Only the plane didn't get high

You can't go wrong with an old DC-3 cargo plane, two tons of marijuana and a third of a mile of mud for a runway - not if you're a storyteller, that is, rather than a smuggler. Heaving itself off the ground, chewing scrub with its propellers as it struggles unsuccessfully to get above the palm trees, eventually losing the fight for height and pancaking on a beach, the doughty DC-3 gives Smokescreen the set-piece any good blockbuster needs. It's also the book's most sympathetic character.

The plane plays best supporting role to Allen Long, whose major lifetime achievement is to have smuggled about a million pounds of grass into the United States, mainly from Colombia, in the early Seventies. Long originally fancied himself as a film-maker, and hit upon the idea of a documentary about a dope-smuggler who called himself El Coyote. Prolonged contact with El Coyote and his ilk persuaded Long that he could do the job better himself.

His main asset seems to have been his ability to withstand his own drug consumption. In a subculture full of people who found endless amusement, and indeed took considerable pride, in rendering themselves unable to perform the simplest everyday tasks, the few left standing took the prizes. Long was into smuggling for the same reasons that rock musicians were in bands: drugs, money and sex. Not in that order, though: Long saw drugs and money largely as a means to gain access to women. He figured smuggling was easier than rock'n'roll, because he didn't have to spend as long on the road.

As with all prolonged exposure to large quantities of drugs, however, it stopped being fun after a while. Long's cocaine habit did his personality no favours, and the quality of the company he kept deteriorated even further.

It began as a game for adventurers toting joints instead of guns - though how the unarmed traders managed to hang on to their cash is the story's abiding mystery - and ended in Miami among career gangsters and machine-pistols.

It is, as Robert Sabbag says, a story of its time - which is what he said about his previous smugglers' tale, Snowblind (reissued by Canongate, £6.99), originally published in 1976.

Apparently concerned about its redeeming historical value, he remarks on the price of luxury goods back then; just as he did more than 10 years ago, in his afterword to a new edition of Snowblind. Sabbag also betrays unease about the veracity of his story, which is hardly surprising, since his sources were all criminals and mostly drugged up to the eyeballs at the time. It's a ripping yarn, if you like yarns about people getting ripped.

Nor does Sabbag have much of a moral at his disposal. This is adventure for its own sake, featuring people who were in it solely for their own sakes. They were neither especially appealing nor especially wicked, and many of them got away without paying much of a price. Long himself knew it was time to quit when a gangster put a gun to his head in Miami. He walked away from the drug trade, later spent about three years in jail and is now married with children and a job in the music business.

Out of all the members of his operation, the DC-3 fared the worst.

After its crash-landing it was torn to bits, its nose and windscreen ending up as a conservatory on a local village elder's house. It was about the only one that never got the chance to go straight.