1988

Around the same time that Reggie was establishing a home and beginning life as a father, another part of his life was moving in a very different direction.

Reggie had been selling drugs since he was a teenager, beginning with marijuana and hash. He had also sold drugs while attending university in Halifax. But in his own account, this period marked a significant escalation in his involvement with cocaine.

Having a place of his own gave him a base from which he began selling cocaine much more seriously.

In Reggie’s Own Words

Reggie described what happened:

“My wife had the baby, a boy, and we rented a house and moved in together. With my place now I started selling coke seriously. I was buying it cheap by the kilo in Montreal and selling it by the gram. The money was good. This went on for several years with me amassing a small empire and a big habit.”

There is a lot contained in those few sentences.

Reggie was no longer describing occasional drug dealing. According to his own account, he was obtaining cocaine by the kilogram in Montreal and selling it in much smaller quantities on Prince Edward Island.

The money, as he put it, was good.

But perhaps the most important part of the passage comes at the end. While his drug dealing was becoming more serious, so was his own cocaine use.

Reggie summed up the result in just a few words: “a small empire and a big habit.”

The Montreal Connection

Montreal had already played an important role in Reggie’s access to drugs.

Our cousin Mike had become a trusted supplier. Because they were family, Reggie had a connection that was very different from dealing with an unknown supplier. Mike could provide access to marijuana, hash and, later, cocaine.

That relationship would remain important for years.

It also meant that Reggie’s drug dealing on Prince Edward Island was connected to a much larger drug market outside the province.

Dealer and User

One of the important things about this period is that Reggie was both selling cocaine and using it himself.

Those two parts of his life increasingly fed into one another.

The cocaine business provided money and access to drugs, while Reggie’s own use was developing into what he himself called a “big habit.”

At the same time, none of this meant that the rest of his life had stopped.

He was a father. He was living with the woman he would later marry. And before long, he would return to school and demonstrate that he was still capable of succeeding academically at a very high level.

That is one of the contradictions that makes Reggie’s story difficult to divide neatly into periods when things were going well and periods when they were going badly.

Both could be happening at the same time.

What Came Next

Despite his growing involvement with cocaine, Reggie had not abandoned the idea of building a legitimate career.

His interests in electronics and technology would soon take him to New Brunswick, where he enrolled in the Avionics program at NBCC.

There, the student who had performed so poorly during his university years would achieve very different results.