INTERVIEW
A N I N T E RV I E W W I T H S E T H L E A F P RU Z A N S K Y AU T HOR OF T H E F IGH T T O E N L IGH T I N I T I AT ION T H ROUGH T H E H E A RT I S T H E O N LY WA Y T O W I N
BY M R . RO O T S
P H OTO G R A P H Y C O U R T E S Y O F I N T H E T R E E S P O D C A S T
Of all of the stories I have heard about people getting busted for cannabis over the years, there was one that had me-and many others I knew--all shook up. It could be because it happened locally, or because he and I were close, but when Seth Leaf Pruzansky went down, it shook many of us to the core. Seth had gotten in touch with me when he was on bail, soon after he had been busted. We had met in a parking lot near the Brunswick-Topsham bridge to talk. The look in his eyes was pure fear, worry, and anger--none of which I had ever seen him express before. And rightly so. What he told me demolished a construct of trust in an underground world whose foundation was built upon that tenant. On that overcast, late-winter day, with the heavy sleet forming slush on every surface, he told me he had been set up. He said he was probably going away to prison for a while. I saw my friend sitting across the truck cab from me scared for his future. All I remember was feeling worry for him, and so much anger and fear myself. I couldn’t help but have bad intentions for whoever it was that had put my friend in this situation. This is how it went down… It had been weeks since Seth had heard from him, which wasn’t normal. In the fifteen years since they had known each other, they had always kept in contact several times a week. They were close friends and, apart from helping each other in various ways over the years, they worked together. ‘He had a bunch of my product, my weed, and he just disappeared on me.” Seth recounted when we met recently. “Which wasn’t like him.” Weeks had passed, and he had kept steady, not questioning, always cool. There was a lot of product that this guy was sitting on. He hadn’t reached out himself to check in, but Seth remembers wondering “What happened?”. Seth started to become concerned. Then out of the blue one day, the phone rang and it was his friend. “‘Oh Sorry bro, it was my Dad’, he said. He had some story, you know?” Seth recounts. “And he goes, look, I didn’t touch anything you gave me. It’s just sitting at my place. You can go get it.” Seth remembered not thinking anything of his friend telling him that at the time. He remembers saying, “I was like ‘Okay’, and didn’t really think anything of it. It was my friend. I was like ‘do you need help with anything?’, and he goes ‘no, no, I just gotta deal with this’, and ‘it’s tough’ you know, writing it off, saying whatever. I was like ‘alright, well I’m going to go over’.” Seth remembered something not feeling right to him on the
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way to his friends house. Knowing he had to pick up what was owed him, he pushed the feelings away. It wasn’t until he drove up the driveway to his friends house that intense “feelings of panic and anxiety” started flooding over him. He had visions of agents rushing him with machine guns. They felt so real, but told himself “No, you are just being paranoid” and moved forward with his mission to pick up his product. Reaching the top of the driveway, there was no one at the house, just like his friend had told him. He used the key that he had been given, and walked into the living room. There were two black duffle bags lying on the floor of the room. He opened them up and noticed that there were some pounds in there that were not his. They were packaged differently. Different bags that were clearly not his. The same feelings from earlier, of something not feeling right, washed over him, and he second guessed himself in this scenario. “I wondered if I should stuff some newspapers into the duffel bag and walk outside with them” Seth told me, “But I didn’t.” Picking up the duffel bags, he walked outside to his truck. Lifting the tonneau cover, he placed the bags in the truck bed, and, as he was reaching to close the tonneau cover, The DEA came at him with machine guns. They rushed him. “Put your hands up! Put your fucking hands up now! Up against the truck! Hands behind your back!” they screamed and slammed him against his truck while they wrenched his arms behind his back to handcuff him. Seth was caught by the DEA with 64 pounds of cannabis separated into two black duffel bags in the back of his motor vehicle. They had him on audio and video surveillance, as well as with marked money. It was his friend who had set him up. The one who he had been close with for years. The events that took place surrounding the bust, and the case that the DEA had built against Seth were well executed. “They got me good.” Seth recounted to me recently. “They got me so good.” When they took him in for interrogations, the detectives told him that he was facing 30 years in prison for the amount of cannabis he was caught with. The room went cold under its fluorescent lights. They told him if he gave them “names of local growers”, he would face a lesser sentence. This was right before the legislative battles were won that began to transform the state of Maine medical marijuna program, which established grounds for increased medical use of cannabis beyond the traditional Cancer and AIDS patients. These were times when local growers were
