Inside America's Almost Legal Marijuana Industry

Trish Regan says she has never smoked pot in her life, but as anchor of the CNBC documentaries "Marijuana, Inc." and "Marijuana USA," she's become one of the nation's leading reporters on the buds beat.

She's collated her experiences and insights into a new book,Joint Ventures: Inside America's Almost Legal Marijuana Industry. Starting with visits to growers and medical-dispensary owners on the new frontier of Colorado and the old-school turf of California's Emerald Triangle, the book moves on to economics, law, and the Portuguese experience with decriminalizing all drugs in 2001.

Regan's eye leans toward the unexpectedly conventional side of America's pot culture. Her favorite subjects seem to be growers and dispensary operators who don't fit the hippie/stoner stereotypes -- clean-cut couples with MBAs, pursuing the "American Dream" through cannabis entrepreneurship.

A business-oriented approach permeates the book. Regan's indica-industry people have to balance the high profits sustained by the herb's illegality with the risks of robbery and arrest. Although the semi-legitimate status of medical marijuana in the states that allow it has prompted a "green rush," she notes, the high costs of garden infrastructure, electricity, and taxes mean that growing really isn't all that lucrative, especially given the intensive labor required to tend plants. The surer way to make money, she says, is in related services, such as law, real estate, and quality testing--or, when marijuana becomes legal, selling your operation to a corporation.

Though a non-stoner, Regan catches some pot-culture quirks, such as the belief that calling the herb "cannabis" instead of "marijuana" will magically dispel the phobias that keep it illegal. But she omits some key historical details, such as US v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative, the 2001 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that as federal law said marijuana had no recognized medical use, "medical necessity" could not be a valid defense for breaking the law. She says she found the constitutional issues more interesting in Gonzales v. Raich, the 2005 case in which the Court held that even giving away homegrown could be outlawed because of its potential effect on interstate commerce.

She does not understand that the presence of THC metabolites in the body does not necessarily indicate intoxication, and this leads her to be sympathetic to Wal-Mart for firing a Michigan cancer patient for using medical marijuana. Wal-Mart contested the man's right to collect unemployment, which Regan presumes was because it "is concerned that it will be liable for unemployment benefits for any employee it terminates for drug use." However, she says her main point here is pragmatic: that "the law is unclear, and because of that, employers will take the simplest path to reduce their exposure to liability--which in the case of marijuana users is often to terminate them."

Still, few outsiders have covered the United States' marijuana world with as much objectivity and depth. I interviewed Regan on the eve of her book launch:

You say you've never used marijuana. What drew you to the subject?

As a small child, I remember going out on a field reporting expedition with my mother (who was also a journalist) in which she interviewed a woman who was dying from lung cancer and needed marijuana to help her cope with her chemotherapy treatments. It is a memory that is still vivid in my mind. At the time, my mother was working on a story for The Boston Globe about efforts to legalize medical marijuana in our home state of New Hampshire. What's amazing to me is that her story could have just as easily been written today. Meanwhile, as a journalist who has spent a lot of time covering the economy and the markets, I knew this would be a fascinating investigation into an underground trade. Regardless of the law, millions of people use marijuana-and thousands are making huge profits off the drug.