As Extinct as the Chumash: The Age of the Surfer Outlaw

Peter Maguire on the movie adaptation of Thai Stick: Surfers, Scammers, and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade

I first met Mike Ritter at Scorpion Bay in 1997. At the time, I was investigating and documenting war crimes in Southeast Asia and moonlighting as a history professor at Columbia University. My first investigation centered around Cambodia’s notorious Tuol Sleng Prison (also known as S-21). Approximately 20,000 to 30,000 (the exact number is unknown) were tortured, interrogated, and photographed at S-21 and less than 20 survived.

I was trying to solve the mystery of four American sailors who were killed at Tuol Sleng in 1978. Some of my colleagues believed they were CIA agents, but I suspected they were pot smugglers.

Not only did Ritter solve this mystery, but he demonstrated that, among other things, he was a natural born historian.

Mike Ritter smuggled his first kilo of hash from Afghanistan in 1968, then became a partner in a hash oil ring. The Santa Barbara native found his calling in the mid 70s—Thai Sticks. While Nepalese Temple Balls, Afghan Primo Hash and Papa Grande’s Colitas were valuable, consumers paid 10 times more for Thai Sticks than anyone had ever paid for marijuana before. What sold for $3 per kilo at the farm in Isan, Thailand, fetched $2,200 in the United States.

Unlike other drugs whose distribution was tightly controlled at the upper levels by syndicates, the Thai marijuana trade was controlled only by the economic law of supply and demand. After years of middling success, Mike Ritter made $5,000,000 from a successful Thai scam in 1986, then retired.

Now that he had the capital to enjoy “the surfing lifestyle,” Ritter did not recognize it.

Unlike he and his peers who pioneered Indonesian surfing and discovered Grajagan, the modern surfers he encountered did not subsist on fish, rice, water, and perfect waves. Instead, professional captains whisked well-heeled surfers and their “surfpas” (also known as “pro Ho’s”) from surf spot to surf spot in climate-controlled yachts. Although sat phones, sit down meals, showers, suites, and even cocaine were de rigueur—marijuana was not.

There was a time when surfer smugglers were treated like heroes, but by the 1990s those days were over. Worse, weed smugglers and the culture they helped to create was being disavowed by many of their old customers who had traded pot for Prozac and pain bills, and reeked of what Gentleman Brown, the pirate in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, best described as “self-righteous stench of the converted sinner”

Despite these seismic shifts in the social landscape, Mike Ritter remained proud of how he and his peers had crossed oceans, war zones, overcome tremendous obstacles and returned with a precious commodity. When the smuggler told me that he wanted to document his past, I encouraged, then coached him.

Ritter’s first interviews with smugglers Warren “Abdul” Anderson, David Ortiz, Jim Cotton, Ed Otero and their adversary retired DEA agent Jim Conklin, were so good that I got him admitted to Columbia University’s Oral History Summer Institute. There, Ritter studied under my professor, the legendary Ron Grele who was equally impressed by both his interviews the rigor of his scholarship.

Over the next five years, Mike and I would conduct the world’s most extensive oral history of the marijuana trade. We traveled to Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, France, Germany, Australia, Hawaii, South Africa, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, and all over the U.S. to interview retired smugglers, DEA agents, confidential informants, Thai growers and fixers, Khmer Rouge cadre, CIA operatives, and many others.

During the summer of 2003, while Mike and I were shopping our book Thai Stick with publishers, Customs, IRS, and the Maui Police, at the behest of a new and nebulous government agency called ICE, raided his house. Like many former smugglers who had been out of the game for decades, Ritter incorrectly assumed that he was immune from prosecution.

However, after 9/11, Americans willing traded freedom for the perception safety as the U.S. government created new laws and agencies that expanded federal power and fundamentally changed the rules of the Constitutional game. In short order, Mike Ritter was tried, stripped of his assets and sent to prison.

After my co-author began serving his sentence, many encouraged me to write Thai Stick without him.

Instead, I waited for Ritter’s release, secured him a job at my friend’s Waikiki hotel, and we resumed our work on the book. The subject of marijuana smuggling posed significant narrative challenges.

Although there is a substantial body of literature on marijuana, little has been written about the intricacies of smuggling by the men who did it. This should come as no surprise. Members of the underground economy do not typically draw attention to themselves, much less write letters to the editor.

