Leonard Lee Buschel, one of Hollywood’s “most successful dealers in the history”, said he has always had marijuana on him since the moment he first tried it as a teenager.
Talking to DailyMail, Buschel said he was so hooked on the drug that it felt as if “suddenly my life went from black and white to colour”.
“I knew that I had found a friend for life, a tool for living, the key to the magic kingdom,” he told the publication.
‘Love, sex, or the Benjamins’
Leonard Lee Buschel said that soon after his teenage years, his life became one long pursuit of “love, sex, or the Benjamins,” and thanks to his luck, working as a Hollywood drug dealer got him all three in spades.
Buschel said he wasn’t a big dealer, but the most successful one “because I never got caught”.
“I only made like $100,000 a year [the equivalent of closer to $300,000 today], but at that time, that was enough to live on and raise a child and send them to a good school,” he said.
He added that his “ill-got gains were also tax-free”. “It was plenty.”
The orbit of stars
Buschel’s business brought him into the orbit of stars and cultural legends of the 1970s and 1980s, including John Belushi, Richard Pryor and Robert Downey Sr.
According to DailyMail, he had dropped out of college to smuggle slabs of Lebanese hashish from Israel in his pants, and plied his trade in Philadelphia, New York, Florida, LA, and San Francisco.
He sold drugs to dealers, who then sold the drugs on to some of the most iconic figures and legendary drug users of the day, including John Belushi and comedian Richard Pryor.
Belushi died of an overdose from cocaine and heroin at the Chateau Marmont in 1982, aged just 33, while Pryor allegedly once set himself on fire while ‘freebasing’ cocaine. Freebasing is when a user inhales vaporised cocaine for an intense, short-lived high.
Daily Mail, citing sources, said Buschel may also have even given, but not sold, drugs to cultural legends such as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Tim Hardin, Clarence Clemons, Hugh Masakela, and Freddie Hubbard.
Robert Downey Jr connection
Leonard Lee Buschel shared a lifelong friendship with Robert Downey Sr, until his death in 2021.
Downey Sr, who struggled with his own addictions, is said to have gotten his celebrity son hooked on marijuana too. Jr got his first joint at age six from his father.
Robert Downey Jr eventually got sober in 2003, after serving jail time for drug possession, possessing a weapon and driving under the influence.
He also famously wandered, almost naked, into a neighbour’s house and passed out in their 11-year-old son’s bed, though the neighbour decided not to press charges.
‘Experience of death’
Like many Hollywood addicts, Leonard Lee Buschel, too, had his share of run-ins with death. Recalling two of his closest experiences of death, Buschel said that he had once done a “few lines of not very well-chopped coke”.
“I sneezed, broke a blood vessel, and exploded with projectile bleeding all over her pure white canvas-like back… like a Jackson Pollock painting.”
On another occasion, after an all-night coke and beer bender, he had a massive, catastrophic asthma attack.
“I fell against my roommate’s door,” he told The Daily Mail. “Luckily, he wasn’t asleep yet, because he hadn’t taken enough Valium. He said I was blue.”
When he regained consciousness, he thought he was blind, but it turned out that his eyelids had been taped shut because, after the high doses of adrenaline and morphine, his lids wouldn’t close naturally, and he risked his eyeballs drying up and cracking.
‘My throat was in excruciating pain,” he writes. ‘The nurse had just taken the ventilator out of my throat after two days of having it breathe for me to keep me alive.
“That was the lowest of the low,” he says.
Astonishingly, however, even that was not enough to get him clean.
It was only four days after his release from the hospital, a night of vodka shots and ecstasy later, that he decided to go to rehab.
Within a month of treatment, after using pot every single day for 26 years, and snorting cocaine for 13, he got clean and hasn’t touched a drink or drug in the 30 years since.
Still addicted to marijuana? Buschel says, ‘GROW UP’
In a message to those still smoking marijuana after years of use, Buschel said, “Grow up.”
He said that the middle-aged people, who’ve been smoking marijuana for 20 years, “they’re not really smoking to get high anymore. They’re just smoking because it’s a habit. It’s an addiction.”
“My message is: it’s time to grow up.”
