Video interview with Doug Fine, author of Too High to Fail, book about cannabis industry

Here's an interview with Doug Fine, author of Too High to Fail: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution.

"How can you have 56 percent of Americans in support of fully ending the drug war, and zero senators in support of it?" asks Doug Fine, investigative journalist and author of new book, Too High To Fail.

Fine sat down with ReasonTV's Tracy Oppenheimer to discuss his time spent in the cannabis capital of California, Mendocino County, and why he thinks this drug can help save the American economy. And it's not just about collecting taxes.

"The industrial [uses] may one day dwarf the psychoactive ones. If we start using it for fermentation for our energy needs, it can produce great biofuels," says Fine, "already, cannabis is in the bumpers of Dodge Vipers."

I interviewed Doug in July about his book. Read it here.

How Cannabis Can Revolutionize Our Economy: Author Doug Fine on "Too High To Fail"

• [Westfakia]

  I would love to read that book but I simply can’t understand why Amazon is charging more for the Kindle version than for the dead tree edition.

• [Brainspore]

  “The industrial [uses] may one day dwarf the psychoactive ones. If we start using it for fermentation for our energy needs, it can produce great biofuels,” says Fine, “already, cannabis is in the bumpers of Dodge Vipers.”

  At long last, society takes one formative step toward building a real-life version of Cheech & Chong’s van from Up in Smoke.

• [jandrese]

  “How can you have 56 percent of Americans in support of fully ending the drug war, and zero senators in support of it?”

  Because too many of that 56% don’t vote, and the old people who do vote are still in support of the Drug War. 

  • [sdmikev]

    No, it’s because their corporate/plutocracy overlords have not told them it’s OK to be in favor of legalizing pot (or any drug).
    We the voters now have effectively zero say in policy.  We can only choose the lesser of two evils and hope that they will be slightly less evil than what the Koch brothers demand.
    This is not meant as sarcasm, BTW.

  • [Brainspore]

    I’m still ticked off that voters in my home state of California changed their collective minds at the last minute to narrowly defeat Proposition 19 back in 2010. And I’m even more pissed off at the lazy legalization-supporting assholes who didn’t bother to go to the polls at all because “their votes didn’t matter.”

• [AdamLesh]

  Since when did Mendocino County become the cannabis-growing capital of California? Given Mendocino County’s relative population density and the extreme deforestation of public and private forests, farmers there face far greater legal threats than they do in Humboldt County. “Rural” Mendocino County may be empty enough to support some viable covert growing operations, but it has nothing on rural Humboldt County. I think Mendocino County’s notoriety as a cannabis-growing region is bolstered due to its closer proximity to the Bay Area. I wonder what the average gross cannabis product is in Mendocino versus Humboldt?

  At any rate, it’s worth noting that growers in both counties tend to be opposed to legalization because the hilly, somewhat marginal land in the area is great for growing covertly, but if cannabis was legalized, production would shift to the central valley and other more fertile regions with better soil, flatter land, etc. In other words, cannabis is grown in rural northern California precisely because it is rural, not because it has ideal growing conditions. Legalization would have a devastating impact on the growers of these areas. 

  Such an ethical quandary. 

  • [bloodybl]

    Perhaps those growers should plan ahead and buy land in those growing regions of the future then? I get your point though, greed is always the downfall of any good idea. 

• [Yar-ren D.]

  I agree that the illegal cartels profit from this war on drugs. I also believe that the military industrial complex profits even more. This needs to be investigated on more often. 

  • [Sasha@librtee]

    You right it as if there’s a difference between the two.

• [Sasha@librtee]

  “Saved 7 deputy jobs.”

  Actually, he means 7 deputies LOST their busywork jobs. 
  And that is (one of the core) nuts of the problem right there.

• [Klaus Æ Mogensen]

  “How can you have 56 percent of Americans in support of fully ending the drug war, and zero senators in support of it?”

  Maybe because of bribes from the alcohol industry lobby?