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What You DIDN'T Know About Pot: "Grass Roots"

Narender Sharma, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49644512
Cannabis growing wild in India.

Marijuana is now officially out in the sunshine in Oregon and California, legal to grow and legal to use.  But that doesn't mean the practices that developed to make and market cannabis during the prohibition years have changed. 

Journalist Nick Johnson demonstrates how the industry continues to use old, environmentally damaging practices even though the purported reasons for them no longer exist. 

Johnson's book is Grass Roots: A History of Cannabis in the American West, from Oregon State University Press.       The author visits with details of a story that dates back--in America--to the mid-19th century. 
 

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Geoffrey Riley is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and has hosted the Jefferson Exchange on JPR since 2009. He's been a broadcaster in the Rogue Valley for more than 35 years, working in both television and radio.
April Ehrlich reports on lands and environmental policy for Oregon Public Broadcasting, a JPR news partner. Her reporting comes to JPR through the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.