As life-changing events go, Ralph Weisheit’s was no lightning bolt from the blue. It could easily have slipped right past him.
If there were two things Weisheit thought he knew a lot about, it was drug offenders and rural life. But the two never mixed in his mind. “And here it was right under our noses. It just never dawned on me.”
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He figured maybe these people weren’t so unusual. Maybe the reason their stories were never heard was the us-versus-them mentality in which criminologists and the media tend to frame discussions about drugs. Weisheit set out to meet the farmer, his son, and other people who had been busted for growing marijuana in rural Illinois. Between 1988 and 1990, when he could steal time away from teaching, he drove the back roads of Illinois searching for the human stories behind the obscure headlines. He wanted to hear about why they did what they did and what effect it had on their lives. He found their motivations complex and surprising. There was a lot more to it than greed.
Weisheit doesn’t come down hard in favor of either the growers or the cops. Although he thinks drug laws are too severe, he doesn’t blame the cops. Rather, he thinks they should better understand grower culture so they can do their jobs more effectively and with more compassion.
When he struck out with the state police, Weisheit turned to looking through back issues of newspapers. When he made his first contacts with growers, he realized that it was a blessing that the police hadn’t cooperated. With an opening line like “I got your name from the police,” he would’ve gotten nowhere. They all would have thought he was a cop. He learned never to ask a grower the names of other growers, because it’s one of the first questions a cop would ask. And he played down the professor bit too. He dressed like he likes to dress anyway, tennis shoes and T-shirts. “I had to show them I wasn’t some asshole from the city coming to make them look like a hick from the sticks.” He let them know he was a small-town boy just like them as soon as he could. He wanted to make them feel they knew a whole lot more about growing than he did. That was easy to do, since they did.
He said planting the marijuana was his father’s idea. They faced foreclosure on their farm, and a family acquaintance made them a business proposition. He would supply the marijuana seeds if they would tend and harvest the crop. Then they’d split the profits. The son was so anxious about being in the marijuana field that he’d go through boxes of Rolaids in a week. But what could he do? Walk out on his old man? Call the cops?
The one Weisheit remembers best lived near Galena. He had about 25 plants growing in his home. He was in his mid-20s with a young son. At harvest time, the son would come crawling along the floor pushing his Tonka pickup truck. Dad loaded the truck with fresh marijuana buds and the son hauled them away.
