Vaunce County Drug Tales

Moonshiners and bootleggers in eastern Kentucky discovered a second living, beyond the soil and the coal mines, during and after America’s Prohibition. Growing cannabis used to be a misdemeanor in Kentucky. A stray patch out back didn’t fetch attention in the holler … or at the local courthouse. But by the 1980s, the War on Drugs had turned an odd “patch of kill” into a felony. As the risks rose, so did the price. So the good ol’ boys and girls who once slung liquor among networks of hidden cabins found something better to supplement what little they earned from the soil and the mines.

Among the endless hardwood forests, gorges and stopped-up hollers of Vaunce County, Kentucky, Ambrose “Big Boy” Hood and his sister Beatrix Lee hide one of the largest marijuana-growing operations in the United States. Officer Tarnation Quagg is a new state trooper, not bought and not beholden, who arrives in Vaunce County with a mandate to wage war on any drugs he spots in his helicopter or through his scrutinizing detective work. Somewhere in between are two boys, Bart Southern and Duane Varnum. Young and bored, they’re taken with “gettin wild,” 80s metal and violence; they choose to enter the drug underworld. Conversely, Bart’s younger sister Annie is forced into the outlaw culture. Once there, though, she finds communion with a mad-violent mystic who has formed the bedrock of Vaunce’s wickedness since he was just her age.

It is 1987.