A KILLING IN CANNABIS: A True Story of Love, Murder, and California Weed, by Scott Eden
Legal cannabis markets are proliferating across the United States, reshaping city blocks and cultural norms, drawing new customers and overwhelming venture capital, promising a clean break from the drug war. It’s easy to forget the industry’s not-so-distant, not-so-legal roots. Enter Scott Eden’s enthralling “A Killing in Cannabis.”
The book, Eden’s second, opens with the grisly, puzzling kidnapping and murder of Tushar Atre, a wealthy Indian American tech-bro surfer type who’d made his money designing websites for Silicon Valley start-ups, and, later, founded a cannabis company. Raised in Westchester, Atre, then 50, had been in Santa Cruz for some 20 years and become a fixture in its insular surfing community.
On Oct. 1, 2019, sheriff’s deputies found him lying shoeless under a redwood tree on his own property, hands bound behind his back and “shot, execution style.”
Rewind to 2016, when our story begins in earnest. Upon learning of her mother’s cancer diagnosis, Rachael Lynch, an experienced California pot farmer originally from Vermont, persuades her mom to move with her to Santa Cruz in an attempt at palliative care far from the frigid New England winter. They decide on the trendy Pleasure Point neighborhood and move into an Airbnb owned by Atre, roughly 17 years Lynch’s senior.
Over time, Lynch opens up to Atre about her background in cannabis — her degree in environmental science, her bona fides as an agriculturist in permaculture. She tells him about a concept she’s been developing for years: a seed-to-sale, medicine-focused, ethically grounded and spiritually framed cannabis operation. Atre, intrigued and smitten, says he wants to fund her dream. She finally relents and the pair fall into a volatile business — and romantic — relationship.
What follows is a wild, riveting tale that oscillates between the couple’s personal narrative and the dizzying web of events that eventually lead to Atre’s murder and its investigation. Eden, drawing on years of research and interviews with more than 200 people, introduces us to a vast and colorful cast of supporting characters. (Indeed, the book contains so many people, stories and subplots that at times you wish for an upfront glossary.)
Throughout, Eden weaves a nuanced history of the weed business in California and beyond. The so-called Emerald Triangle refers to three sprawling counties near the northwestern tip of California: Mendocino, Trinity and Humboldt. These roughly 10,000 square miles of rugged, mountainous, heavily forested terrain constitute one of the highest-producing marijuana-growing regions in the world, where “almost every hill, every ridge,” Eden writes, comprises “its own community of weed plantations.”
Lynch cut her teeth in Trinity County, where her nearest neighbors were cartel members, “the only woman growing weed on a backwoods hill otherwise full of stoner dudes bursting with unvented testosterone.” In other words, a place where cannabis could have very real consequences. By contrast, Atre built his life and businesses in and around Santa Cruz, where he seemed to believe any consequences could be engineered away — if not ignored.
Atre comes across as incredibly difficult to work with and, in the course of the book, treats almost everyone terribly. “Tushar was too much of an office guy for the weed business,” writes Eden. “And too much of an asshole.” And yet, for all Atre’s narcissistic, privileged antics, Eden also manages to humanize him, illustrating his gentler qualities, his regrets and his unwavering love for Lynch.
By the time of his death, Atre was no longer merely adjacent to illegality — he was operating within it. “The sheriff’s office certainly knew that an enormous marijuana black market — orders of magnitude larger than its aboveboard counterpart — still thrived in California, despite legalization or maybe because of it,” writes Eden. “Taxes and other costs were so high for legal operators that they often sold their products into the black market just to stay in business.”
If the Emerald Triangle is where cannabis learned to survive under prohibition, Santa Cruz is where that knowledge was repackaged for investors — its inherent dangers neatly hidden. But those dangers, and Atre’s failure to recognize the two very different worlds he was straddling, ultimately led to his demise.
“A Killing in Cannabis” is an exhilarating, deeply reported true-crime murder mystery and love story that moves like a Netflix thriller. It is a detailed and intricate cultural history of marijuana in California on both sides of the legal and moral divides. Eden reveals an industry growing faster than its laws, where white-market ambition still depends on black-market supply chains and legalization has not eradicated risk so much as redistributed it.
A KILLING IN CANNABIS: A True Story of Love, Murder, and California Weed | By Scott Eden | Spiegel & Grau | 370 pp. | $30
Tas Tobey is on the staff of the Book Review and is studying poetry in the M.F.A. program at the City College of New York.
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