According to Square Grouper: The Godfathers of Ganja, a "square grouper" was '70s slang for a burlap bag of pot cast overboard by Caribbean smugglers during hot pursuit by the law. The documentary by Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman (out on DVD) nostalgically looks at a gentler era of mom-and-pop dope dealing under the expectation that marijuana would soon be decriminalizedif not legalized. Alas, the world turned. The '80s and '90s brought the proliferation of crack and crank, the failed war on drugs and a bloody war by giant cartels for control of drug trafficking.
Square Grouper examines three cases from that portal of pot smuggling in the '70s, Florida. First up, the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church, whose adherents smoked ganja as a sacrament but took a stern view on all other aspects of behavior. With nary an Ethiopian, Egyptian or Jamaican among them, they come across in archival footage as hippie sectarians preaching a bleached-out Rastafarianism. Then there was the "Black Tuna Gang," a ready for Jimmy Buffett trio of Philadelphian transplanted to sunshine land. They stumbled into what seemed like a great business planonly to be imprisoned by the feds for decades after their conviction. Neither group probably traveled to the sleepy hamlet of Everglades City, where virtually every family worked to run pot through the mangrove islands by night. They proved too trusting of strangers and too willing to spend their money conspicuously.
At least in this telling, it seemed more like fun than crime. No one got hurtuntil the jail doors slammed.
