“Things Substack Doesn’t Know About Me (Yet)”:

Apparently I don’t disclose enough of myself here; Canary Vale wants me to spill more beans 😆 Well, actually my emotional reaction is to tell the world my most scandalous secrets, so I wonder where to draw the line…

Well, since I blog about life after drugs, it’s no secret that I was a pothead for 35 years. But what I haven’t mentioned is that for a while when I lived in Egypt I also sold a bit of weed.

It was nothing I sought out at all, I never did it on a large scale and I wasn’t motivated to make a lot of money off it. It’s just that, in some parts of the world, if you do drugs and have a home, you have to make an effort NOT to get involved in the drug trade.

In Egypt, foreigners, especially tourists, are constantly offered inflated prices for everything, from coffee to vegetables, and as you can imagine, the same applies all the more so to drugs. When you first arrive in a town like Dahab, you can expect to pay over 100 Egyptian pounds for a “finger” stick of hashish with a color and texture suspiciously similar to camel dung. The pure stuff smuggled from Lebanon is not even offered to you.

But the longer you stay in town, the more people you meet, and the better connections you make. Move into the Bedouin neighborhood where the police are afraid to show up (because Bedouins hate Egyptians, and some of them have guns) and guys are happy to deliver you a quarter or half a kilo of cannabis plants, wrapped in 2-year-old newspapers, in the back of their pick-up trucks, for only a few hundred Egyptian pounds.

Mind you, it’s not nearly as much weed as that sounds. We’re talking entire plants, stalks and all, not just buds. And the plants themselves barely qualify as cultivated; the Bedouins just go out to quiet places in the desert, plant seeds above the underground streams, and return months later to harvest. They don’t bother about separating male from female plants, so the results are full of seeds, and it’s weak stuff. But it’s pure cannabis, no camel dung, and if you don’t mind playing with butane, you can make your own hash from it.

Once you are established as a long-term resident, if you are still meeting lots of tourists — which in itself is almost unavoidable in a town like Dahab — conversations often turn to the hushed question “Do you know where I can get a good deal on weed?”

What do you tell them? Your connections don’t want to meet backpackers renting nightly stays at beach camps. Is your desire to stay clear of trouble so strong that you feign innocence? OK, I can see why the thought of spending years in jail might be a motivator for some folks, but that wouldn’t be me. I started answering with lines like “Well, it just so happens a friend sold me some pure local cannabis, and I happen to have a little bit left over… how much were you interested in?”

One young European who kept extending his stay became a frequent visitor, and I started preparing his weed by eyeballing the size and wrapping them in tin foil. I got tired of his conversation and soon became annoyed at the frequency of his visits. So I confirmed that he wasn’t smoking alone in his room, but was sharing with others back at the beach camp.

“Look,” I said “How about instead of coming here twice a week with 10 pounds, you take up a collection at the camp and bring me 70? I’ll give you 10 of these packets instead. You can sell 7 of them and get your money back and keep 3 for yourself.”

Sounded good to him. And thus I moved up a rung in the trade, and only to keep the dude from bothering me so often. Like I said, I would have had to try very hard NOT to have become a dealer in such a place. Too much effort for me.

So, that’s one thing you didn’t know about me. But the challenge said things, plural, and I do need to get on with my day, so… I used to have a cat named Rude Boy.

Care to play this game? I nominate Kelly Stuart, Sarah Salem, Christopher Carazas (🇫🇷🇪🇸🇮🇹🇬🇧) and Aida Rose.