Pot Went Legit

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. (May)