New York Man Bluntly Pushes Blunt Book

NEW YORK (TNA) – Two attractive blonde girls – Swedes, it sounds like – approach a street salesman’s stand on Broadway, look hard at the book copies arrayed there, and ask the rookie question:

“Excuse, please, what is ‘Blunt’?”

Rashawn Prince

Rashawn Prince makes his green by selling his self-published manifesto, 'How To Roll A Blunt For Dummies,' to tourists visiting New York.

Fortunately, Rashawn Prince is here with the 411. His book, “How To Roll A Blunt for Dummies” (Rashawn Prince Publishing), is the first-ever hood-approved instructional manual for mega-joint rolling.

Prince self-published his book a year ago, and has sold more than 10,000 copies at $10 each from street stands in Soho and elsewhere, as well as online.

“I never thought I would be able to sell the book outside of the hood,” he says. “But what surprises me are the older people in their late 50s and 60s who buy it. The cops buy my book.”

Those cops are “usually out of uniform,” he says. “When I autograph it they’ll say ‘Make it out to officer so-and-so.’”

But sometimes they are more obvious.

“One time I was on 34th Street and these [New York] Rangers fans came to my table. And before they walked off, one said ‘How’s sales goin’?’ and I said ‘It’s amazing, cops buy it.’ And he lifted his shirt and showed me his gun,” Prince says.

“It’s popular with voters from the blue and red states. Surprisingly, everyone’s smokin’.”

Or perhaps unsurprisingly. With the 2005 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) estimating that 97.5 million Americans aged 12 or older tried marijuana at least once (40.1 percent of the population), Prince’s potential readership is bigger than Harry Potter’s.

The 31-year-old wrote his reefer reader after a day of smoking in Harlem with his “recreational young knucklehead” buddies.

“I kinda butchered a blunt,” he says. “And we were joking that there needs to be a movie on how to roll a bunt for dummies. And I said, not a movie, but a book.”

The resulting manual, with its cartoon cover of a baseball-capped stoner, “shows you [how to roll], but it’s more satire. Although I show you the origins,” Prince says.

“I saw the whole progression of how blunt rolling started on the fringes of society. And today, everybody around the world knows what a blunt is.”

Prince says blunt rolling began in “jail systems, notably Riker’s Island. Inmates used to smoke their weed in torn pages from the bible and toilet paper wrappers. One smart inmate one day said, ‘You know those cheap cigars they sell in the commissary? Let’s just dump the weed [in there].’”

Rashawn Prince

Prince says his book is especially popular with cops.

And now, never mind Swedes, the book has ended up in the hands of tourists from the U.K., France, Italy, Spain, Russia and Serbia. Prince is working on a Spanish translation, “’Cause I see there’s a worldwide market for it.”

Closer to home, the book provokes a constant stream of New York moments between author and readership.

“One time on 48th Street, this older gentleman in his late 50s bought two copies. And then he asked me, did I wanna smoke some weed? I said ‘Of course, I wrote the book,’” Prince says. “So he comes back five minutes later and tosses a crumpled-up parking ticket on my table. I figured it was gonna be garbage, but the weed had these white flakes in it. He had some very high-end marijuana. Here’s this older gentleman who’s got a better connect than I do. I’m kinda hoping I run into him again.”

Hook me up, grandpa! And it isn’t just old white-haired guys.

“It’s more the old ladies. And sometimes people will be amazed when they see me and this old lady having this joyous conversation. It’s kinda surreal.”

Well, Prince’s future looks very real. Yes, he is working on a movie adaptation, “a modern-day Dr. Strangelove, a satire on the War on Terror,” which will combine Prince’s three stated favorite interests: “cinematography, politics and smoking blunts.” And why not? Even Hollywood should recognize a dope book when it sees one.

Theoretically, of course, it remains illegal to smoke pot; but not to instruct others in the arts of self-alteration.

“Not at all,” Prince laughs. “That’s one of the beautiful things about capitalism.”