Where There's Smoke

“Taken together, these chapters provide an informative and frequently fascinating glimpse into the complex political, environmental, and regulatory dimensions of cannabis production.”—Great Plains Research

"Critically relevant perspectives are shrewdly compiled from biology, law enforcement, journalism, sociology, politics, and others to produce a comprehensive, on-the-ground snapshot of marijuana activity across the nation."—Environmental History

"Miller reveals the surprising environmental impact of growing marijuana."—Choice

"A truly cautionary tale, showing how well-intentioned proponents of cannabis legalization often provoke the very environmental and social injustices they hoped to ameliorate."—High Times

"Does much to advance the conversation around the important environmental questions surrounding [marijuana] production."—Western Historical Quarterly

"An important foundation stone in the scholarly literature on cannabis."—Hemperical Evidence

“In Where There’s Smoke scholars and field experts document firsthand in painstaking detail the damages that American-style marijuana prohibition has brought to our ‘protected’ lands. Such environmental damage is a form of ‘blowback,’ as the recent history of drug law enforcement has included taxpayer-funded aerial crop spraying campaigns abroad done with little regard to collateral damages. This volume charts some of the under-appreciated consequences of marijuana prohibition’s ‘carceral ecology,’ which creates a scenario of perverse incentives in which an easily grown common plant’s flower buds become worth their weight in gold and beyond. With contributions from marijuana law reformers, this volume is balanced and does force the reader to recognize the limits of state-level legalization to allay environmental damage when much larger forces of prohibition are still at work.”—Sunil Kumar Aggarwal, MD, PhD, FAAPMR Physician-Scientist and Medical Geographer

"The topic of the environmental impact of marijuana growing is understudied and the book provides new concepts, data and interpretations to guide both future research and policy development provides a new forum for the marijuana legalization debate. It fills a glaring gap in the literature and will be foundational for future research and policy development. While there have been a relatively large number books on the unintended consequences of marijuana prohibition and the war on drugs, this is the first book to exclusively take a true multidisciplinary focus on an intractable public policy dilemma; either a massive infusion of resources to eradicate the marijuana growing sites with concomitant refurbishing of the land or legalization of marijuana in order to create a new supply-side regulatory dynamic and to separate the marijuana market from the current Schedule 1 illegal drug market."—Charles D. Kaplan, Research Professor and Associate Dean of Research, Hamovitch Center for Science in the Human Services