2003 - George Jung                                  Home


     In April of 2001 my younger brother Rick mentioned to me that he had seen the movie "Blow" and that I should see it. I had just been re-arrested for the last time on April 12th about the time the movie had come out. I was in Lee County jail in Fort Myers, Fl and about to be indicted by the Feds for conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine and had no ability to pick my movies, so I didn't see it.

In 2003 I was serving a 51 month sentence at Butner, NC when I saw the movie "Blow" was going to be on TV and determined to watch it. All I knew was that it was about cocaine. At the beginning of the movie as I watched Johnny Depp play this young man who had just graduated from high school and rented an apartment in Manhattan Beach, Ca. in the summer of 68 my ears perked up because of the encounter I had had with the young man on Manhattan Beach on June 1st, 1968. (George Jung – 1968)

What struck me about the beginning of the movie was that the camera was showing just what I had seen while I was standing there talking to George. I could see this overweight kid running back from the beach yelping and whistling at the good looking girls; as if the camera had replaced me. It was as if George remembered me and was trying to be sure I realized who he was.

Also the short scene of the girl sitting on the beach smoking what we all assumed to be marijuana looked just like the girl I had seen from the back. She always was facing the ocean and I never got a good look at her face. I also noticed in the movie that it showed George, the fat guy, and the girl sitting on a couch. That was the only place to sit in the whole apartment. I had forgotten his name over the years but I remembered that when he told me his first name I thought that it didn't fit him. He just didn't seem like a George. I guess it wasn't a popular name for a youth of the sixties. That helped me to recall that his name was George when I saw the movie.

Of course I didn't know at the time that I was meeting the future distributor of 85% of the cocaine in the US in the late 70's and early 80's and a main cog in the formation of the Medellin drug cartel who would later have a movie made about his life which I would see while serving my own sentence for conspiracy to distribute cocaine in 2003.

I have to think that with the opening scene of the movie George was making sure that I would be aware of who he was. Of course he didn't know that I was one of the protesters in 67 on national TV burning my draft card in front of the Pentagon and that I had already met future president Bill Clinton and would go on to meet other future famous and infamous people such as Arnold, the Unabomber, Rush Limbaugh, and David Koresh.

My opinion about marijuana today is that recent science has shown that it interferes with the transmission of information between brain cells which is why it affects reaction times so that it would not be a healthy habit to get into but I still think the benefits of legalization of all drugs far outweigh the costs of prohibition not to mention the issue of individual freedom. There are many prescription drugs out there whose effects are far worse than marijuana or cocaine.