Weed Land

February 17, 2014
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. Agent: Jeff Gerecke, G Agency.

April 1, 2014
Sacramento Bee senior writer Hecht chronicles how "reefer madness" divided the Golden State's pot-loving community and forever changed America's attitudes toward marijuana. In 1996, the state of California passed Proposition 215, or the Compassionate Use Act, which legalized the personal use of marijuana for medical purposes. That, however, didn't stop federal officials from tearing through recognized medical dispensaries, chopping down plants, and cuffing growers responsible for easing the pain of scores of AIDS patients and cancer sufferers. It also didn't prevent--and in many ways, it instigated--the deep divide that was to develop between medical marijuana proponents and those dedicated to universally legalizing weed throughout the land. As the author painstakingly demonstrates, compassionate care would soon run headlong into cannabis commerce, while agents of the Department of Justice circled overhead, eager to strip the bones of both combatants. Hecht quotes U.S. attorney Melinda Haag: "The California compassionate use act was intended to help seriously ill people....But the law has been hijacked by profiteers who are motivated not by compassion but by money." Hecht introduces readers to a cavalcade of characters on all sides of the contentious marijuana issue. These include hard-assed narcs, wheelchair-bound activists, opportunistic entrepreneurs, cigar-chomping union chiefs and other assorted heroes of hemp. What many didn't realize during those pivotal years in the late '90s was that with legalization would come regulation--lots of regulation. Some of it threatened to put old-school pot growers out of business while at the same time undermining all the gains medical marijuana growers had made throughout the years. It's a complex situation roiling inside a haze of Purple Hindu Kush but one to which Hecht is able to bring commendable clarity and context. A comprehensive and compelling report on the weed wars still raging across the country.

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April 1, 2014
Even as resistance to legalizing marijuana eases, clashes between the perspectives of patient advocates, recreational users, cannabis capitalists, law enforcement, and various political factions continue to thrash out what legalization will look like. Journalist Hecht traces the journey toward legalization from a 2002 DEA bust on an idyllic California garden cooperative growing plants for suffering patients to legalization in 20 states and the District of Columbia, including legalized recreational use in Colorado and Washington. Hecht details the successes, setbacks, and culture clashes that took place in California, the epicenter of the debate, where legalization saw its first victories and greatest challenges and where the major effects on the economics, politics and social landscape were first apparent. Along the way, Hecht tracks an assortment of figurescounterculture rebels and many who started as very unlikely advocates for legalized potacross the U.S., Europe, and Asia, who gained both medical and spiritual knowledge of marijuana as well as the political savvy to wage a long, hard battle. Readers interested in the evolving story of marijuana legalization will appreciate the scope of this book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)