NOTORIOUS MARIJUANA SMUGGLER TAKES US ON AN INTOXICATING TRIP

Confessions of a Pot Smuggler By Brian O'Dea Random House, 358 pages, $35

Reviewed By Douglas J. Johnston

BRIAN O'Dea's first brush with public notoriety was in February 2001
when he ran an unusual notice in the Employment Wanted section of the
National Post's classified ads.

Titled "Former Marijuana Smuggler," it read, in part: "Having
successfully completed a 10-year sentence, incident free, for
importing 75 tons of marijuana into the United States, I am now
seeking a legal and legitimate means to support myself and my family.

"Business experience: Owned and operated a successful fishing
business -- multi-vessel, one airplane, one island and processing
facility. Simultaneously owned and operated a fleet of
tractor-trailer trucks conducting business in the western United
States.... I also participated in the executive level management of
120 people worldwide in a successful pot-smuggling venture with
revenues in excess of $100-million US annually."

It landed him a job -- nicely in keeping with his familiarity with
risk capital -- as a venture capitalist. Today, the ex-Newfoundlander
is a Toronto television and film producer.

O'Dea is the scion of Newfie aristos. His father was owner of the
Newfoundland Brewery, an MP and a member of the provincial House of
Assembly. His uncle was lieutenant-governor.

Now in his early 50s, he was arrested in 1990 and sentenced to 10
years, but paroled in 1995.

His story is that his life went wrong when he was sexually abused in
early adolescence by a Christian Brother who ran the private Catholic
school he attended.

But it's hard to credit his criminal vocation solely to a predatory
pedophile. He writes about deals and scores and travels and highs
(from sampling his wares) with such gusto it sounds like he had a lot
of fun along the way -- at least early on.

His sampling of his wares, ample by his telling, raises another
credibility question: Did he really swallow, snort and inhale as many
illicit drugs as he says? O'Dea has a nice touch. He portrays
dangerous and loony characters -- from both his international drug
deals and his stint in prison (initially at Terminal Island in Los
Angeles harbour, latterly in Nova Scotia's Springhill penitentiary)
- -- with exact strokes and gives them perfectly pitched voices.

And High is an often gripping and sometimes mordantly funny memoir.

But if O'Dea consumed even a quarter of the LSD, pot, hash,
psilocybin, peyote, mescaline, cocaine and booze he claims, he should
have long ago french-fried his brains. Instead, we have High, a book
that's clearly the product of a fine, and disciplined, mind.

O'Dea's otherwise seamless narrative and terrifically paced story is
interrupted in its last chapter by a
smacks-of-psychotherapy-treatments litany of questions about why his
life took the turns it did.

O'Dea's drug deals, by some estimates, made him at one time the
world's richest Newfoundlander. Proof, arguably, and of a sort, of
the executive abilities he touted in his infamous classified ad.

But far more certain proof of his talent as a writer is found within
the pages of this memoir.