Coming soon:
Pot Inc.:
Inside Medical Marijuana,
America's Most Outlaw Industry
My fourth book, about the exploding medical marijuana industry.
Part personal memoir, part hard reporting, Pot Inc.
is the narrative nonfiction chronicle of my full immersion
into a culture that is all around us,
but which has for the first time gone mainstream.
Depending on your viewpoint, it's either the Apocalypse or Nirvana.
By
almost any measure, I'm the last person you would suspect of growing
pot in his basement. I had my time in college to become familiar with
how bongs work, but it had been a long, long time since I had any desire
to light up a fat doobie and get stoned. The reasons are simple: I'm a
terrible stoner. Marijuana makes me sleepy and paranoid. I'll take a
beer any day.
But
my attitude changed in the summer of 2009. In Colorado, where I live,
medical marijuana had been approved for use since 2000, but hardly
anyone, it seemed, took advantage of the permissive law. For one thing,
state law means nothing when compared to federal law, under which
marijuana for any use is still quite illegal. Few people were willing to
risk a few decades in the federal penitentiary testing to see just how
seriously the DEA might pounce on local medical marijuana providers.
That changed in 2009, profoundly. A series of court cases challenging bureaucratic regulations that had been imposed on the otherwise vague and permissive law were successful, clearing the way for largely unregulated marijuana sales to qualifying patients. The only barrier continued to be the federal government, which, in October 2009, signaled in a memo that is by now surely regretted, that federal prosecutors should lay off pot businesses that are in compliance with their state laws.
That,
of course, set off a tsunami of activity, and depending on your
perspective, it was either Nirvana or the Apocalypse. In the 13 states (now 15)
that had voted to allow medical marijuana, it was like a pipe bomb had
been detonated, one with shrapnel named Purple Urkle, Kandy Kush and
AK-47. Dispensaries popped up almost literally overnight, with lurid
neon signs and names like Dr. Reefer and Canna Mart. Suddenly, everyone
who'd grown pot in their basements, or in a stand of woods on National
Forest Land, had the chance to go legit in practically the only industry
in the state growing like a wildfire.
That's
where I came onto the scene, a dude with barely any knowledge at all
about marijuana and none whatsoever about how to grow it. But so what? I
was hardly the only neophyte who'd decided to make a leap into the
multimillion-dollar marijuana industry.
I am, however, probably the only one who decided to write about it. My newest book, Pot Inc., chronicles my journey into ganjapreneurealism. Along the way, I learn not only how to grow killer pot — and, incidentally, how hard and stressful it can be — but I also gained an invaluable education into the truth about marijuana's value as a medicine. I discovered vast ignorance about pot's centuries-old therapeutic value (an ignorance the government is desperate to maintain) as well as my own unexpectedly personal connection to its medicinal value.
Pot Inc. will be published by Sterling in April 2012.
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