'My Dad, The Drug King'

Tyler Wetherall had no idea her father was a drug smuggling kingpin until the police eventually tracked him down. She speaks to others who share her experience of a childhood spent on the run

- Tyler Wetherall

I was nine years old when I first discovered my father was a fugitive. Instead of taking us to school one morning, Mum called my sister and me into her room, gathering us together in her king-sized bed with cups of tea. She told us our surname was not our own but an alias, and that our family had been on the run from the FBI for the past seven years. That was my entire remembering life. It was several years later that I learnt what he’d done. My dad’s organisation smuggled nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of marijuana into America in the late 1970s and early ’80s. By the time I was born, in 1983, the Feds were watching our home. Within two years the investigation had closed in on him, and my parents decided that rather than break up our family through his incarceration, we should leave the country. They hoped it would blow over.

With the benefit of hindsight, it was clearly ill advised. But at the time we weren’t the only family doing it, and for good reason: Ronald Reagan’s 1980s crackdown on drugs saw some sentences more than double, with mandatory minimums and no parole. The liberal approach of former president Jimmy Carter meant the weed-smuggling community had been relatively benign – hippies with a modicum of business nous and the connections to cash in on the times. But with the full might of Reagan’s newly formed Drug Task Force mobilised against them, many went on the run – and took their families along for the ride.

When we first arrived in Europe from California in 1985, we became part of a network of fugitives stretching across the whole continent. These fugitives exchanged information and contacts with each other: tips on how to get children into school under fake names, who had been arrested and how long they got, and where to hide illegal money.