Joint Ventures

Trish Regan

Description

CNBC anchor Trish Regan takes you behind the scenes of America's thriving pot industry, to show readers things only drug dealers know about this secret world. Forget amber waves of grain. Today, it's marijuana plants that blanket the nation from sea to shining sea in homes, in backyards, and even in our national parks. In Joint Ventures, Trish Regan takes you behind the scenes to explore every aspect of this flourishing underground economy. Her focus is the so-called Emerald Triangle Northern California's Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity counties where many small-time, part-time marijuana growers contribute to a trade that generates roughly a billion dollars a year.

• A fascinating investigation into the inner workings of today's exploding American marijuana industry
• Based on extensive research and interviews by Trish Regan, whose Emmy nominated documentary Marijuana, Inc. attracted more viewers than any documentary in CNBC's history
• Regan examines all aspects of this new culture. She reveals how small time growers get their start, make (or lose) a fortune, struggle with violence, try to keep up with constantly changing laws and regulations all while walking an increasingly fine line with the Feds
• Regan reports on the current and potential impact of legalized marijuana on local economies, uncovers the link between marijuana and violent Mexican cartels, questions whether decriminalization would work on a national scale, as it has in Portugal since 2001

As the decriminalization and legalization debates gather steam, Joint Ventures arms you with the facts on both sides of the issue.
Introduction.

1 Potholes: The Challenges of the Marijuana Business.

2 The Mile High City: An Emerging Market of Pot.

3 Purple Kush: Lessons from a Successful Business.

4 Cannabusiness: Those Who Can, Teach.

5 Green Rush: The Towns With Backyard Billions.

6 Cash Crop: Moving From the Woods to the Mainstream.

7 Seed Money: Making Money Supplying Suppliers.

8 Modern Day Pirate: The Price of Prohibition.

9 Wherever You Launder: How Prohibition Drains Money Out of the Country.

10 Pot of Gold: Sizing the Potential Market.

11 Downers: Not Everything is Coming Up Roses.

12 Free for All: The Great Portuguese Experiment.

13 Getting the Treatment: How Decriminalization Works.

14 Law and Disorder: Navigating the Legal Maze We’ve Created.

15 This Not Gay Marriage: Why Advocates Can’t Turn to the Courts for Help.

16 Smoke Free or Die: Changing Minds in a Hard-to-Change State.

Acknowledgments.

Notes.

Index.

Sujets

• Weapons
• Histoire
• Humboldt County
• Trinity County
• Emerald Triangle
• Military
• Mendocino County, California
• History
• Comté de Humboldt
• Comté de Mendocino

