Seth Ferranti calls himself “the Outlaw Filmmaker.” So it’s perhaps no surprise that he just got arrested with more than 400 lbs of cannabis in his truck. “They’re still acting like it’s the height of the ‘War On Drugs‘ years with marijuana,” he exclaims. “When is it going to stop?”
Seth has a big history with both VICE and just about every lever of US law enforcement. In 2015, he was released from a 21-year stint in federal prison for selling quantities of cannabis and LSD so biblically huge they provoked national outrage; by that point, he’d already been writing for VICE and many other publications for years: a columnist behind bars. Since being freed, he’s made his name as a screenwriter and filmmaker.
But now, he’s back in the shit.
Over the phone, Seth is eager to point out that Nebraska, where he was arrested on October 29, just voted to legalize medical cannabis—joining the other 38 states where it is either medically or recreationally legal. But outside of regulated frameworks, criminal punishments remain in place for possession. “Why can all these legal corporations transport money and marijuana wherever the fuck they want, but individual citizens can’t?” asks Ferranti rhetorically, in his distinctive gruff drawl between heady tokes of a hash joint.
The 52-year-old, who grew up in the California suburbs before following his military father on placements overseas, is under no illusions as to why the authorities remain so keen to make an example of him. It goes all the way back to 1991, when he was 20 years old, and that original bust when he was accused of distributing more than 100,000 doses of acid in Virginia. A situation he responded to by jumping bail and spending two years on the lam.
After absconding, the 6 foot 1 rogue elaborately but unsuccessfully staged his own drowning in an attempt to throw police off the scent. He drove to the edge of a river in Maryland and left an empty vodka bottle and a note in his abandoned car. However, the “suicide” was declared a hoax by police after they worked out Ferranti had staged it on the wrong side of the river; if his body had really entered the water that side, it would have washed up into a dam. It led him to be placed on the US Marshals’ 15 ‘Most Wanted’ fugitives list. His wanted poster explained that Ferranti was a member of a North Virginia drug distribution organization that supplied LSD and marijuana “to students at numerous high schools and universities.”
“Out of all the fugitives, they made a Deadhead college marijuana dealer a top priority in the whole United States,” as he despaired, previously. Needing money, and unable to work legally, he went back to selling cannabis but got caught smoking a joint outside a Burger King while doing a deal in 1993. He was released under investigation but his fingerprints marked him out as a man on the run, and he was tracked to a motel bed in Missouri. He was promptly given a maximum sentence, the kind usually reserved for hardened drug kingpins. “They gave me 25 years when I was only 22,” he recalls. “I was a first-time non-violent offender. There were dudes who’d killed people in there that had less time than me. It shook me to my core.”
Seething with a fierce sense of injustice that he still harbors today, Ferranti spent his initial years incarcerated working out, playing guitar in a prison death metal band, and doing “a lot” of drugs—cannabis, LSD, mushrooms—along with getting drunk on prison moonshine. He wouldn’t recommend tripping in prison: “When you were out in the yard, it was OK, but then you go back and get locked in a cell… LSD is about setting, and in prison your mindset’s a lot of negativity.”
Whether prompted by a psychedelic prison-yard epiphany or not, Ferranti eventually stopped twiddling his thumbs. The high school dropout got three college degrees and became a journalist while locked up behind the razor wire, writing for a popular underground prison magazine, launching the website Gorilla Convict, and beginning his I’m Busted column for VICE in the late 90s. His plight soon elicited attention from Rolling Stone.
“I had to do something; I had to let people know,” he says. On his anti drug war crusade, he wrote about his own case and other narcotics inmates who found themselves inside on what they felt were unjustifiably long sentences. He also wrote about gangsters and the doll porn craze. “I told the real stories,” he says. “The mainstream news media just repeats the prosecutor’s story. But there’s a lot of gray areas in life.” He also revealed prison officer corruption, leading guards to throw him in solitary confinement.
When he was in ‘the Hole,’ he would simply switch focus from mag deadlines to one of his many books. “They say you got First Amendment rights and can write for the press, but as soon as I started getting national attention for work that was critical of what was going on in the institution, I found out real quick I had no rights,” he says. “When I was in the Hole I’d pay one of the orderlies like, $20 to bring me a pen, and I’d write. That’s the type of dude I was.” The Daily Beast, for whom he also contributed articles, reported in 2013 that Ferranti was in the throes of a weeks-long stint in solitary, “evidently as a punishment for his journalism.”
After he was finally released from prison to a more 4/20-friendly world in 2015, his 2017 documentary White Boy—the true story of Rick Wershe Jr, a teenaged FBI informant who became a cocaine kingpin—was among the top 5 most watched movies on Netflix in the US. It led to a swathe of further films, including last year’s Secret History of the LSD Trade. But Seth didn’t always manage to make ends meet through his journalism—the golden days of the early noughties web boom and getting paid $900 from VICE for a column long behind him. “As an artist, sometimes you struggle, man. If your work is not as accepted as some of your other work has been. But that’s life, I’m not giving up.”
Ferranti’s trial has been set for March 25. He’s pleaded not guilty and plans to question the legality of the stop, pointing to a local police force with a reputation for pulling people over and forcing them into “civil forfeitures.” Ferranti claims it was only after being made to stop that the cops said they could smell weed; his defense will argue that some courts have ruled that the scent of cannabis alone—a legal aroma, in many places—does not justify a search. (The police claim Seth was driving on the hard shoulder.) Ferranti spent three weeks in county jail before his supporters were able to amass the $25,000 in cash needed to meet his bail.
“They had me like I’m some cartel dude,” he says. “I never got caught with a gun. I never got caught with no powders. I’m not a fucking criminal.” Ferranti remains ardent that he is first and foremost a repeat victim of the enduring War On Drugs, seeing himself more as a “trailblazing entrepreneur” who has championed causes that happen to be politically unpopular. Perhaps, with the ongoing legalization of cannabis and the psychedelic renaissance, he is in the process of being vindicated by history—despite his most recent arrest.
“I always believed these substances were medicinal, spiritual, and therapeutic,” he says. “I’m like a rebel with a cause. I was a psychedelic, cannabis warrior. They almost convinced me I was wrong. But now I feel justified: I was an activist. I was ahead of my time and had to pay the price.”
His gritty new documentary, A Tortured Mind, covers the failure of the authorities to reintegrate former prisoners back into society and the realities of post-incarceration syndrome. The protagonist, Ryan Leone, who was not long out of prison, fatally overdosed while they were making the movie. “If it happened tomorrow, I’d have a tonne of regrets, but I can honestly say that I didn’t die with fear of death,” Leone says, morbidly, in the film.
“He had maybe a few mental issues and drug addiction but then all the violence and stuff he witnessed during eight years in prison exacerbated everything,” Ferranti says. “When he came out he was a complete mess. He couldn’t stay off drugs, his mental illness was off the charts. He went to prison and they grinded him up and he came out totally more fucked up.”
Today, it’s Ferranti who faces the possibility of another stretch inside, this time on charges of possession with intent to supply. But he is unrepentant. “They don’t call me the Outlaw Filmmaker for nothing,” he says. “The laws need to change.”
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The post The Ballad of Seth Ferranti, Who the Cops Just Won’t Leave Alone appeared first on VICE.
