Hashish (“hash”) was common in the drug culture Reggie encountered while he was still very young. It became part of his life both as a drug he used and as something he sold.

Growing up in Souris, Prince Edward Island, might seem an unlikely place for a teenager to develop connections to a larger drug market. But Reggie had something most teenagers in a small Island community did not: a trusted family connection to Montreal. Our cousin Mike was involved in that world, and in the summer of 1981 I got an unexpected glimpse of just how substantial that involvement had become.

A Memory From Montreal

That summer, I went to Montreal to visit my cousins. Mike took me along when he went to visit some friends he had business with. I had no idea what that business involved, or the scale of the drug world in which Mike had become involved.

While we were at one of his friends’ houses, another man arrived carrying an Adidas bag. He opened it and poured out what I remember as approximately 40 bricks of hash. They looked very much like the type of brick represented in the image below.

A brick was approximately one kilogram, or 2.2 pounds. Reggie wrote elsewhere that hash sold for about $20 per gram, which is also the price I remember from that period.

I did some quick math in my head. At $20 per gram, a kilogram would have had a street value of approximately $20,000. If my memory of approximately 40 one-kilogram bricks is correct, the theoretical retail value of what was sitting in front of me would have approached $800,000.

Even allowing for the uncertainty of a memory more than four decades old, what I remember seeing was clearly an enormous quantity of hash. The experience scared the hell out of me.

I had simply gone along with my cousin. Suddenly I was sitting in a room with what appeared to be a huge quantity of illegal drugs, wondering what would happen if the Montreal police came through the door. How would I explain why I was there? Until that moment, I had no idea Mike was involved at that level.

AI-generated reconstruction based on a family recollection; not a documentary photograph.

The Montreal Connection

What I saw that afternoon tells us something about the world to which Mike had access. It does not tell us how much hash Reggie himself was handling.

I have no evidence that Reggie ever dealt in quantities remotely approaching what I saw in Montreal, and I don’t want to imply otherwise. Unless evidence emerges establishing a connection, these are two separate parts of the story and should remain that way.

What the experience does help explain is how a teenager growing up in Souris could have access to a trusted source of drugs in Montreal. Reggie’s relationship with Mike gave him a connection that would have been difficult for a teenager on Prince Edward Island to develop on his own.

Reggie and Hash

Marijuana and hash had become part of Reggie’s life at a remarkably young age. In his own account of this period, Reggie wrote:

“So, I started selling pot. I was 12 years old.”

Hash became part of that world as well. My recollection is that Reggie would obtain quantities of hash and divide them into much smaller pieces for sale. I don’t know how large the quantities he originally received were, and I don’t want to fill gaps in the historical record with assumptions.

What is clear is that Reggie was no longer simply a young person experimenting with drugs. While still very young, he was also learning how drugs were bought and sold.

Christmas Packages

One memory of Reggie has stayed with me. Around Christmas one year, I remember seeing him packaging small pieces of hash and wrapping them like miniature Christmas presents for his regular customers.

He even had a small Christmas tree in his room, with some of those little packages hanging from it like ornaments. At the time, there was something almost funny about it. Looking back now, I find it more disturbing than funny. It was a very different world.

Where This Was Leading

Hash was only one part of Reggie’s early involvement with drugs, but it illustrates something that would become increasingly important in his story. He wasn’t simply experimenting with drugs. While still very young, he had begun learning how to sell them, how to find customers and how to obtain a supply.

His connection to Montreal would continue to matter as he got older. The drugs would change, the quantities and circumstances would change, and eventually the people surrounding the drug trade would become considerably more dangerous.

My own encounter with that world had a different effect on me. The experience didn’t mean that I suddenly stopped using drugs, and I don’t want to rewrite my own history to suggest that I did. What changed was the way I viewed the drug trade itself.

For me, what I saw in Montreal was a warning. For Reggie, the warnings did not have the same effect. That difference between us became clearer as the years passed.