A true crime page-turner charting the Wild West of California’s Marijuana Gold Rush.
A Killing in Cannabis: A True Story of Love, Murder and California Weed Scott EdenSpiegel and Grau (384 pages)
A Killing in Cannabis: A True Story of Love, Murder and California Weed | Scott Eden
| Spiegel and Grau (384 pages)
When deputies flew over the Santa Cruz Mountains hunting illegal pot farms, they’d spot plywood signs spray-painted in block letters: CALL BEN RICE.
It was equal parts legal defense and gallows humor. The sheriff liked to joke that Rice had the biggest business card in the county.
But that wasn’t the only place Rice’s name appeared. For years, black market extractors in Santa Cruz accidentally blew up labs, suffered serious injuries, and were airlifted to burn centers. Pinned above their hospital beds were notes instructing law enforcement: “Represented by counsel. Do not ask any questions. Call Ben Rice.”
Rice was THE lawyer you called when things went sideways in California’s cannabis trade, and in Scott Eden’s A Killing in Cannabis, things go sideways constantly. There’s even a chapter titled “Call Ben Rice,” which tells you everything you need to know about his pivotal role in this world. Acting as the buffer between the counterculture marijuana producers and the law, he represented the entire chain of production in California’s cannabis industry — a booming business operating in the gray zone, or well past it.
How to Legalize an Outlaw
The book’s through line is the killing of tech CEO Tushar Atre, who had recently entered the cannabis business. But the real subject is the uneasy transformation of California’s marijuana economy — from outlaw hillsides and handshake deals to licensed storefronts and regulatory labyrinths.
Ben Rice is just one of the Dickensian cast of characters Scott Eden brings to life. Eden pulls together murder, money, regulation, ego, and romance into a fast-paced narrative while retaining the depth of long-form investigative reporting reminiscent of Patrick Radden Keefe.
He keeps the intrigue and emotional investment high until revealing the details of court proceedings in the home stretch. His ability to dig into how marijuana is grown one minute and generate top-shelf suspense the next sets the account apart. The result is a sensational true crime story and a case study in what happens when a black market goes legitimate but cannot shake its shady past.
The book’s soundtrack is Warren Zevon’s “Send Lawyers, Guns and Money” — all chaos, black humor, and that specific oh-shit-ness of realizing everyone you know might want you dead.
The Wild Roots
The Santa Cruz Mountains have always attracted outlaws and dreamers. In the mid-1960s, Ken Kesey ran his legendary La Honda compound in the northwest part of the range — the birthplace of the Merry Pranksters and the launching pad for the Grateful Dead’s wild early days. Eden writes:
With Kesey’s crowd providing the initial demand, some of the earliest commercial marijuana crops in the U.S. were planted in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Nestled in these cloistered reaches, hippie spiritual communes proliferated, along with their secret gardens. Santa Cruz became one of California’s historic weed-growing regions. Hillbilly hippies with dreadlock beards…
There was even a network of major weed players from all over California, powerful and secretive, called the Cannabis Illuminati. Meetings were called at secret locations where they would agree on pricing and supply. Eden calls it a “sort of weed OPEC.” Once recreational legalization came in, the group was sidelined; disrupted by the very thing they’d fought for.
The 911 Call in the Redwoods
The narrative opens in 2019 with a frantic 911 call: a reported kidnapping at the Santa Cruz mountain home of Tushar Atre.
Eden toggles back and forth between Atre’s early life and career and the police efforts to solve his murder. Along the way, he shuffles in colorful anecdotes including the story of Atre’s mother, an expert programmer who talked her way into an IBM job in New York in the 1970s despite resistance from her German bosses. Atre’s business partner and former lover, Rachael Lynch, emerges as a compelling figure in her own right — she sold marijuana on the black market before going legitimate and was viewed with suspicion by Atre’s family.
From there, Eden moves fluidly across time. He reconstructs Atre’s rise in Silicon Valley, his pivot into marijuana, and the volatile partnership — both romantic and professional — with Rachael Lynch. Drawing on interviews, court records, and trial testimony, Eden tracks the investigation while mapping the volatile ecosystem Atre stepped into: informal investors, bruised egos, unpaid debts, and expectations inflated beyond reason.
