It’s the fantasy of every teenager who puts on their favorite record and stands in front of a mirror with a hairbrush, then hollows out its handle to store narcotics. First you get together with some friends in the garage and start your own band of drug smugglers. You land a few local gigs, you build up a following, and—with some luck, some perseverance, and some more drugs—one day, you find yourself in Rolling Stone. And the next thing you know, Hollywood comes calling. It’s the classic American dream, and it’s all coming true for Doug Dodd and Lance Barabas, two Florida teens with a little bit of gumption and a whole lot of OxyContin, who just this month landed in the magazine for today’s hippest drug dealers.
Guy Lawson wrote about Dodd and Barabas’ exploits in the current issue of Rolling Stone, and—as happened with Arms And The Dudes, another Lawson-penned tale of young drug dealers that Todd Phillips is currently adapting—his “Dukes Of Oxy” is already being fast-tracked for a movie. Deadline reports that The Fault In Our Stars’ Ansel Elgort is interested in developing his own steroid addiction to play Dodd, a former high-school wrestler who partnered with his buddies to smuggle painkillers all across the South. Dodd’s caution and careful planning was undone by his Scarface-worshipping friend Barabas—known as “the Little General”—who, in a shocking twist, became kind of an asshole after getting lots of money.
As Dodd tells it, theirs is a story is filled with party scenes of “cocaine on silver platters and goblets filled with pain pills,” naked sorority girls romping on beds strewn with cash, and musclebound dudes flexing while holding assault rifles—all building to the inevitable collapse—and making for a tale that Lawson himself likens to The Wolf Of Wall Street and Goodfellas, in that it’s similarly about terrible people having a really good time. And like those movies, Dukes Of Oxy will inspire its own generation of fame-chasing dreamers to never give up—and definitely never stop dealing—until you see your smilin’ face on the cover of the Rolling Stone.