In the spirit of Hunter Thompson’s <i>Hell’s Angels</i> or Tom Wolfe’s <i>The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test</i>, a first-person account of a booming California business: weed<br><br>When Californians voted on Proposition 19—the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act --- in November 2010, many expected the state to become the first to fully legalize a Schedule I drug. After all, the pro-legalization movement had huge popular support, medical marijuana was already legal, and, well, pot was the state’s biggest agricultural money-maker. Tax revenues would be enormous, the legal system relieved, new jobs created --- it seemed like a no-brainer.<br><br>But Prop 19 was not only defeated, it was crushed, and the opposition was driven not by Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mothers Against Drunk Driving --- but by the marijuana growers themselves, who launched a major campaign to keep their product illegal.<br><br>Why?<br><br>To find out, journalist David Rose went beyond the Redwood Curtain of Northern California --- seat of the clandestine pot-farming industry and the country’s largest guerilla economy --- and what he discovered was not only eye-opening, but, at times, heart-breaking and, at other times, terrifying. California’s famed pot farmers, it seems, are not the peaceful, laid-back hippies you might imagine.