Sober St. Louis Man Bamboozled by Weed-Themed Magic Show

When I first learned that a traveling magic show that caters specifically to consumers of marijuana was coming to town, my immediate reaction was one of outrage.

Smokus Pocus, as the act is so dubbed, features the talents of one Ben Zabin, a globe-trotting entertainer in his mid-twenties who grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. Zabin got into boy wizardry when he was gifted a magic set for Hanukkah at the tender age of 4, and proved so adept at his craft that he was performing publicly by age 10 and being regularly paid for it by the time he reached high school, as detailed in a 2016 profile by the Greenwich Free-Press.

But that's where the story takes a dark turn. Zabin's primary source of income had been performing on cruises and at large events, and both were put on hold when COVID-19 came. In response, Zabin holed up in his lair and hatched a scheme that would come to be Smokus Pocus, a weed-themed magic act that took up residency in Las Vegas in 2021 and saw the gifted young man performing several times a week in the city's dispensaries.

“It was always an idea on the back burner,” Zabin told the Las Vegas Weekly in May of 2023. “To me, magic and weed have always seemed to go so great together. It was always fun doing tricks with friends while we were high.”

What Zabin calls "fun," however, is what some would call cruelty. Here we have a practiced liar — as all magicians are — preying shamelessly upon those who have willfully taken leave of their critical faculties, a slow and stupid bunch rendered infinitely more bamboozlable by their own choices of consumption. Is not attempting to trick a stoner with sleight-of-hand akin to shooting a big fish in a small barrel?
I decided to attend the February 23 St. Louis stop at .Zack totally weed-free. Zabin is used to audiences approaching his work at a marked disadvantage, I figured, but what happens when his skills are put to the test by the sharp mind of a dogged investigative reporter who once hoodwinked multiple elected officials into thinking he was nothing but an innocent frankfurter?

As a control, I decided I should also bring along a stoned associate, so that our experiences could be compared and contrasted. Said associate did not wish to be named in this article, so we're gonna call her Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr., or just Meredith for short.

The first order of business was to procure the necessary supplies for Meredith to achieve the appropriate state of mind, so I approached a budtender at the Swade dispensary on Delmar with a simple but important question.

"What pre-roll would you recommend for a weed-themed magic show?" I asked.

Said budtender came back with an array of options, discussing their pros and cons. We landed on the Grateful Dead-themed Terpwin Station. After inquiring whether one needs a doctorate in order to write for the Riverfront Times (LMAO, no) she sent me on my way with a word of warning for Meredith.

"I would just maybe microdose it," she cautioned. "Maybe drink a little soda at the same time, make sure you're drinking water and eating, and it'll work out fine."

Upon arrival at .Zack's parking lot, I neglected to relay any of that warning to Meredith, who fired that bad boy up and started puffing away. Once she was satisfied, we made our way inside, where I ponied up to the bar and ordered a double Jameson, because while I'm serious about the sober aspect of this experiment, I'm not, like, a fanatic about it.

The sold-out show was packed, a capacity theater full of visibly stoned attendees. Meredith and I made our way to our seats, whereupon she declared herself "too high." And with that, the stage was set.

Zabin came out on stage clad in black pants and a black leather jacket with the sleeves rolled up, his hair pulled back behind his head. For one of his first tricks, he brought out a bottle of alcohol and a jar of weed, which he then covered with some silver cylinders. When he lifted the cylinders, the weed and the bottle had switched places. After that, he set down and lifted the cylinders several more times, leaving a new bottle of alcohol behind with each move.

"How the fuck did he do that?" exclaimed a man near me. I must admit, I wasn't sure either.

For his next illusion, Zabin offered to show us all how a trick was done — an arrogant move made possible only by the fact his audience was working with a handicap. He began showing off a fake egg with a hole in it into which he was able to make a bag of weed disappear, remarking on how some of the people seated on the sides might have been able to spot the illusion even if he hadn't explained it — not so impressive, if you ask this sober-minded reporter. But then, in a bewildering moment of actual sorcery, he cracked the egg into a glass, which filled with egg white and yolk — no weed to be found. "What is this devilry?" I thought to myself.

The evening continued on in much the same fashion, my heart filling with increasing dread as it became clear that dark forces beyond my comprehension were at play here. Zabin concealed his true nature through an affable, aww-shucks stoner delivery that was heavy on humor, eliciting plenty of laughter as he bent the very nature of reality to his whims. Bongs miraculously filled with smoke, boxes of mac and cheese defied physics and the whole crowd gasped as Zabin hammered a vape pen into his own nasal cavity. Nothing was as it seemed, and seemingly anything was possible.

The show was also heavy on crowd participation. For a particularly astounding act of prestidigitation, Zabin called upon a man in a backwards red Cardinals hat named Alan, who said he'd been smoking weed for between 24 and 22 years, to take the stage.

"That's perfect," Zabin told Alan, "because I needed somebody to come on stage that's been smoking weed for 24 or 22 years."

Zabin said that he wanted Alan to see if he could spot the secret to the illusion he was about to perform, inviting him to watch from a close-up vantage point. He then asked Alan to write his name on a tag large enough for everyone in the room to see. Alan was then instructed to place the name tag into a stack of blank ones in Zabin's hand. Zabin held the stack aloft for a couple moments, then dropped the name tags one by one, proving that the signed one was no longer in the stack. He then reached into the right pocket of his jacket and produced the card, to the crowd's astonishment.

With the cocksure attitude of a man clearly endowed with supernatural abilities, Zabin once again opted to explain the trick. He said he'd employed a move that magicians call the "diagonal home shift." He explained that when Alan had dropped his signed name tag into the stack, Zabin had secretly shifted it to his palm.

"Once it was there I then shot the name tag up my arm, up my sleeve, across my god-like chest and into the pocket," he explained.

There was just one problem with that explanation: Zabin's sleeves had been rolled up the entire show.

Zabin offered to do the trick again, in slow motion, so that Alan would have a better chance at seeing what was happening. He encouraged Alan not to take his eyes off his pocket, and called upon the rest of the audience not to take their eyes off of the stack of name tags. But even at a slower speed it was impossible to ascertain how the illusion was done — a feat explicable only by true magic. I shuddered at the implications.

By the time I left the hour-long show and stepped into the cool night air, I was convinced I'd been in the presence of some kind of trickster god. I turned to a thoroughly stoned Meredith for her take, sure that in her addled state she'd be even more shaken by what she'd seen than I.

"He had a bunch of hollow bottles that stack up when you grab the cylinders," she replied, "and he had an egg in his pocket the whole time. Also he just kept the name tag in his hand. The rest of it is lying."

Her confidence was enough to make me doubt my very premise in this undertaking. Perhaps the consumption of weed does not make people inherently stupid. What if I'm the idiot here, a Howdy Doodat unable to parse fact from fiction? That'd be a concerning thought.

I swiftly dismissed those concerns, though, and became convinced instead that my companion for the evening was actually a powerful practitioner of dark magic herself. I made my way away from her down the sidewalk, where I spotted Alan leaving the show. In a near-panic, I asked him how he thought the trick he'd participated in was done, hoping that his answer could somehow return me to the reality I once knew.

"I'm gonna be 100 percent with you," Alan replied. "I don't know, because I wasn't even paying attention. I am fucking high and just chilling with it."

In retrospect, that might have been the way to go.


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