In a letter to the court, Natalie Marie Gonzalez shares a memory of her father.

As a kid, she'd sometimes watch him sip a cocktail behind the wheel.

He'd glanced back at his kids with a grin, slowly lift both hands off the steering wheel,

and declare that technically he wasn't drinking and driving anymore.

It was the kind of joke that probably got laughs at the time,

but in a San Francisco courtroom, it lands very differently.

Theoretically, you could kill somebody doing that.

It kind of speaks to this, like, idea that if you don't think about the dark side of this stuff and you just convince yourself that you're being a force for good and you ignore the

potentially negative consequences, you can kind of get yourself into some deep-rooted denial and not see the train wreck

coming.

Stanford graduate Natalie Marie Gonzalez had, metaphorically, taken her hands off the wheel.

And driven by a delusional sense of doing good, she crashed.

You get out into the world and you're like, what can I do to really make a difference?

But even back then, like fresh out of college, by all accounts, it seems like the, the quote-unquote, darker side of her life was starting to manifest.

This is the opportunist, an original podcast from Podcast One.

You're listening to a story told in one episode called Natalie Marie Gonzalez,

High Achiever Drug Dealer.

I'm Sarah James McLaughlin.

In this episode, we dive into the story of Natalie Marie Gonzalez, a Stanford graduate who turned a high-achieving future into a high-risk delivery operation in San Francisco. Natalie Marie Gonzalez was born and raised in the mountain town of Bailey, Colorado.

Her parents were self-described hippies, and Gonzalez's upbringing had a certain granola charm to it.

She grew up eating organic produce long before it was popularized by luxury grocery stores

in a house her father built by hand.

...