Burt Rubin page 2

MG: Are you part of the counter-culture or are you straight?
BR: More straight guys were smoking dope than you know. I mean all my college contemporaries, all, okay? I grew up in the age of marijuana in America. It was smoked at other times in America's time, but between 1965 till 1980 anyway, it was a giant growth period in marijuana use.
MG: Were you involved in the marijuana trade?
BR: No. There was something that you would do in college or a little after where--
MG: --you'd buy 4 ounces and sell 3.
BR: Thank you. That was done, yeah. Was I a dealer? I don't know if you'd call that a dealer. Yeah, I guess. Statute of limitations is over, I can say yes.
MG: What about girls? Were you a participant in the sexual revolution?
BR: Well, it started in college, yeah. Until I got married when I was 23, 22. I was very blessed. It was pre-AIDS, pre-fear. I started having more money, I had a good job at this trading firm and I was doing well. And started socializing and starting to travel. I wasn't in the top 10 percent of those getting laid. But I wasn't in the bottom 30 percent--those who get none--either. I was your average 23-year-old.
MG: When does EZ-Wider happen?
BR: Well, I was still smoking grass and I had smoked grass in law school with a lot of the law students. And at that time I had noticed that people were always putting two papers together. In law school, I saw that kids that came from Chicago did it and kids that came from Arizona did it that way too, and kids that came from California also. And it just stuck in my mind and when I was at the trading firm there was an article that I read in The New York Times in 1971, or maybe 1970. And it said that a guy was moving millions upon millions of booklets [of cigarette paper] a month. And I said, if this guy could do that! I decided to see what information I could get about the volume of business in cigarette papers.
MG: A light bulb went off?
BR: Yeah, and I thought it could be done. I thought, you could make one large sheet of paper instead of two small. But I wanted to be sure that the market was large enough to have a business. So I studied the import statistics from the Commerce Department. You could find out everything: what source country it's from, the volume in dollars that come into the port from these various countries and from that you can extrapolate quantities, booklets, companies, etc. etc. I felt it was significant enough then. If I looked at it now I don't know if I would have, because I was really naive in terms of the size of business at the time. And at the same time I had gotten married, my wife was pregnant, Bob Stiller was my wife's father's partner's son. So they were good friends. And he and I became good friends.
Bob at the time was working in accounting for Columbia University. We would dine together and play tennis and backgammon.
MG: He told me he had never been a pothead.
BR: No, Bob wasn't. But I said listen, there's a business here, I explained to him, and I said let's do it. I borrowed from a bank and he borrowed I think from a bank a little bit. And then Jane, my then-wife, had a friend who was an art director and we discussed the name. You know, eight friends got together, we all lit up, passed it around, started throwing names out. Somebody was saying, Easy Roller and somebody said Better Wider and then Connie said well how about Easy Wider?
MG: Did anybody say, "This is illegal?"
BR: No. I always looked at it as though I was the bottle maker during Prohibition. That was a way to make something legal that's used with something illegal. I'd gone to 10th Street and Avenue A to the Psychedelicatessen during college. Just to see the place. You'd smoke pot and you'd go in and they'd have all these draperies. It was kind of a little freak-out room. And in front they'd have a desk where they'd sell pipes and some papers. Now what happened was, this developed into a new distribution system, these head shops, that didn't exist before. And they start to open up in 15,000, then 20,000 cities and there's one in every city, and all of a sudden you have 15,000 stores, and they need product on their shelves. They try to buy this product from the standard people, from Zigzag or Brown & Williamson. They wouldn't sell to them. So where are they going to get product? Some bodegas are selling a product they brought over from Spain called Bambu. All of a sudden people start buying the Bambu. There's this little guy bringing in Bambu, he's a Spanish man himself, he's selling it to bodegas, all of a sudden instead of selling 10 boxes a week, he's at 20 boxes.
MG: And somebody has the idea that there is business in paraphernalia.
BR: Right.
MG: Are there big people in this?
BR: It's all small operators. But those cartons turned into more cartons. I developed the idea, I write letters to 13 companies in Spain, Italy, England, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, anywhere I could find that exports cigarette papers into the United States. I call the commercial attaches, they give me information about who the companies are, I write them basically a dear sir letter, I think I have a good idea for product and you make cigarette papers, would you be interested? Five of them wrote back that they had no interest in the business and the other seven or eight didn't even write back. So I took those five and wrote them again. And said, thank you, however, if you'll notice, here are the statistics that in the United States the cigarette paper business in 1961 was X and '65 was Y and '69 was Z, there's been a big growth pattern-and finally this one manufacturer in Spain called Jean said yeah. Jean did it, started making E-Z-Wider and then we took up all of his production.
MG: How do you launch it?
BR: At the time the head shop market was the only market that would take the paper. And I was also working full time at the same time. It wasn't as though I quit my job and started working on this. My wife was pregnant, I was having a little boy, a terrific son that I have. So I kept working E-Z-Wider nights, weekends, da-da-da, for about a year and a half or so. Bob is still at Columbia. Then I leave my job when it started to generate sales. I was doing the packaging, the importing, the storage, the shipping. I handled all new things in development, accountants, attorneys, banks, whatever. Bob handled inside administration and manufacturing. Eventually we were in 125,000 stores.
