Sara Payan: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Planted with Sara Payan. I’m Sara Payan, your host, and today, our guest is Luke Scarmazzo. He has been a political prisoner, and he has gotten out. He has written a book, “High Price.” Welcome. Thanks for being here.
Luke Scarmazzo: Thanks for having me. Sara. It’s an honor. Big fan.
215 Medical Movement in California
Sara Payan: I’m excited to have this conversation with you. You were very much in the early days of the 215 medical movement and had a dispensary in Modesto.
Luke Scarmazzo: We talk about it a lot and even joke about it being the golden era in the 215 times. It was a different time back then in the sense that every day you went to work, it was always in the back of your mind that you could go to jail and might not come home to your family that day. And that was a real thing. It was a real presence in your life. We still have 3000 men and women in federal prison alone for cannabis. Parker Coleman, Edwin Rubis and Valerie Flores are still in prison for cannabis. So, you know, even though we’ve made so much progress, there’s still a long way for us to go before the effects of prohibition aren’t felt by generations.
Sara Payan: I agree. I have a real problem with the fact that we’re able to do business now, and there are large companies that are, you know, multi-state operators while we still have people in jail.
Luke Scarmazzo: It’s not right at all. And it seems like it’s the easiest, lowest-hanging fruit, right? It’s both sides of greed. There shouldn’t be people incarcerated for nonviolent cannabis offenses. Every presidential candidate besides Joe Biden was in favor of legalization and releasing people from prison.
President Biden even made the promise that he was going to release everyone who was incarcerated for cannabis and zero out or expunge their records. The progress is tremendous in the federal realm, but we still have so much to go when opening state after state and market after market. People need to be released from prison. All the other things can be figured out. We can argue about regulation. We can argue about safe banking. But we can’t do that while people sit in prison and wait, and mothers and fathers have empty seats at Christmas dinners and empty seats at Thanksgiving tables because somebody is in there for cannabis. It is crazy to me that we still have to talk about this.
Turning to Authorship: High Price by Luke Scarmazzo
Sara Payan: We’ve got a lot to do. I want to talk about your book “High Price.” What made you decide to write a book?
Luke Scarmazzo: I knew the story was important from the initial conviction when I went into prison. I was telling myself the whole time I had to tell this story because I felt in a sense that the government was trying to kind of push us off to the side and kind of keep us quiet and put a blanket over our situation and whether that was true or not like I felt like that. I know people think, “Oh, you’re in prison. You have all the time in the world to do things.” It’s not really like that. They’re scheduled out. You’re in the yard at a certain time. There are all kinds of things that they have to structure to try to help people rehabilitate.
I wrote the first 10 pages, and it just sat for years, and then I got put in the SHU, and the SHU is solitary confinement. It stands for segregated housing unit. I was in the SHU for several months at this time. You’re just in a cell by yourself. There’s no TV, there’s nothing in there. You’re fed in there with the tray, which comes in a metal slot, you eat, you send your tray back out when you’re done, and you have books and can write letters. A lot of times, the prison won’t provide books, so you’ll have to have books sent in from your family members or friends on the street. And so you try to time yourself to always have reading material because if you run out of reading material or things to do in a brick room with nothing else, the day is dragged.
Sara Payan: Yeah.
Luke Scarmazzo: It’s such a horrible form of treatment to do to a human. So I’m in this situation; I run out of reading material. I’m waiting on my next books, and I go, well, hell, I guess I’ll just continue writing this story. So it was really like a necessity thing. The funny thing is that I came up with this in my head. I’m going to write four pages a day because the task seemed too daunting. Oh, I got to write this whole book. It’s going to be 400 and 500 pages. I used to get nervous. Like when my teachers would give me a 20-page essay, I’d wait till the last night and do it on the last night. You know what I mean? So I’m daunted by this task. And then, finally, I came up with this thing where I’m going to take little bites at it with four pages a day. I’m coming up with four pages a day because that’s what they gave us per week: four pieces of writing paper and two envelopes. So, on the first day I wrote, I used my four pages. I had another set of four pages there. On the second day, I used the second four pages, but then I realized I didn’t have the material to keep this going.
