Stephen Roffe: Beyond Hercules, the Interview

Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to load a speed boat with a ton of hash and then  race it between continents at over one hundred miles an hour on the darkest night of the month?  Imagine clinging on for dear life while you’re bouncing over the waves in the pitch black. The engines are roaring, cold salty spray is hitting you in the face, your favourite song is blasting through the headphones and the cops are trailing in your wake. Make it home and you’ll have earnt a year’s salary in one night.  Sound like a good day at the office?

Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to load a speed boat with a ton of hash and then  race it between continents at over one hundred miles an hour on the darkest night of the month?  Imagine clinging on for dear life while you’re bouncing over the waves in the pitch black. The engines are roaring, cold salty spray is hitting you in the face, your favourite song is blasting through the headphones and the cops are trailing in your wake. Make it home and you’ll have earnt a year’s salary in one night.  Sound like a good day at the office?

In the nineteen eighties Gibraltar played host to a diverse motley crew of sailors, gangsters, smugglers, wayfarers and adventure seekers who smuggled Moroccan hash to get their kicks, fund their lifestyles and satisfy Europe’s insatiable demand for the stuff.  Stephen Roffe was one of those people.  In his new book, Beyond Hercules, Stephen shares the thrills, spills, successes and disasters of this secretive world with anyone who cares to read it.  We read it and we liked it, so we went to catch up with the man himself to talk about his long relationship with the cannabis plant, his hopes for the book and his future plans for moving into the cannabis industry legally...

SSUK: Congratulations on the book Stephen, it’s a very entertaining read – what were your motivations for writing it?
SR: Thanks. I’d been thinking about writing my memoirs for my own posterity, but after spending years telling stories around camp fires everyone would tell me “you should write a book!” So it was other people that motivated me. I read other books on similar subjects, like Mr Nice, and then watched dubious films like ‘Layer Cake’ and thought ‘Shit, they’re right, I’ve got a better story than that’ and as I’d been thinking about doing my memoirs anyway I’d already written the book in my head.

It must’ve been a bit of a learning curve for you, can you tell us a bit about that process?
Yeah, as a sailor I obviously knew that ‘hemp’ had been used for hundreds of years to make all the canvas sails and ropes that helped transport people and goods around the world but I knew absolutely nothing about the legal history or the medical applications of cannabis. It was through researching bits and bobs for the book that I learnt about all that. I learnt how it was America’s number one crop for donkeys years and then, almost overnight, it became illegal to grow it – and all because of people like the timber barons, the Du Ponts and Anslinger and Hearst, the big business people. That all lead me to finding out about Rick Simpson’s oil and all the medical applications of the plant, which was mind blowing.

I started talking to people about it and then I found out about a friend’s mother-in-law who used it to cure her skin cancer. I saw the after effects with my own eyes. This was a very attractive woman in her early sixties who’d developed a cancer at the corner of her mouth, the tumor was about the size of a ten pence piece and the doctors wanted to cut out a big chunk of her cheek to try and fix it. That would’ve left a big hole, exposing her teeth and gums where her cheek should’ve been. She refused that. Her son knew about the benefits of cannabis oil so he got hold of some and they treated it very successfully. A few months later they went back to the hospital because she needed a bit of cosmetic surgery to deal with some scar tissue and they found that the cancer had completely disappeared. If I had known about that five or six years ago my Dad might still be alive and healthy today. My Mum is in a nursing home in Hastings in her sixth year of the cruel disease Alzheimers, so maybe it’s a bit late for her, but I believe it was the stress and heartbreak of caring for my Mum that contributed to my Dad’s early demise.

Knowing about this and hearing about all the other incidents of people curing their tumours and treating Alzhiemers and Chrones disease with cannabis has inspired my next big project.

What’s that going to be?
Well, it all depends on how well the book does, but I’m hoping to raise enough funds to set up in the cannabis business legally. I live in Portugal these days and the government here has just granted its first license for industrial cannabis trials. I want to become part of that. At the moment they’ve granted the license for a small pilot scheme to, and I don’t mean this in a negative way, a bunch of pseudo-hippies. We don’t need to do this though. Loads of countries around the world have already done that and we know how well it works – there’s just no point growing an acre, where does that get you? I want to get permission to grow hundreds of acres because that’s the only way to make a viable business out of it. If you’re going to do it, do it big! It’s a great way to make money – its good for industry, its good for people and its a great way to help sort out all the shit that we’ve done to the planet. It’s not like its a new idea, we did it for hundreds of years and its only cos of big business and their politicians that we stopped. Here in Portugal there are thousands of hectares of unused farm land that are absolutely perfect for industrial cannabis plantations and it would be great to see Portuguese government allow people to do something productive with the land. There are a lot of social and economic problems in this country and a legal cannabis industry could go a long way towards sorting that out. We need to get on to the Agricultural Minister.

It sounds like putting this book together has given your love of cannabis a new lease of life!
Yeah, exactly. I’ve been a consumer of recreational cannabis for my entire adult life but all this information has opened up a whole new world, not just for me but for millions of people. They can’t stop it now, its an unstoppable snowball.

Does what you know now change the way you look back at your smuggling days?
No. Back then we weren’t thinking about the product in any way other than in terms of the quality of what we were smoking. None of us knew about all the other properties of the plant, we should’ve done though cos back in 1974 we know that they knew cannabis could cure cancer but they told us all huge fucking porky pies and hid the truth from us. Since then they’ve legislated against it, persecuted people for it and at the same time they’ve poisoned us all and made billions of dollars doing so, and all at the behest of half a dozen or so very powerful people. They’ve changed the whole history of humanity – I mean, a schedule one drug with absolutely no medicinal value? The history of the world would be very different if they hadn’t banned it in the 1930s and then again in the 1970s when they knew for sure that cannabis oil could cure cancer. I was twenty four years old in 1974 and if we’d been allowed to know all that then think of all the lives that would’ve been saved and all the ill health and suffering that people have gone through. Imagine how different all of our lives would be, and think of all the families that’ve lost their Mums and Dads because of financially and racially motivated political lies. Its nothing short of fucking criminal.

Indeed. This may be a bit of a daft question, but what are your hopes for Beyond Hercules?
I’d like to see the book on the shelves when I walk through the airport, and up in WH Smiths as a number one best seller. There have already been mutterings about turning it into a film, that would go hand in hand with the book – it’d be the icing on the cake and it sure would be fun to go down to Gibraltar again and get on a big, powerful motor launch to recreate the action. If that happens I want to be the one driving the boat, cos I’m rather good at it! Getting chased across the Straits at 100 miles an hour with hundreds of kilos of illicit cargo is a massive adrenalin rush, it was always about that rather than the money, and if it can all help to finance a legal and positive cannabis business here in Portugal then I’ll be a very happy man indeed!