High Times: The Extraordinary Life of a Joburg Dope Smuggler

Roy Isacowitz and Jeremy Gordin, High Times: The Extraordinary Life of a Joburg Dope Smuggler (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2024)

CHARM, charisma and confidence are worth more than any academic qualification; but they can spill over into dangerous hubris. Michael Medjuck was born in 1950, grew up in Johannesburg and was deputy head boy of King David High School. His teenage years coincided with the drug-infused 1960s and he left for his ancestral home in Canada before the end of the decade.

There he developed a successful network smuggling cannabis at an industrial scale. His domestic life in Vancouver and a number of legitimate businesses fronted a life of criminality in which he was renowned for efficiency. Away from home, often in Florida, he indulged in the highlife: drugs, booze, food and numerous women. But success bred over-confidence and in September 1991 he was arrested in the USA after a major operation turned out to have been a set up by federal agents.

Sentenced to 24 years in prison, he was released ten years early after acting as state witness in a case brought against a prison guard for smuggling drugs. He experienced various horrors in a variety of American prisons from federal penitentiaries to local lockups. Released and deported to Canada it was only a couple more years before he was caught up in another sting, this time in Spain. He was now a financier rather than an organiser, but was the only person to serve time in jail, for a total of seven and a half years that ended in February 2014. He ended his working life as an unlikely owner-manager of a Mexican hotel. His criminal record has proved an obstacle to travel and he subsequently sampled detention in France and Britain. In all he experienced prison in six countries.

This book is a curate’s egg of strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side it provides informative insights into the workings of international drug smuggling and its often chaotic nature. Not least of its problems is that employees are often unreliable addicts or informers. Then there is a great deal of detail about the attitude of American law enforcement and the judicial system towards the drug trade. Finally, the US prison system is described from Medjuck’s perspective although given his behaviour and the amount of time he spent in isolation, mainly for drug taking, this is unlikely to be balanced.

On the debit side Medjuck was a criminal of enormous ego and uncontrollable urges who seems to have regarded himself as above and beyond the normal boundaries of behaviour; yet he is treated by the writers with a certain reverence. The authorities come across as largely vindictive, although this may also be a skewed perspective.

The authors had access to background documentation and that may account for the more coherent and informative parts of this book. But there is also a great deal of dialogue which can only have been fabricated and contains a wearisome proportion of foul language. Which readers enjoy this? The writing style leans heavily on metaphor, the equivalent of painting by numbers. Painful examples abound, but one has sweat running off Medjuck like rats deserting a sinking ship.

Jeremy Gordin was murdered while the writing of this book was in progress. Whether this had an impact on the final text is not clear. But this is another instance where one wonders why some books are published; and others not.

Book review by Christopher Merrett, reproduced from his web page, From the Thornveld