Sarah's whole street reeks of pot. This is not hyperbole. When you turn the corner onto this lane of 1970s tract houses, you smell the tang: the sour, earthy, green odor that wafts up from lush marijuana plants steaming in the sun. Sarah estimates that seven of 10 households on her semi-rural street, a couple miles from white-bread-suburban Rohnert Park, Calif., are growing weed. She ran into one neighbor at the hardware store, in the new section devoted to cultivation, with the special dirt, fertilizer and outsized plastic pots the growers use. Her next-door neighbors, two brothers, trade ... Read More
Journalism on Sale
June 6, 2009 • By • 1 Comment
In 2005, Evelyn Pringle was freelancing articles to the Dayton Daily News. When she wanted to write an article critical of TeenScreen, a national effort to get primary care providers to check for signs of depression, she found no takers. So the former drug and alcohol abuse counselor hit on an innovative way to finance her investigations into the pharmaceutical industry. She contacted law firms handling class action suits against drug companies. "They're looking for clients; I explained that my work would give publicity to the harms of the drugs," she says. She found enough takers to make a ... Read More
Trash Crops to Cash Crops
March 21, 2009 • By • 1 Comment
When cattle and hay farmer Wayne Keith took a road trip from his spread in Springville, Ala., to Northern California, his first stop wasn't a gas station; it was a Dumpster behind a furniture factory. He emptied the half-ton of wood scrap into an open trailer, fed some into a boiler-like device mounted on the trailer hitched to his 1991 Dodge Dakota and took off on the 7,000-mile round-trip journey, stopping every 90 miles or so to pop some more wood into the burner. "That's a cheap ride, on somebody's garbage," he said. Back in the 1970s, when the OPEC oil embargo squeezed oil supplies ... Read More