They have what’s called an orderly, and he passes stuff out like dinner, laundry, and other things like writing supplies. You don’t have a currency back there–there’s no money. I guess you can call, and maybe if your people on the street are connected, you could have money transferred. As far as being able to barter for stuff in there, you have food. Food is very valuable there because it’s scarce. So I told the orderly, I will give you a lunch tray and a dinner tray every week if you can give me extra writing paper. And he’s like, okay, cool deal. The first night he comes by, I’m expecting maybe to get ten pages or something, you know? And he goes to, like, drop the laundry by my door, and he slides in a full notebook under there and eight pens. And then, for every week, he just kept doing that for me. And it was so awesome that I could sit down and write.
Sara Payan: So, how long did it take you?
Luke Scarmazzo: When I got the paper, I sat down, and the first 10 days, I was nonstop, and I wrote like 40 or 50 pages. I felt like I had something there when I had those first 50 pages; now I’m inspired. So, I would say the total time was probably over the course of a couple of months. I ended up staying in the SHU for seven months my first time. I finished the book the second time I went to the SHU, which was an eight-month run.
Sara Payan: That’s a long time to be alone.
Luke Scarmazzo: Yeah, it is. And I wasn’t even one of the guys there the longest. Some people were there longer than me. It’s a terrible existence. And no doubt that they will call it torture 50 years from now. But, in that environment, I was able to sit, and it was like writing in a Zen cave. There was no noise. There was no one talking to me. So, I was able to vividly recall everything that happened and even conversations. I tried to get as close to the conversation as I could remember. It was a unique experience and emotionally overwhelming because I had to sit and live through the whole situation again. It was therapeutic, for sure, but definitely an emotionally overwhelming experience. And then again, when I had it printed and had to sit and read it to do the first edit, it was tremendously emotional.
Sara Payan: When I was reading it, I didn’t know what to expect. In many ways, it was a day in the life with you. I wondered how you could recall all those things and go so deep. But I mean, spending all that time in the SHU.
Luke Scarmazzo: To be honest, if I didn’t do that, it wouldn’t have come out. Yeah. I wouldn’t have ever written the book if I didn’t go into solitary confinement. So that was divine intervention.
Sara Payan: How long after you finished the book did you get out?
Luke Scarmazzo: I finished the first copy in 2018–so about five years. When I got out, my editor, Angela Bacca, really pushed me. I gave her the manuscript and asked her to help me because I did not want anybody else to help me. She had been along the journey the whole way.
Sara Payan: I wanted to ask you if you wrote more about the prison once you were out because it hits close to home when you’re in the midst of it, and you’re writing about it, I’d imagine.
Luke Scarmazzo: Oh, yeah, I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it and didn’t want to. But I was able to afterward.
Sara Payan: I can’t imagine having to tell your own story about being in prison. It’s got to mess with you in many ways because you’re just trying to get past it.
Luke Scarmazzo: Right. And just one of the really powerful moments with that is, so we just did the California State Fair, our brand was sold at the State Fair with the state’s backing. It was a really powerful moment for me because 60 miles down the road from the California Exposition, we were raided for running a dispensary. So now I’m sitting at the State Fair in a dispensary with the state’s backing and DCC around me and all the sheriffs and all these, you know, officials. I’m working there with Ricardo, my co-defendant, and my daughter, Jasmine. It was so powerful. It was so moving and full-circle that it made me feel everything was worth it.
Looking Towards the Future
Sara Payan: We’ve talked about a lot of the stuff you’ve done in the past, but let’s talk about what’s going on now for you and what you’re excited about. What are some of the projects?
Luke Scarmazzo: Well, I mean, the one that’s taken the most time is Prophet. That’s the cannabis brand I launched with my co-defendant, Ricardo Montes. It’s a brand that’s rooted in social justice. Ten percent of our brand goes back to the people still in, men and women still incarcerated. And that is something that I hope we can end.
Sara Payan: Luke, thank you for sharing your story. If it weren’t for people like you, we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing today. For those who want to follow you on social media, check out the book or your products, how do they do that?
Luke Scarmazzo: Go to Prophet Brands on social media, Prophetbrands.com. The book is available on Amazon. It’s “High Price- The Luke Scarmazzo Story.”
Write your senators, and congresspeople, and stay involved at the local, city, and national levels. Because these people craft the policies that affect us in our industry, don’t sit on the sidelines and talk when you aren’t involved in the policy-making or putting forth effort.
Sara Payan: Absolutely. What is it that they say? If you don’t get a seat at the table, you might be on the menu.
Luke Scarmazzo: Yeah. That’s real talk.
Sara Payan: Thanks so much, Luke.
Luke Scarmazzo: Yeah. Thank you, Sara.