Because marijuana smuggling is illegal, it is impossible to assemble historical evidence in a traditional manner. There are no smuggling archives, and state records only document the failures of smugglers and the victories of law enforcement. The only records of success are the fading memories of the surviving participants.

“True crime” is a strange, one-sided genre that consists mostly of law enforcement fairy tales and self-serving, Mr. Big soliloquies of greatness that omit all but the heroic narrator’s myopic perspective. Following the lead of British historian E. P. Thompson, we wanted to capture the voices of a voiceless group conspicuously absent from history. Published by Columbia University Press in 2013, Thai Stick and was very well received by critics and scholars.

Much more moving than our nominations for the Bancroft Prize, the PEN/ESPN award, the Oral History Association’s book award, and the American Historical Association’s prize for world history, were the heartfelt thanks we received from former smugglers who showed up unannounced at book events, from Malibu to Mendocino, to thank us for accurately chronicling their history.

Over the next decade, Thai Stick was optioned five times by the good, bad, and ugly of Hollywood. Having spent a decade working for the U.S Department of Defense, I can honestly say that compared to the film and television industries—the DoD is clean, honest, efficient and transparent. In 2023, after an especially punishing Hollywood Squares Zoom call with a group of oxymoronically entitled “creative executives,” I vowed to never “hop on” another call or do another Hollywood porch dance again. Rather than making a cartoon about my culture, I decided to make an accurate documentary about marijuana smuggling. Instead of bad reenactments, perfectly shot in 4k, I decided to let the smugglers speak for themselves.

Although he could not afford it, Mike Ritter put up the initial seed money to make this film. For the past two years, my house has doubled as a production office, hotel and commissary. My skeleton crew—the remarkably patient and diligent Netflix editor Michael Kenny and our run and gun sound/cameraman Josh Stevens—slashed their normal rates and worked tirelessly, as did my illustrator/wife Annabelle Lee, and my production assistants/sons Seaborne and Joe.

Based on the strength of the twenty-minute proof of concept documentary we completed in 2024, my friend and teacher about all things Hollywood, Jose Padilha, and my martial arts student, employer and friend Reggie Barnes, provided us with our most significant funding. This money enabled us to travel to Nevada, Oregon, California, Thailand and Cambodia to conduct more interviews.

Finally, and most recently, old friends Patrick Lang, Tina Hulett, and Hunter Sutton stepped up to finance this final edit.

I was not surprised when the Karens and Kens who run Hollywood “passed” on Thai Stick. I was relieved to be spared their input. After all, the values many of our narrators hold and I share—respect your elders, your word is your bond, don’t snitch, steal, whine, or snivel—are antithetical, even slightly threatening, to those of the algo rhythm and consensus driven technocrats who run show business today.

I reject the view that creative endeavors are group activities and that human taste can be quantified. My friend, writer and director John Milius, put it best: “All creative work is mystical. How dare they think they can demystify it? Especially when they can’t write. How arrogant it is to assume that you know the market, that you know what’s popular today.

Only Steven Spielberg knows what’s popular today. So leave it to him. He’s the only one in the history of man who has ever figured that out.” Instead, I believe in an artistic closed loop that consists only of the artist, their art, and the audience—a world free from “notes,” “concerns,” and “conversations” about whose tender feeling might be hurt.

The rough cut you are about to watch is imperfect. We worked until we ran out of time and money. Please ignore the time codes and Getty burn ins. The sound and color in parts are nothing short of abysmal. Money can correct these things, but money cannot buy the stories that you are about to hear. Because the final fate of this film is uncertain, I wanted to hold this screening for those who helped us most and trusted us with their stories—the smugglers of the Santa Barbara Channel.

The Thai marijuana trade was one of the few unequivocal victories in the War on Drugs. But what did the U.S. government actually win? There was no reduction in either the supply or the demand for marijuana.

In fact, quite the opposite. As everyone from economist Adam Smith to the Thai politicians who were pressed by the U.S. government to crack down on marijuana pointed out, political laws will always be less powerful than the economic law of supply and demand. In the end, the United States lost the war on pot and the War on Drugs because today America is the most drug addled nation on Earth.

If nothing else, Thai Stick is a reminder of a simpler, more innocent and more chivalric time and a civilization that it every bit as extinct as the Chumash.