Confessions Of A College Coke Dealer
Written by Jay Kaskel
Jay Kaskel is a recently retired advertising writer who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is married with one grown son, who lives nearby in Minneapolis. Jay has yet to decide exactly what the next chapter of his life looks like. It will likely include spending more time constructing crossword puzzles, playing tennis, and riding his bike. He is seriously contemplating getting into endurance sleeping.
Jay grew up in Morton Grove, a suburb 20 minutes north of downtown Chicago. The middle child of two other brothers, he attended Niles West High School, where his greatest accomplishment was managing to avoid getting stuffed into a locker.
Hosted and produced by Peter Griffith & Rob Wallace; contributing engineer Micheal Henery.
In this episode it’s 1980. We meet Jay, a leader in college who takes a dangerous venture into the underworld of narcotics. One that many never escape from. Hear this cautionary tale, a true story and lesson in life not found in textbooks or online lectures – We all do some dangerously stupid things, just to be liked.
Published January 15, 2025
Transcript: Confessions Of A College Coke Dealer
[ 80’s blues music ]
HOST: Today on campus, it’s 1980. Eric Clapton released an anti-cocaine song about cocaine. At the same time, however, a Columbian dude named Pablo Escobar is sending monthly shipments of 70 to 80 tons of cocaine into the U.S. — and actor John Belushi develops such a liking for the white stuff that, when he films The Blues Brothers movie in Chicago, the studio actually includes cocaine in the budget.
There’s no denying that back in 1980, drugs were part of the curriculum for many, many college students.
In today’s episode, we meet Jay, a leader in college who takes a dangerous venture into the underworld of narcotics. One that many never escape from. Stay tuned for this cautionary tale, a lesson in life not found in textbooks or online lectures – We all do some dangerously stupid things, just to be liked.
[ Podcast theme music ]
This is Once, In College. I’m Pete Griffith. Today’s episode is a true-life story, written by Jay Kaskel. Jay just retired from a career as an award-winning copywriter and has been a good friend of ours, but we didn’t know him back in college. So when he told us the account of these events… well, we never saw it coming. But more of that later, class is about to begin.
[ Bells from campus tower ]
[ 1980’s music ]
NARRATOR: I did a lot of crazy and stupid shit in college. But perhaps nothing crazier or stupider than embezzling $1,000 from the school’s Advertising Club to buy and sell a ton of cocaine. Or however much you can get for a cool grand.
It was back in 1980, my senior year at the U of I, where I was the president of the Advertising Club. I had transferred to the school from ISU as a junior, because ISU didn’t offer a major in advertising, and the U of I did.
I knew I wanted to go into advertising after taking a marketing class my senior year of high school. There was a chapter on advertising, and something just clicked. THIS is what I want to do! I was a big fan of the TV show Bewitched as a kid and was influenced by Darrin. The first Darrin, not the second. That Darrin was a hack! Even I could tell back then. But I wasn’t a particularly good student (I flunked Algebra) and didn’t have the grades or test scores to get into the U of I. So off to ISU it was, where, as it turned out, I discovered I was a pretty good student after all and did well enough to be accepted at the U of I two years later.
One of the first things I did when I got to school, was join the Ad Club. It was great, they brought in various ad agency creatives who would tell us how hard it was to get an agency job, and that maybe one in 10 of us would land a job. So inspiring! But the more I was told I couldn’t do something the more it motivated me to persevere.
I ran for Ad Club President the following year and got elected by just a few votes! (It was between me and one other person, but still). The office holders consisted of me as President, Nancy as VP, Brock as Treasurer and Larry as Secretary. There were about 20 students in the club, including this one girl named Jenny who I had a big crush on. I tried everything to get her to go out with me, but she said she had plans every weekend for the entire semester. Talk about being slow on the uptake. It was only years later, when I ran into her on the Chicago “L” that I found out she was gay.
But that’s a story for another time.
One sunny spring day, I was walking back from class to my apartment when a breathless Brock comes running up to me out of nowhere. Brock and I were friends outside of the ad club and were in all the advertising classes together.
I was a bit intimidated by his attractive good looks, and laid-back, easy-going demeanor. That could have been the result of all the pot he smoked. All the girls were interested in sleeping with Brock. I figured, I was lucky to hang around with him, and maybe could be seen as cool by association. Truth be told, it didn’t help me get laid.
With a crooked, mischievous grin on his face, he says,
“Hey Mister President, uh, I got this crazy idea. Bear with me here. I know where I can get my hands on some coke, which, if we pay for with the money we have in the ad club, we can sell and make enough to replace the funds and have some left over that we can keep for ourselves. We’d just be borrowing the money. I have every intention of paying the money back. It’s not like we’d stealing it, man”
It never occurred to me in that moment that A) We’d be committing embezzlement (I didn’t even know that was thing) or that B) We’d be involved with drug trafficking.
“Look, I’ll handle everything,” Brock said. “I’ll buy the blow and find the buyers. All I need from you is your signature, authorizing the withdrawal of the money from the Ad Club checking account.”
I strongly pushed back and told Brock I don’t want to have anything to do with this nefarious venture. “Do you realize what could happen to us man,” I yelled at him.
Okay, so that’s what I wished would have happened, but it didn’t quite go down that way. I crumbled like a folding chair and agreed to his plan, trying to push any thought about what my parents would think out of my head.
