James* started selling marijuana in college. It seemed like the natural thing to do and required little effort on his part. He knew people who smoked and his junior year, met someone through a job waiting tables who could get good quality pot at a decent price. At its height, James was buying a half a pound a week and would net about $1,000 a pop. It lasted about three months, until he changed jobs and moved to a different part of town.
He remembers sitting around with friends smoking pot – playing video games, listening to music and watching movies – with warm nostalgia, and makes very little distinction between the smoking and the selling.
“I think there’s a fine line between using and selling as far as marijuana goes. I think that a lot of people that use marijuana have, what would technically be called selling at some point, just because you know somebody that somebody else doesn’t,” he said. “It comes along with knowing these people and being involved in that type of activity.”
James was never nervous about being robbed; he’s said he’s never owned a weapon and sold only to friends. At points towards the end, he said, he started to become nervous he could get in trouble with police, but at no point did he ever feel his safety was in jeopardy.
But investigators will tell you that Robbie Jacobs never worried for his safety either, nor did Karen and Rick Brown.
Robbie Jacobs, 20 years old, was shot and killed in Cumberland County in 1997. He sold marijuana to friends to make some extra money, and on a night in July he made his last deal. The killer made away with about a quarter pound of pot.
Karen and Rick Brown lived in rural southeastern Chatham County, and were discovered shot to death by Karen’s sister in April 2005. They grew high-quality marijuana, and like Robbie, only sold to people they knew.
Murders over marijuana are rare, said Donny Hansen, Special Agent in Charge for the Raleigh office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. At the same time, he scoffs at the notion that pot is a harmless drug.
“It’s a gateway drug,” he said. “It’s illegal and it’s dangerous to use.”
The DEA presents a detailed rationale for why they treat marijuana the same as any other narcotic, and while Hansen acknowledges that working to eradicate drugs and dealers is an uphill battle, he insists he has seen great progress over the past decade of his career in law enforcement.
North Carolina has interstates and a central location on the Eastern Seaboard that make it a target for traffickers, and not many weeks pass without headlines of a major bust. The Associated Press recently reported that an uptick in drug- and gang-related murders over the past several decades has led to a spike in unsolved homicides. The solve rate, nationally, hovers below 60 percent.
Both the Brown and Jacobs families are reluctant to blame drugs for their loved ones’ murders, but admit they would probably still be around if not for the marijuana. Whatever the reason, they say, no one deserves to be murdered.
Not only are drugs involved in a high percentage of homicides, investigators say they make those homicides difficult to investigate because people are reluctant to come forward with information, afraid they will incriminate themselves.
And James – unlike Robbie, or Rick and Karen – has the luxury of looking back at the reckless decisions of his youth. But unlike what they might feel if they could look back, he doesn’t harbor much regret.
“It’s not really something that I say oh gee, I wish I never smoked pot. It’s not like that, but I don’t really miss it either,” he said. “For me, it’s a time in my life; it’s something that I did for a time that I enjoyed, that I really don’t believe was that harmful, and that I no longer do.”
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