When Texas-based investigative journalist Max Marshall set out to tell a true crime story about Xanax on college campuses, he came across a 2016 Charleston news story exposing a multi-million-dollar drug ring that operated steps away from the College of Charleston (CofC) campus.
Once Marshall started researching, he said he quickly realized he’d found a much bigger story that he had anticipated. And now, five years after starting research, Marshall has penned Among the Bros, a harrowing and thrilling account from the intersection of privilege, drugs and decadence that is set against the Spanish moss and historic houses on the CofC campus.
A drug ring in plain sight
In 2016, Charleston police arrested eight men who used their connections to longstanding, almost exclusively white fraternities to sell large amounts of Xanax, cocaine and other drugs at colleges throughout the Southeast. The network of current and former students found drugs via a variety of online and street sources, and then found thousands of buyers by way of the college’s downtown nightlife.
In an interview, Marshall said the ring had been hiding in plain sight for years, but things began to unravel after the fatal shooting of a 23-year-old who was reportedly involved in the network.
In 2018, Marshall arrived on campus to interview more than 120 people, uncovering multiple student deaths related to drug use. He chronicled not just the details of the case, which includes colleges across the country, stories of wild King Street nights and rapper Waka Flocka Flame, but the culture of fraternities as a whole.
Pursuing the story
“I’m the same age as most of the guys in this book and went to college around the same time, 2012 to 2016,” Marshall told the Charleston City Paper. “And I saw a lot of students taking Xanax. I had friends who got addicted — not just as an anxiety drug on weeknights, although I saw that plenty, but more so as a party drug, and often combining with other drugs — most commonly using it with five or six Natty Lights with the goal of ‘blacking out.’ ”
Reflecting on that experience led Marshall to two questions: “One was, why are all these guys doing this? You know, their life is so good, they have these huge safety nets, this huge amount of privilege, coming from elite backgrounds and families. The second question: Where are all these drugs coming from?”
So when he visited Charleston to investigate the CofC story, he had the goal to find as many sources as possible to get insights on the students’ motives and experiences. The breakthrough for the story came when a friend texted Marshall the phone number for Michael (“Mikey”) Schmidt, the group’s ringleader who’s currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for drug trafficking. After gaining trust in Marshall through years of phone conversations, Schmidt began recounting some details and wild stories.
“Life imitates art” is a theme which quickly emerged in Marshall’s research — sources compared their involvement with the drug ring to shows such as The Wire or films like The Wolf of Wall Street.
Exposing a larger story
Marshall said his intention was that the story wasn’t written as a finger-wag or to show how “toxic” these characters were. Handling these real-life stories with care and nuance was important to Marshall, who ultimately presents a story laced with a duality of privilege and pain.
“It’s very telling,” he said, “to think about how Xanax might be characterized as the drug of our generation. The reason Xanax is pitched as such a great party drug is it
helps you black out faster. Whenever I tell people in my parents’ generation, they’re like, ‘Well, we took cocaine for fun. Why is blacking out fun?’ ”
A lot of the people that Marshall interviewed about Xanax told him they enjoyed Xanax and “blacking out” because they could avoid feelings of social anxiety, at least temporarily. It’s uncomfortable in many ways for students to enter the Greek life world, said Marshall, where kids have a perfect excuse to judge one another, separate into groups and determine who’s highest on the ranks.
“I didn’t want to hold the readers’ hand and say here’s the moral of the story or here’s how you should think. But I do think the way things fall apart, the story speaks for itself.”
Marshall made clear that behind the pop culture cliches of Greek life lies one of the major breeding grounds of American power: 80% of Fortune 500 executives, 85% of Supreme Court justices and all but four presidents since 1825 have been fraternity members.
“Being in a fraternity is almost like a separate campus for kids of an elite background,” Marshall said. “They’re both a product of and a producer of the American elite. They get drunk with each other, haze each other and then help each other for the rest of their lives.”
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