Marijuana arrests were so common that they carried little social stigma, Good said. But he still wrestled with guilt.

“I consider myself a moral person,” Good said. “I had to question how do I feel selling marijuana, how do I feel about dealing drugs.”

He said he traveled to Nicaragua each year to help people “in response to the atrocities of the Reagan administration.” He said it helped his conscience that the money he made selling marijuana built a kitchen for a Nicaraguan day care center and bought lumber that Nicaraguan women used to make furniture.

Then on Jan. 31, 1985, police acting on an informant’s tip searched Good’s Orchidland house and charged him with promotion of marijuana. He was sentenced to one year in jail, a $1,000 fine and 500 hours of community service. He served the jail sentence at night and refurbished the floors of the old Hilo Police Station by day.

By August 1989, four years after his arrest, Good said, he no longer was selling marijuana.

He was living in a refugee camp in Nicaragua in which everyone had lost homes and family to war. That’s when Good got word that authorities had seized his house and 4-acre lot in Hawaii.

“I thought that I was still probably the wealthiest person in this town in Nicaragua,” Good said.

Good bought his house in 1979 for $2,400, tore it apart piece by piece and spent the next six years redesigning and customizing it with recycled materials. Once in the hands of the government, the house and land sold at auction for $240,000.

Today, Good lives in the remains of the old Hakalau School, which he moved to a 1-acre parcel in Puna’s Hawaiian Paradise Park. He took the old school apart and rebuilt it into another gorgeous home made from recycled materials. The frames of old blackboards serve as picture windows. Girders from an old Army barracks run across the living room ceiling as exposed beams. Slabs of lava provide an open-air shower with live plants and shower heads for two people.

Good, 56, has a thriving flooring business, and he said he is over the bitterness he once felt when he drove by his old house in nearby Orchidland.

“But my attitude toward marijuana has not changed one iota,” Good said. “It was not something that was an integral part of my life, not ever. I just got caught and paid a heavy price.”