While the book never has a final epiphany where Sheldon stops and says, "and that's how I learned my lesson," ...there are two chapters at the end in a section named "Yin & Yang" where the author reflects on his life and lays out the most eloquent examination of the wonders and dangers of drug use that I have ever read. These are the insights I was waiting for, packed solidly into a critique of both the self and culture, observations that could only be made by someone who 'lived the adventure' of being an American dope dealer.
     — James Kent - TRIP Read this review!
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Throughout Confesssions, Norberg makes his point about the pitfalls of drug abuse without sounding preachy, and happily remains an idealist who still believes that the proper use of psychedelics can lead to the greater awareness necessary to create a more enlightened society.
      — Tierney Smith - Relix
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Here's the lowdown: If the title interests you whatsoever, then the book won't disappoint.
      — Fearless Reviews
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Read it now, before you find it on your wanna-be-hip teenager's floor!
      — John F Lee
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POT DEALER ROLLS HIS OWN BIOGRAPHY

Sheldon Norberg emerges with a definitive account of life on tour, as Deadheads used to say.

What the author of this autobiography really deals out, though, is irony that, had it been rolled together by Pynchon or even Updike, could not be any more stocious (to borrow some of Norberg's extraordinary lingo).

Sheldon is no dope.He wins a full scholarship to the University of California at Los Angeles...Abandoning higher education for getting high, Spaceman joins the multitudes of weird kids traipsing after the Grateful Dead..Spaceman heads to the pot hills of Northern California, where he tends to muddy, back- breaking tasks that only a fanatic horticulturalist or a Colombian campesino would tolerate. He goes on to describe $10,000 multi-kilo Humboldt-to-Berkeley deals in the heavy tones that are reserved today for multimillion-dollar Silicon Valley stock option agreements.

But Norberg wasn't in it for the money then, nor is that his goal now. Norberg wants his recollections to provide a wiser approach to the war on drugs.
      — Rex Weiner- SF Chronicle 8/20/00
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ALA Booklist March 1, 2000

More Cheech and Chong than Alice's Restaurant, a sort of On the Road Lite for heads, this doper's progress may suggest the '60s, but it actually recalls the '70s and '80s. Norberg turned to the pleasures of weed and LSD early, thanks to a college-age brother. California's recreational drug menu in the early '70s allowed him to sample myriad psychoactive substances with but a minimum of the what's-it-all-mean blather that accompanied getting high in the '60s. Party dog Norberg (whose first name, he notes, is an anagram of "He on LSD - heavy!) gets through most of the book without announcing a change of heart and dumping on dope. In the last several pages, however, he renounces the high life for seemingly sound reasons. Still, he is more reflective than genuflective or didactic about the drug experience. Ultimately, he became a "professional clairvoyant." The cosmic adventure story of his past makes thoroughly enjoyable reading.
     — Mike Tribby
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If you're about forty-something and you were once an upper middle class American kid, you probably knew someone like Sheldon Norberg in high school; a fast-talking, drug-bingeing, lady-killing, foul-mouthed, wiry-brained pistol of a dude that you kinda disliked and kinda admired, all the while wondering whether you could possibly have anything in common with him. After you read this book, you'll still be wondering.... Not that the life of a man like this isn't remarkable in its way; it's just that with all the drugs, sex, rock and roll, avoiding cops, seeing the Dead in their TRUE glory days, turning people on, getting laid, crashing on people's floors, blowing up and patching up with cohorts, hitchhiking long distances, etc.and so on, it all feels somewhat quaint here in the new millennium. Still, Norberg is a fine and witty writer (even though he could have used an editor). In the end, he overlays a sense of purpose on his long strange trip; he lets us know that he no longer does drugs, and now makes his living as a "professional clairvoyant." Here's the lowdown: If the title interests you whatsoever, then the book won't disappoint.
     — Fearless Books -August 2000
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"Sheldon "Spaceman" Norberg, All-American Boy, tells his life story: growing up in San Leandro and Roseville, green weed (for "highbrains"), brown weed (for burnouts), dangling stoned from a high-tension electric tower with every hair on his body standing on end, his attraction to Berkeley, acid and its discontents, frat days and solid "F"s at UCLA, his frantic Deadhead diary (he can quote every song he ever heard them play, natch), harvesting weed in Humboldt, freak-outs at the Greek, and finally, a poignant coda in which he surveys the remnants of his brain and concludes that yes, there are psychological dangers in LSD, but if readers can learn from his mistakes, they can move forward with awareness and hope... Good read, Sheldon!
     — Kelly Vance- East Bay Express 4/27/00
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The degree of recall that Sheldon has for detail is amazing to me. I followed every sentence with fascination for the development of his character from a selfish, ruthless little SNOT to a man who is concerned for others, who has developed an intense and peaceful spiritual relationship with the world, and deals with his fellows from an extraordinary level of perception of human nature. I was impressed with his description of the details of growing and harvesting marijuana and his involvement with the drug world. It is an unapologetic insider's view that has never been expressed before. Parents and teenagers should read this book together. Truth would out, oh my yes!!!
     — Judith Mattart
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Only a writer with the supreme self-confidence of Sheldon Norberg would dare to write a novel in which autobiography is so thinly disguised as fiction. Norberg has the audacity to think his career as a dealer makes for a can't-put-it-down page-turner. Well, Confessions of a Dope Dealer is all that and a bag of chips. Reading it is like burning through several bowls of quality herb, then taking a swig of bong water as a chaser. You put it down entertained and buzzed, yet knowing more than you needed to.

The book sends up the long strange hippie trip much as Tom Wolfe poked fun at Ken Kesey and his pranksters in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Behind the tie-dye and patchouli of his prose lurks a brainy wiseass product of the Me generation. Norberg recounts his life and times as a working class wheeler-dealer, a salesman blissfully and/or occasionally paranoically zonked out on his own wares, primarily the evil weed itself, marijuana. If you ever inhaled you will find this book fascinating. If you didn't you may start getting ideas as the tale progresses from California's suburbs to the CAMP war zone in Humboldt County and zigzags through Grateful Dead tour in between.

Norberg is a poster child for consciousness expansion and drug advocates everywhere, a dude who tripped his brains out on every psychedelic he could get his hands on, massive quantities of pot, acid, nitrous oxide, . shrooms, DMT, you name it. A huge drug snob, he always had the finest stash. After a decade of this abuse he emerged with some brain cells left! As a bonus he never got busted. Norberg's abiding power to entertain and inform is a good argument for legalizing drugs, Nancy Reagan and her ilk be damned.

Norberg does offer a bullshit disclaimer at the end of his saga that makes a self-righteous distinction between "bad" drugs like heroin, speed, and the crap brought to you by Ollie North, and the fun drugs he sold throughout grade school, high school, college and beyond. Whatever baggage you have concerning the marketing of recreational chemicals in our great republic full of liquor stores, drugstores, the mega pharmaceutical industry/medical complex, growth hormones, steroids, TV, video games, internet glue sniffing paint huffing, well, what you think of all that is certainly going to affect your opinion of this truthful little book by the freak next door.Read it now, before you find it on your wanna-be-hip teenager's floor!
     — John F Lee
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