The question becomes not only who killed Atre, but who didn’t have motive. Disgruntled employees who felt cheated. Former partners pushed aside. A Midwestern RV dealer who had fronted serious money. Lynch herself. In Eden’s rendering, the cannabis economy runs on ambition and improvisation. It’s Miami Vice stripped of flamingos but the same paranoia, rolling cash, and the constant hum of risk.
Better Call… (You Know Who)
A Killing in Cannabis has so many colorful characters: Humboldt County hippies, Mexican cartels, chemists, growers, Santa Cruz surfers, tech bros (amusingly dubbed “Chads”), even a guest appearance of a dealer named Namaste.
But I had no trouble picking a favorite: Ben Rice, the preeminent weed lawyer and Zelig of California cannabis. Through Rice, Eden shows how nearly impossible it was to remain entirely compliant in an industry emerging only halfway from illegality. Legalization did not erase the past; it overlaid bureaucracy onto improvisation.
Tushar and Rachael consulted Rice when trying to navigate the transition from the “215 era” of medical marijuana to recreational legalization. And years later, when the murder trial finally happens? The judge is Rice’s old law school classmate.
Physically, Eden describes a Rice looks as if he has wandered in from a different California myth: tall and wiry, mop of steel-gray hair, chevron mustache. Boston Brahmin upbringing. Harvard lineage. Draft resistance. Surfing in Hawaii. Arrested by undercover federal agents posing as GIs. A period on the run, aided by the Students for a Democratic Society, until the FBI threatened to indict his lifelong Republican mother.
Of course, this is the man who ends up defending weed growers in the redwoods.
Bust, Lawyer Up, Repeat
Rice’s long-running counterpart is Steve Carney, the county’s chief marijuana enforcer. For years, Carney arrested growers and Rice defended them. So many of Rice’s clients had been busted by Carney that a huge chunk of Rice’s practice could be attributed to Carney’s career. Over time, they formed a wary professional respect: the cop and the defense lawyer locked in recurring conflict.
And when legalization arrives, it wasn’t the marijuana entrepreneurs who shifted gears. Carney doesn’t disappear. He moves to the county’s cannabis licensing office, still chasing illicit grows, just under a different regulatory regime. The war didn’t end. It changed paperwork.
Big J’s Catch-22
Carney became suspicious of the business dealings of Big J, who was aptly named since he was six feet six inches tall and a major player in the pot trade. He’d been selling pot from Santa Cruz since the 1990s, already busted once by the sheriff in 2002 on felony charges. Did that stop him? Nope. He swore his businesses hewed meticulously to medical marijuana laws once they were enacted, running collectives serving chronically ill patients. Eden writes that Big J considered himself a patriot battling repression.
When Prop 64 passed, legalizing marijuana, Big J went all in, obtaining at least twenty-four cannabis licenses under names like Rooted Republic and Monterey Botanicals. But Carney suspected Big J was growing pot on unlicensed farms and then “inverting” that cheaper black market weed into his legal operation to juice profits.
Big J argued he was caught in a Catch-22 — the county botched its regulatory rollout so badly cultivators were forced to grow without licenses, and now they were being shaken down. Big J and the county settled for just over $750,000, negotiated by a team of lawyers including, you guessed it, Ben Rice. When Big J paid the fine, he paid in cash. Eden writes that “the bill-counting machines at the County building whirring on and on.”
Still Call Ben
Over the decades Eden chronicles, marijuana magnates rise and fall. Tech CEOs gamble and lose. Partnerships fracture. Enforcers change titles. Ben Rice remains.
When I googled his name, up pops his website listing recent victories and features testimonials describing him as “a champion of civil liberty,” a lawyer who has “carried the gauntlet” for those damaged by the Drug War.
The rhetoric is elevated, almost epic. Yet in the context of Eden’s narrative, it feels earned. Rice has outlasted the eras: prohibition, medical marijuana, recreational legalization, regulatory retrenchment. Marijuana mavens may come and go. Markets go boom and bust. And Ben Rice is still fighting the good fight.
Fine Print: Thanks to Spiegel & Grau and NetGalley for the ARC.