Herb Trader by A.R. Torsone

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Herb Trader is one of the most gripping stories I’ve ever read - all the more so, because it is true. In 1998, one of the biggest marijuana dealers on the face of the planet, a man known to many simply as “Max”, became a pawn in a desperate political struggle in Southeast Asia. This is his incredible story.

A.R. Torsone explains that by using complicated political choreography, the United States government began an elaborate scheme to swing a Cambodian election in their favor. Unfortunately, their plans derailed. Max and his friends quickly found themselves neck deep in a dangerous power struggle where mere survival seemed an almost impossible task.

Following his capture, Max endured the horrors of T.3 prison, the incessantly droning insects, disgusting filth, punishing heat and food that couldn’t tempt a drunken swine. Men and women were beaten and killed and the crematorium filled the air with the ashes of the dead. Huge ransoms were demanded for the lucky few, frantically raised by desperate families in the outside world - and still, Max and his friends remained prisoners.

Max should have died in T.3 prison, far away from his wife and loving daughters living in the cool, green woods of the northeast United States. The government’s gaping breach should have been plugged by his death and no one would have been the wiser. Somehow, after enduring months of squalor, illness and mind-stealing torture, Max was freed to return to his beloved Ahm. Unfortunately, their joy is short-lived. Max is recaptured and now presumed dead. The reader gasps as the beautiful Ahm prepares to kill herself, certain that her beloved Max is no longer among the living. Can anyone reach her in time to tell her the truth?

This is a riveting story of adventure and terror on the high seas, love and deceit, smuggling and marijuana trading, espionage, criminal activity, and political brainwashing worthy of Hollywood’s finest. As a biography, Herb Trader provides a powerful look into the mind and psyche of one of the biggest marijuana dealers of the modern age, but it is also a telling account of a political coup and subsequent cover up that should have set the world on its ear. If only we had known the truth. If only we had known.