After we got the money, I drove with Brock in his car to some house near campus and waited as he went inside to make the score. Should I have been nervous when he asked if I knew how to drive a stick, and told me to keep the car running?
Visions of Brock stumbling out the front door, holding his hand over his gut, trying to stem the flow of blood played in my head. “Shit” I muttered to myself as I pulled my Cubs baseball cap down over my eyes and slunk back in my seat. WHY DID I AGREE TO THIS?” Five minutes later, he was back in the car, grinning and laughing with the coke. This shit just got real, I thought to myself.
We took the drugs back to Brock’s apartment where he laid out a couple of lines on a mirror for us to “sample.” Up until now, I had never tried coke. Pot was my drug of choice. I reluctantly took the rolled up five-dollar bill out of Brock’s hand and snorted my first ever bump.
[ snort ]
Had I just crossed the Rubicon? As my nose began to tingle and I could feel the drip in my nasal passage, Brock began to divide the coke up into 10 separate packets. He had a scale, razor blade, the whole nine yards. A certain movie about a drug kingpin with a distinctive scar on his face wouldn’t come out for another five years, so God knows where he learned how to do any of this.
“Okay,” he said, “So do you know anyone you could sell this to?” “Do I know anyone? You’re the one who said you’d handle it.” Brock just grinned and shrugged his shoulders. “I may have lied.”
Great, I was in the thick of it now, half as responsible as Brock for unloading the product we were now stuck with. Putting an ad in the campus newspaper wasn’t an option, even though as an aspiring copywriter with some copywriting classes under my belt now, it would probably be a pretty good ad.
So with a bounce in my step, and five grams of cocaine in my pocket, I floated back to my apartment, where I began to call all my friends. Suddenly, I was a coke expert. Or pretended my best to be.
A typical call would go like this: “Yeah Harry, what’s up man? So, uh, any chance you’d be interested in some quality nose candy, you know, flake, snow, sniff, sneeze? We’re talking good shit, man. Not cut with baby laxative or anything like that.” Harry was a no, but my roommate happened to have some friends back home in Chicago who he said would buy a few grams. They may have been in some Filipino gang, I’m not certain. Hey, the less I knew, the better.
I may have found one or two others who shelled out a $100 apiece. And I assume Brock found enough people to buy the rest. Or maybe he ate the cost and paid out of his own pocket. Pretty sure he had some money. His dad owned a bunch of Chicagoland area car dealerships.
Either way, after a couple of weeks, to my great relief, we recouped our initial investment (which we redeposited in the checking account) and then some. I bought a bag of pot with my winnings. We may have cleared $1,200 when all was said and done. Don’t ask me how, maybe we included a sales tax on each gram?
[ 1980’s music ]
Occasionally I look back at this incident and think to myself, “What a complete fucking idiot I was.” I’m just glad it was a one-time occurrence, and it didn’t send me down the wrong path in life. Unless you consider going into advertising the wrong path, which is what I did.
And while it makes a great story, I feel a great deal of shame and guilt about the whole thing. In hindsight, I feel I let myself get steamrolled and manipulated by Brock. Did I go along with him simply to make him like me and think I was cool? While I didn’t end up paying a price for my actions then, it still haunts and saddens me today to think how malleable I was.
The incident may have something to do with how I responded a few years back when I learned my son was selling pot out of his dorm room. It was triggering, and I freaked the fuck out. I had no problem with him smoking pot, but I demanded he get rid of anything he had in his room. I told him he could get expelled if he were to be caught. Hopefully, he took my advice. He at least said he would.
After graduating college, it took me a couple years, but I finally got a job in advertising (I guess those speakers weren’t kidding when they said how hard it was to get into the biz). I went on to have a long, semi-illustrious career, before retiring just this year.
As for Brock, he briefly worked in advertising, before going on to become a musician, living and gigging in Nashville (as I learned from Facebook).
We have not spoken since our college days.
HOST: Today’s episode was produced by Rob Wallace and myself, with a special shout out to Michael Henery who contributed some mad sound design and engineering skills.
[ Marching band music ]
We want to thank Jay Kaskel again for his incredible story and the wonderful way in which he wrote it. It reminds us that many of us, at one point or another during college, felt manipulated into doing something they know they shouldn’t.
Jay also let us know he has recently retired and has yet to decide what the next chapter of his life will look like. He did mention it will most likely include spending more time constructing crossword puzzles, playing tennis and riding his bike. And he is seriously contemplating getting into endurance sleeping. Jay, we hope with your new abundance of time in retirement, you will include sharing more of your stories with the world.
If any of this sounded like something you experienced once in college, love to hear about it.
Leave us a comment or two, or visit us at onceincollege.com and connect with us there. We‘re looking for unique or unusual college experiences that are worth looking back on. Mostly the kind of things you didn’t learn in class or at a lecture. Which reminds us…
We want to thank Jay again for reminding us to not fall so willingly into the seductive traps of plans that just don’t smell right. It’s always worth taking an extra beat to really think things through. And a reminder – even for a first offense, the Federal penalty for trafficking cocaine is a minimum of 5 years in jail.
If you liked any of what you heard today, give us a like. Or share this episode with someone you went to school with. And if you want to hear our upcoming stories the moment they come out, please subscribe to our podcast. It really helps us more than you’d ever think. More than our GPAs ever did.
Until then, I’m Pete Griffith, back next week with more stories like this, all from a time Once, In College.
[ Podcast theme music ]