Sofa Enlightenment
by Robert Broughton
#4 – Adventures in the Drug Trade
The narrator leaves his office job and decides to go ever deeper into drug dealing. He flies to India via Hong Kong. In Hong Kong he has a seedy experience with a prostitute in a hotel. Smuggling marijuana from India nearly goes wrong a couple of times, and for the first time he has to deal with hardened criminals, not hippie part-time dealers. In 1974, after years of hippiedom and a few close shaves while drug dealing, he receives a letter from his friend Rob, who quit smoking dope to do Transcendental Meditation (TM) in London. The narrator is by now experiencing attacks of extreme paranoia, and he soon decides he can't go on like this. On the spur of the moment he goes to a travel agent and within hours is taking his seat on a Sydney to London flight.