in life illegal. Tobacco kills and has side effects. Alcohol kills and has even more side effects. Even caffeine is addictive and can cause anxiety. If a drug’s worst side effect is too much Taco Bell, I think we should be able to have it.

I started trafficking marijuana to provide high-quality marijuana to friends and give my family a fourth source of income. I was bartending five nights a week, working for a moving company during the day when there were jobs, and my pregnant girlfriend was bartending as well. We decided together to let my friend in California send a pound of weed and see if I could sell it to my friends. To those of you who aren’t in the “game,” sending marijuana through the mail may seem crazy, but I promise you that nearly all the marijuana you have ever seen has arrived in the mail. I became good at what I was doing. It isn’t easy to find friends you can trust to sell it, and it’s not easy always being available. It is stressful to owe people money, even if they are your best friends. I did enjoy what I was doing, though; I love all aspects of marijuana. We used to host giant cookouts where friends would come over to eat and smoke. The social part is my favorite, how it brings people together to have fun. The camaraderie of sitting in a circle smoking a blunt together followed by conversations about life, music, art, and whatever else. Selling weed never seemed dangerous. Sure I took my losses: one guy ended up owing me over eight grand. I never stressed it ,though, because I knew it was part of the game.

Eventually I started to get bigger, and the mail just wasn’t good enough anymore. Finding addresses to send to is hard, and you don’t want to send too much to the same address. Getting the money back out west was also a problem at this point. Mailing it takes time and risk—once we lost three grand in the mail in one fell swoop. My boy started having me use bank accounts. It seemed risky, but we seemingly didn’t have a choice. As we grew bigger and bigger, the money was great—I didn’t have to work the moving job much, and my daughter’s mom didn’t need to work. We bought a new bed and each had reliable cars. We weren’t rich, but we were comfortable.

One day a friend came over to smoke, and I was showing him my new bed. I made an offhanded comment about how much weed could be stuffed into a bed. He thought about it for a minute and told me that he was friends with a guy who owned a foam factory in Florida. Custom made mattresses to ship weed in? How could this possibly go wrong? At this point I knew almost everyone who sold in my town. I knew how much guys were paying, and I thought I could beat everyone’s price. It was time for me to go to California and get this all figured out.

The first mattress we did was a trial run: we got a king-sized mattress made, but only put five pounds in it so, if it didn’t work, we would be okay. There were also 500 cartridges in there, which in early 2015, weren’t a thing. I knew they were the future of smoking weed the second I saw one, so I was all in. The mattress arrived without any major problems, but I didn’t like how it looked. Maybe it was because it was so empty, but it looked fucked up when we got it. I decided to change to a queen-sized mattress. The packaging just looked less suspicious. I had a friend willing to pay for the mattress up front. Forty pounds of weed in a mattress cost me roughly 80k. When the mattress arrived, he would give me $200 per pound on top. I was still getting my own marijuana through the mail, but this was a nice check on top.

I would fly to L.A. every other week. Mondays were spent acquiring the weed. In order to get that much weed in L.A., you had to buy different grows. My friend had a few different connects, and we would drive for hours around L.A. attempting to find what we wanted. Tuesdays were normally spent getting the supplies we needed in order to ship the mattress. I wonder if the makers of vacuum seal bags know why they sell out in legal states so quickly. Finding elven-inch bags is nearly impossible; I have been to every Wal-Mart and Target within an hour of Los Angeles. Mattress boxes are also hard to find; I only found one store in all of L.A. that had them. Tuesday nights were spent packing, and I promise you that this is no easy task. It takes hours and hours of tedious work to make sure that you get it right. The risk of detection, the fear of loss, and the anxiety of knowing the illegality if it would make it hard for anyone. Wednesdays would be spent setting up the shipment and delivering the mattress to the terminal before 5 p.m. I realize I made good money off of this, but to say it was easy would be incorrect. Things were good for awhile, but as the saying goes: all good things must come to an end.

I would still send my own weed in the mail and distribute it to my friends. These were people I trusted, ones who could sell a little bit of weight. From myself, “the trafficker,” it would go to the “dealer.” I consider these guys to be the ones with five pounds or less. These guys probably make three to four hundred dollars a pound. If they sell two pounds a week, that’s a livable paycheck. I think most people believe that if you sell pounds, then you’ve gotta be rich. Most guys I knew still had jobs and lived somewhat comfortably, but were very far from rich. The people under the dealers are selling ounces and quarter pounds. These guys smoke for free, and they get you your quarter ounce. They don’t make enough money to survive on and need that restaurant job. The whole business is set up on trust; almost no one pays up front. You give your $50 to your ounce guy, he gives it with the rest to his pound guy, the pound guy pays me back for the pounds I gave him, and then I pay back my guy in California. Sometimes I would owe nearly 100k. Even though I knew could make it happen, this still was quite a stress. In order to get more weed and keep this flowing I had to find a way to get the money back. The bank account drops were so sketchy, walking into a bank two minutes before it closed with nine grand in cash to drop. Going in different banks three days in a row with nine grand each time to drop. I flew with the money as well, but eventually that got stopped (see: “Am I Under Arrest?”). I had to pay for the weed somehow, but there just wasn’t an easy way.

Eventually my house got raided by the state. They had been informed I sold cocaine. There was no cocaine to be found, but I did have seven pounds of weed. The feds took over the case a year later and charged me with possession of 100kg or more (220+ pounds). In the article written about my case, it talks about money laundering 780k. A lot of people read that and think it means we were laundering profit, which just wasn’t the case. All that money was collected and transferred over the course of two years to pay my guys back. If I could have reported the money and paid taxes on it, I gladly would have. Discounting losses, of which there were plenty, I profited about 78k in two years off that money. Not an insignificant amount by any means, but also far from being a baller. People try to attack my story by saying, “You aren’t there for weed, you’re there for money laundering.” While it is true that I was convicted of both, only the marijuana carried a mandatory minimum sentence of five years. Any illegal drug sale from the $20 a gram to the millions is money laundering.

You can make your own decision about me, but I just wanted to present the facts. I was paying for weed, not elaborately hiding money like most people assumed. If you care about your quarter a week, I would ask you to care about the guy selling it to you. I promise that even at my level I was thinking about you. When I would get weed, I would check it for quality, make sure it hadn’t been blown*. I tried to make it cost-effective, but if one weed costs more and was way better, I would take the better one knowing I was losing money. Having the best weed was important. I wanted people to be happy with what they got. I cared about you. Now I’m asking you to care about us. I’m sitting in prison over a plant we all love. What I did was illegal, and I am paying the price. What I don’t have to accept is that “this is just the way it is.” Because it’s not. Not anymore. More states are legalizing every year, and it’s time to make your voice count. We are so close to legalizing marijuana in this country, but we need everyone who smokes to count. This isn’t a victimless law that isn’t really enforced anymore. My daughter is without her father for five years, and others are in for life. Make your voice heard on this issue. Together we can change the world.

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*blown: Weed that is ran with solvents to make concentrates and then sold at discount prices to people shipping weed. It looks exactly like good weed, but it doesn’t have much smell and the crystals are almost gone. It still contains THC, but is highly diluted