Trices Group Book Review Journal

Blow

Porter, Bruce

by:

Harper Paperbacks

Publisher:

Location:

1993

Copyright:

Georgina Bedrosian

Cover:

Paperback

Type:

Lynard Barnes

reviewed by:

09/05/1994

Comment:

Must read. More depth than the movie.

Reprinted from Crushies Book Review, September 1994 Volume I, Issue No. 4: There are two highly significant bits of information in Blow. The first is a glimpse at the early days of marijuana and cocaine smuggling and how the Medellin cocaine cartel discovered the American free market. The second significant bit of information is an unexpected insight into the crime problem. To get to the latter bit of information, you must first read through 250 pages on the ups and downs of a drug smuggler named George Jung. As Porter would have it, George Jung, more than any other character, was responsible for opening the American illicit drug market to South American drug merchants. This may be an overstatement but not by much. George Jung put together a transportation system, developed wholesale distributors and was responsible for dumping well over a couple of tons of cocaine in California and Florida markets. His contribution to the drug problem went beyond smuggling. He was the inspiration and certainly the catalyst for Carlos Lender's elaborate drug importation network on the island of Norman Cay. (See Turning the Tide, by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick and Peter Abrahams for more on the Normal Cay drug operation). It would be gratifying to read that George Jung was an evil monster with pointed ears, drooling mouth and maniacal laugh. After all, his business was importing death onto the streets of America. But George Jung was not an apple so rotten he leaped out at you. Indeed, Porter shows us a man who is just about average in many respects. Therein lies the value of Blow. George Jung was an entrepreneur in the business of making money-- about 100 million dollars in eight years. That his business resulted in wasted lives, corruption and death was, to him at least, totally incidental to the goal. The goal was to make money. In steps the law. The law says something to the effect that, no matter how inventive, how industrious or how productive one may be in one's chosen manner of making money, there are certain acts which may not, must not be done. Smuggling illicit drugs may be one of these acts.

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Actually, the police and federal agents who eventually caught up with George were a bit clearer on what the law said than the lawyers and judges who got involved later. It is here that Blow exposes, in rather subtle fashion, the fallacy of justice as a product of law. The law is about the law, not justice. Because justice is administered by people, justice is imperfect. The law, however, is once removed from the hands of people, having been written down on paper. The law is perfect. With skill and finesse, it is possible to string together a series of laws in which you come out with no law---the ultimate goal of the business of crime. Add to the null-law product line of our legal system the buddy-buddy system in which the defense attorney is buddies with the prosecuting attorney, a dash of money and the ever present willingness to make a legal deal, you can, if you're George Jung, reduce a possible sixty year sentence for breaking the law to a fifteen year sentence--less when you include the other product line, good behavior time. In reading Blow, it is easy to forget that the likable and personable George Jung and all the others like him place them selves above community. They don't have to obey the law. They don't have to constructively contribute to the benefit or welfare of anyone but themselves; they don't even have to consider the consequences of their acts and what effect they have upon others. Weighted against the whole, the George Jung's of society are criminals. But if the criminal is self centered, self-absorbed and narcissistic, what is a justice system in which the letter of the law is the law and this letter and this letter and ad infinitum. Read Blow. Its impact is cumulative.

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