1984 – After I finished high school, I went to University – St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  I didn’t know what I wanted to do but both of my brothers had been to university so my parents insisted that I go too.  So off I went.  I didn’t care about school but I wanted to live in Halifax – the big city compared to where I was from.

I started selling drugs to the other students when I got there.  I was taking trips to Montreal to buy hash by the kilo and coke by the ounce.  At St Mary’s, I sold it by the gram and I made a lot of money – easy money. 

It was hard to be interested in school when I was making so much money selling drugs.  Halifax was just one long party.   I was going downtown to the bars almost every night, doing cocaine all the time. 

I could never get out of bed for my classes.  I made it through my first year but then I pretty much gave up on school altogether.

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Two Roads Meet Again

There is an irony in this part of Reggie’s story that I did not fully appreciate until many years later.

Our parents were trying to send Reggie down a very traditional path. His two older brothers had gone to university, and they wanted the same opportunity for him. Reggie even went to the same university in Halifax that I had attended.

But Reggie’s own words make clear that he arrived there with very different priorities.

Only a few years earlier, I had returned from Montreal after witnessing what I remember as approximately 40 kilograms of hash being dumped onto a table. That experience had frightened me enough to step away from the drug trade and pursue a more traditional direction in my life. I told my brothers what I had seen and warned them about the risks.

By the time Reggie arrived at Saint Mary’s, the two roads had crossed again.

He had been given the opportunity to attend university, but almost immediately he was travelling to Montreal to buy hash by the kilogram and cocaine by the ounce, bringing it back to Halifax and selling it to other students. As Reggie himself acknowledged, the money and the partying soon became more important to him than his education.

Looking back, this is one of the clearest examples of how differently two brothers could respond to similar opportunities and influences.

Related story: Two Brothers, Two Roads →