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 08 mars 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781118007952
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Potholes
Chapter 2: The Mile High City
Chapter 3: Purple Kush
Chapter 4: Cannabusiness
Chapter 5: Green Rush
Chapter 6: Cash Crop
Chapter 7: Seed Money
Chapter 8: Modern-Day Pirate
Chapter 9: Wherever You Launder
Chapter 10: Pot of Gold
Chapter 11: Downers
Chapter 12: Free for All
Chapter 13: Getting the Treatment
Chapter 14: Law and Disorder
Chapter 15: This Is Not Gay Marriage
Chapter 16: Smoke Free or Die
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Copyright 2011 by Trish Regan. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Regan, Trish, date.
Joint ventures : inside America s almost legal marijuana industry / Trish Regan.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-470-55907-9 (cloth)
1. Marijuana industry-United States. I. Title.
HD9019.M382.U67 2011
338.1 73790973-dc22
2010054050
Introduction
I remember the story vividly. It s one of those memories that becomes etched in your mind; it s buried deep in your database, but it s there. I was maybe five years old and had tagged along with my mother, a journalist, on one of her field reporting expeditions. We were at her friend s home, and she told me to wait in the living room on a yellow silk couch. Within seconds, she had disappeared down the hall. As I listened to hushed voices in the background, my eyes peered around the pale blue, wallpapered living room. On the polished wood side table to my left were a series of photos of a young woman with her small daughters, a woman with her husband, a woman laughing. I didn t know or understand it at the time, but the woman whom my mother was visiting, the woman smiling in the pictures next to her husband and children, was dying of lung cancer. I had met her once. I remember a white terry cloth turban tied around her head in an attempt to disguise her hair loss. The woman-a forty-four-year-old mother of four, a wife, and a close friend of my mother s-was suffering through chemotherapy treatments in an effort to save her life. She had lung cancer, and she was not going to make it.
Could this woman s final days have been made easier by having access to quality marijuana to help her manage her chemotherapy? Might she have responded to treatment better had she been able to regularly smoke cannabis?
That same year, my mother, wrote an article for the Boston Globe on the efforts to legalize marijuana in our home state of New Hampshire. It was the early 1980s, and a handful of states had made efforts to decriminalize marijuana, although it would be almost two decades before California would become the first state to legalize marijuana for medical purposes. But at that time, the tiny northeastern state known for its Live Free or Die motto was at the forefront of the medicinal use movement. A seventy-nine-year-old legislator named Everett B. Sackett, a Republican from the small town of Lee, had become the first to introduce a bill legalizing marijuana for state use. He told my mother, It seems that in a state where we do so much to promote alcohol, referring to the state s monopoly on its well-publicized liquor business, we should be willing to legalize a drug that could help people in terrible pain and discomfort. 1 Representative Sackett championed the marijuana bill in response to his gut reaction that prohibiting cancer patients from alleviating pain and nausea was somehow just plain wrong. Sackett believed his seventy-three-year-old friend, who was suffering from cancer, should not be forced to break the law just to relieve the painful side effects of his chemotherapy treatment. His friend, a former college professor, who requested that his name not be published at the time because, as he put it, I don t like to expose myself as a law breaker, did explain that his decision to experiment with marijuana for pain came after his fourth chemotherapy treatment. Have you ever been on a cancer ward in a hospital? You can always tell from those awful sounds coming from the room. All that vomiting and retching, he said.
Eventually, Sackett s friend asked some young acquaintances to obtain some marijuana and wrap it into cigarettes for him. By smoking one joint one hour before his chemotherapy treatment, he said he was able to ward off huge bouts of nausea. And, he added, If I experience any nausea during the one-hour treatment, I light up another and take a couple of drags while the nurses look the other way. The nausea goes away completely.
Meanwhile, my mother s friend-the woman dying from lung cancer-suffered from massive bouts of nausea. It was horrible. I couldn t eat anything. You can t imagine what it s like to have four different chemicals running through your body and knowing you have no control, she said. When her doctor recommended that she try marijuana, she asked him how she could obtain it. He told her that that was her problem.
It was, indeed, a problem. The woman was terrified of getting the drug because there was talk of it being laced with phencyclidine (PCP), also called angel dust. She sought out some friends in Cambridge with degrees in chemistry and asked them to secure and to test marijuana in their laboratory to ensure its purity. They did, and once she began smoking marijuana, she was able to relieve her nausea and managed to eat.
The woman s husband, a retired air force colonel, insisted that the failure to legalize marijuana for cancer does nothing to stop the illegal drug trade. All it does is tie the hands of a competent physician in prescribing medicine for his patients and punish the people who are dying and in pain. A member of the New Hampshire state legislature at the time said that Sackett s bill was not a legalization of marijuana bill. It is a cancer treatment bill which would allow a chemical to be used under a doctor s supervision.
When I decided to examine the underground marijuana trade for a documentary at CNBC, my memory of being in that blue living room, knowing that my mother was interviewing a woman on her death bed, came rushing back. Today New Hampshire, like the rest of the country, is still wrestling with the same issue. Indeed, the sad irony is that my mother s article could have just as easily been written today.
I ve never smoked marijuana, and having made it this far in life without it, I don t feel a desire to smoke. But that s my decision. If I were suffering and it could help me feel better, I would want the option of trying it. Has the federal government overstepped its bounds? Are the feds contributing to a culture of violence? Might the federal government be doing the right thing by decriminalizing, or even legalizing, marijuana outright? These are the questions examined in this book. Several things are clear from my research: Marijuana is hugely popular. There is a large market for high-quality marijuana. It is difficult to succeed as a grower, in part, due to the myriad laws governing the substance.
It s disturbing to me that this many years after I tagged along with my mom on her story, I m reporting a similar one. Nonetheless, this book isn t about why marijuana should be legalized for cancer patients. The answer to that argument, much of the country agrees, is clear. Poll numbers overwhelmingly support the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. Rather, this book examines the groundswell sweeping the nation as state after state moves to legalize medicinal marijuana. With so many states permitting use, marijuana has reached a state of quasi-legality (although it is still illegal under federal law), and the financial rewards have been significant for some risk-taking entrepreneurs. They are, after all, risking it all for the chance to work in an industry they believe in and, more important for most of them, they may make money in.
The marijuana industry (and it is an industry, as this book explains) has changed dramat