Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Air Boomtown

(PHOTO: RENAE MITCHELL)

At the end of this summer, as I’ve done most summers for the past 25 years, I copiloted a small plane and landed at Sloulin Field International Airport in Williston, North Dakota. Sloulin Field is hunkered not far from the arid, windswept eastern border of Montana, and about 60 miles south of the Canadian border. It’s the first opportunity to clear U.S. customs following my annual family fishing trip to northern Saskatchewan. The previous summer, only the wind and the lilting song of meadowlarks disturbed the little airport’s tranquility. This year, Williston’s tarmac reverberated with ... Read More

California’s Medical Marijuana Morass

In California, annual retail sales of medical marijuana may be as high as $1.3 billion. But to use it, people have to grow it, and deliver it, and the laws governing the substance are anything but clear. What’s more, the feds’ official position is: no marijuana is legal. And they’re cracking down. Writer David Freed takes us on a road trip through the medical marijuana morass as part of the “Medicine on the Front Lines” report in the January-February 2012 issue of Miller-McCune magazine. We’re riding south out of Northern California’s Humboldt County, pushing 75 miles an ... Read More

U.S. Crackdown Highlights Mixed-Up World of Medical Marijuana

“The problem is that this is a multibillion dollar industry that literally has no guidelines. … Every time anybody goes before some city council somewhere or the county, nobody knows what the hell they’re doing. And every time the elected officials change, it’s all new. It’s a friggin’ nightmare.” So explains certified master gardener and marijuana farmer Kevin Jodrey, the cultivation director for the nonprofit Humboldt Patient Resource Center in Arcata, California, a city-regulated dispensary that distributes to its patients medical marijuana grown in the center’s own ... Read More