MG: What was the reaction?
BR: We used to get letters all the time. This is amazing, I went out to buy a pack of rolling papers, somebody said why don't you try these E-Z-Wider, I now sit with 32 perfectly rolled joints in front of me. Thank you. But what really told the story is--people were reordering.
MG: Did you use EZ-Wider?
BR: Yeah, absolutely.
MG: At your best you were selling--?
BR: 78 million booklets. A year. That's what I sold. EZ-Wider generally started at about 35 cents but you know, if you wanted to buy them at the Plaza Hotel they were 2 bucks.
MG: How does the market change following the introduction of E-Z-Wider?
BR: For our first 5 years from '71 till '76, maybe '77, all we could put our fingers on we could sell. We started developing new brands, like Joker and Roach and Harvest and Salsa. We designed a rolling machine. And we worked with a senior design engineer from Polaroid and had a spill-proof water pipe. All cigarette paper was sold through tobacco candy wholesalers. And they weren't interested in EZ-Wider. So I went down to Chalfont, Pennsylvania to this guy, who was a blender of tobacco. I found a natural tobacco, and we packaged it-we put 12 of those in a box and 50 E-Z-Widers. And then the tobacco wholesalers would take them. Except they sold no tobacco and the 50 packs would go out. So they called and said, do you think we could just re-order the paper? And I'd say sure.
MG: Any problem with the government?
BR: Never. Never a knock on the door. And we used to throw some big parties, we never had a knock on the door. At the introduction of our water pipe, George Plimpton was having a fireworks display in Central Park, so I quickly booked the Sky Garden at the St. Moritz, we sent out an invitation, we invited 250 or 300 people, and catered a party and had the greatest time. Afterwards, we got a call saying that they had heard that people had used marijuana in our party. We sent them a letter that, said, no, we didn't think that that was the case, we're sorry but we do want to thank them for the wonderful work they did in catering and we appreciate it. And so we got a nice letter back saying oh, anytime you guys want to have a party here, please let us know.
MG: Did you have contact with the drug culture?
BR: I could tell you a lot of stories. We were big donators to NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, I used to donate $10 or 20,000 a year which in today's dollars might be 50 or 100 thousand. Many of the growers and distributors and importers, smugglers, used to send NORML cash. They'd also show up at the convention and what would they show up with, but some of the finest exotics that were ever grown anywhere. A lot of the seeds from then are being sold in Amsterdam today. I was a businessman, first and foremost. It so happened that I also happened to do drugs, at that time smoked grass primarily. I heard about this magazine, High Times. I call up the company and I say, hey, I'm Burt Rubin, I saw this first issue of High Times and I'd like to advertise because this is what I do. Eventually I was their biggest advertiser. At that time we had our own advertising agency. I thought in 1971 that marijuana would be legal in ten years.
MG: But the political climate changes.
BR: Big change. We sold out in as '80, January of '80. For the year, year and a half before we sold, Bob and I were in a personal battle. He and I were not getting along. Bob and I were young, hard-working people. We both worked very, very hard. In certain ways, compared to our contemporaries, we were sophisticated, but compared to businessmen we were not. And a person came to our company with the intent to divide and conquer. He divided, he didn't conquer. He came in, pretending to be our friend and in our naivetŽ we believed him, didn't check up enough on him, whatever. And he just drove us apart, would tell us different things, make us believe different things.
MG: What was he after?
BR: Taking over the company. And Bob and I just stopped communicating and he was successful in that. And then he tried to oust me and I tried to oust them. Bob tries to buy it at one price in September and I say you're out of touch, it's worth much more. He says, no, look at these numbers and I say, I don't believe your numbers. And so he says well, then let's dissolve the company. And I suggested that we have an auction, knowing that this company Rizla would have very strong interest. And not having the backing that Bob had, I said hey, I'll try to raise the money, invite them and eventually they were the ones who got the company.
MG: You sold for $6.2 million. At twelve times earnings, that means the company was taking a half million in profit a year?
BR: Yeah. About. That's after we were taking big salaries.
MG: How well are you doing?
BR: I'm driving a 450 SLC Mercedes. And I had a home in Fire Island. We had a boat called the EZ-Wider, a 30-foot Sea Ray. We threw a lot of parties every year. We had 250 employees.
MG: Did your social circle include people from the paraphernalia/drug world?
BR: They were friends, just like now. But I'm still skiing, I'm still playing tennis, I was traveling, I was in Europe three times a year, not playing, building a business, visiting eleven cities. I might be taking 30 employees to a Moody Blues concert and throwing out EZ-Wider booklets at the concert.
MG: In '74, '75 the drug scene changed to coke and Quaaludes. Does that affect you at all?
BR: It was the down syndrome, the downs time. I would use Quaaludes occasionally. But not as living on Quaaludes or anything like that.
MG: You weren't blowing your money on coke?
BR: No, not at the time. That didn't happen till Studio 54. Bob used to play tennis with Steve Rubell. So he knew us. So I lived at Studio 54 every night till 4 in the morning, after hours clubs.
MG: Are you still married?
BR: No, at that time I wasn't. I was divorced.

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