📚 Time to write some letters

Scott Eden is the author of A Killing in Cannabis: A True Story of Love, Murder, and California Weed, out now from Spiegel & Grau. Here are the weirdest things that happened while researching the book.

I was sitting at the bar of my hotel in Santa Cruz, California, after a long day of reporting, when my phone buzzed. It was a text from a source over Signal, the encrypted messaging app favored by drug dealers, spies, investigative reporters, and paranoid people the world over.

“A guy named Frank turned up dead at the hotel I was staying at,” the message warned, a little breathlessly. “Heard a rumor he was meeting you.”

While reporting on the world of California weed for A Killing in Cannabis, my experiences were, not infrequently…weird. This was probably to be expected. Despite legalization, the black market still thrived, and many, if not all, licensed weed businesspeople were still active on the illegal side of the business. Many weed entrepreneurs were former full-time black marketeers.

There was, without doubt, an ancient tradition of omertà, and secrecy, and distrust of outsiders, and a kind of mystic spookiness that fit right in with the foggy redwood mountainsides and the old hippie spirituality of the place.

Don’t receive me wrong. Many of the people I met in the weed trade were kind, generous, honest, and more than happy to regale me with tales about their adventurous lives. But their stories were also saturated with paranoia.

I heard any number of madcap allegations, including the one about poor Frank. (I never spoke to anyone named Frank for the book; no dead bodies were discovered at the hotel that day or any day.)

Or the one about the mysterious, powerful Santa Cruz drug-trafficking families who controlled local law enforcement.

Or that the murder victim at the center of the book’s story—a legal cannabis startup founder named Tushar Atre—had become a serial snitch, informing to police on all the other licensed cannabis business owners who were also dabbling in the black market. (I never unearthed any evidence to support either of those accusations.)

Or that Atre had obtainedten himself in debt to a Mexican drug cartel. (Read the book to learn more about that one!)

In the book, I quote William S. Burroughs, the famed writer and outlaw, who once notified an interviewer: “A paranoid might be defined as someone who has some idea as to what is actually going on.” It could have been the book’s epigraph.

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