Listen to the Fresh Air Interview about the future of the marijuana industry. http://www.npr.org/2012/11/13/164981433/legalizing-and-regulating-pot-a-growth-industry
November 13, 2012
When reporter Tony Dokoupil was a teenager, he found out that his father had sold marijuana, but he just thought his parents “were hippies.” A few years ago, while working on a story about his father’s drug dealer past, he discovered that actually, in the 1970s and ’80s, his father, Anthony Dokoupil, had been a big-time marijuana smuggler.
“He was arrested in the early ’90s on a job selling 17 tons of marijuana,” Dokoupil tellsFresh Air’s Terry Gross, “which was enough at the time to roll a joint for every college kid in the U.S.”
Dokoupil is now writing a book about the controversial plant, and is the author of the recentNewsweek cover story “The New Pot Barons,” about the group of entrepreneurs who are growing medical marijuana in Colorado and hoping to cash in on the plant’s recent legalization there for recreational use. On Election Day, Colorado and Washington became the first states to greenlight marijuana for recreational use, which is big news for the expanding marijuana industry.
If legalization is here to stay, Dokoupil says Colorado’s tightly regulated for-profit medical marijuana market will likely be the basis for the legalized recreational markets in other states as well. In Colorado, more than 1 million square feet of warehouse space outside of Denver are dedicated to growing marijuana, and hundreds of dispensaries sell it. To manage this growing business, the state has 200-plus pages of regulation to explain what is legal and isn’t. Marijuana grown in the state, says Dokoupil, is tracked from “the time it blooms to final sale — every single ounce is accounted for.”
Read more info and listen to the story on npr: http://www.npr.org/2012/11/13/164981433/legalizing-and-regulating-pot-a-growth-industry
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