Weed Land
Inside America's Marijuana Epicenter and How Pot Went Legit
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Early in the morning of September 5, 2002, camouflaged and heavily armed Drug Enforcement Administration agents descended on a terraced marijuana garden. The DEA raid on the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana, a sanctuary for severely ill patients who were using marijuana as medicine, is the riveting opening scene in Weed Land, an up-close journalistic narrative that chronicles a transformative epoch for marijuana in America.
From the 1996 passage of California’s Proposition 215, the nation’s first medical marijuana law, through law enforcement raids, clinical studies that revealed medical benefits for cannabis, and the emergence of a lucrative cannabis industry, Weed Land reveals the changing political, legal, economic, and social dynamics around pot. Peter Hecht, an award-winning journalist from The Sacramento Bee, offers an independent, meticulously reported account of the clashes and contradictions of a burgeoning California cannabis culture that stoked pot liberalization across the country.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With journalistic bravura, Sacramento Bee reporter Hecht captures California's odyssey to legalize marijuana with immediacy, personality, and objectivity. Hecht's blog, "Weed Wars," intimately covered the state's failed Proposition 19, and he bookends his story with the 2002 DEA raid on Mike and Valerie Corral's Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana, an event that shaped the struggle for states to craft compassionate use laws in opposition to the federal Controlled Substances Act of 1970. The Corrals' operation also serves as an ongoing contrast between what could have been, and what was. Better structuring of the individual accounts into a sequential framework would have strengthened the narrative, but Hecht's absorbing reportage featuring incisive portraits of passionate caregivers and easy-going Humboldt County hippie growers recounts how research into marijuana's medicinal efficacy led to changes in state laws. Enter the power-players promising big bucks and other opportunists, and a chronicle of profiteering and inevitable public backlash emerges, leading to divisions within the movement, eventually culminating in a resurgence of federal crackdowns. Hecht's cautionary and deftly written account is an animated examination of how too much, too soon, almost doomed a movement.
