This article ran on April 3rd, 2009, in The Weekly. The extended version can be found here.

After a couple of months of dealing pot out of his room in Bobb-McCulloch Hall, Simon was getting a little paranoid. His clientele, which at first had just been a small circle of friends, had expanded to include friends of friends, kids down the hall he didn’t know, and sometimes, visitors from outside Northwestern. His CA didn’t care about kids drinking as long as they didn’t do it in the hallways, but dealing was an entirely new offense. The giant gallon Ziploc bag full of carefully divided eighths of marijuana, each separated in its own little baggie, started to smell more and more to Simon as the grind of winter quarter wore on.

Weed smells. It’s the toughest thing to deal with if you’re trying to keep your stash a secret - you can lock it in a box, put it in a drawer, vacuum-seal it or put it in an airtight mason jar and it’s still going to stink. No matter how many CVS bags Simon wrapped his product in or how deep he shoved it into his closet, the odor of wet grass, burning rope and pine continued to fill the room. At least he thought it did. He couldn’t be sure. Though his friends said they never smelled anything, they weren’t the ones who had to leave the room and hope a gaggle of cops wouldn’t be standing in front of it when he came back.

One day, when his roommate wasn’t home, Simon dug the bag out of his closet and made sure it was sealed tight. He peeked his head out of his door to make sure no one was walking through the hallway. Bag in hand, he quickly stepped out and walked toward the men’s bathroom.

No one was inside. He walked over to a stall and stepped in and locked the door behind him. He quickly stepped on top of the toilet seat, still holding the bag, and looked up. He put his fingers to the ceiling tile above him and propped it up. Then, he took his massive Ziploc bag - covered in one wrinkled plastic bag after another - and put it through the hole in the ceiling he had just created, resting it on top of an adjacent tile. He replaced the tile, stepped down from the toilet and went back to his room. From then on, whenever a customer came calling, Simon would go into the bathroom, get back on the toilet, take his weed down, distribute it and put it back.

“You know, I never found my piece or grinder at the end of the year when I moved out,” he laughs hard, after taking a break from his bong to talk. “Do you think if I went back, it might still be there?”