In 2019, a tech entrepreneur who was trying to start a legal cannabis processing company was brutally killed in Santa Cruz. A new book meticulously explores who the victim was, what was happening in the cannabis industry here at the time, and how the murder investigation unfolded.
Scott Eden is the author of A Killing in Cannabis, A True Story of Love, Murder, and California Weed. He spoke with KAZU’s Amy Mayer.
Amy Mayer: Could you start with how you came to this story?
Scott Eden: It started as a magazine assignment from editors that I knew at Inc. Magazine who had come across the local news coverage of the murder of Tushar Atre, who was a tech entrepreneur, shifting, though, from Silicon Valley into this new world of cannabis. And so I made a few phone calls and was sort of instantly intrigued.
AM: For you, was it a business story, a crime story, a weed story?
SE: I wouldn't have done it if it was just a story of a crime, of a murder. But I think the murder, like many murders do, they open windows into wider worlds. And this particular world was really what fascinated me, which is this transition that the cannabis business was in. Tushar Atre decided to get into cannabis right when California was legalizing recreational cannabis. That legalization, you know, caused this wave of entrepreneurs and startup founders who were from outside cannabis to get into cannabis. And it inspired a wave of operators who had been in [it on] the medical side and the black market... they were wanting to go legit, to take advantage of what everyone thought was this gigantic opportunity.
AM: The book is told as these almost vignettes of the biographies of many of the involved individuals. How did you build their stories and get so much detail about who each of these characters was?
SE: I mean, it took a long time. In the cannabis world, because it comes out of an illicit world, a lot of people in the cannabis business sort of looked at me like they would a cop almost.
There's an omerta that sort of hangs over everything. They don't want to talk to reporters. There's this sort of stigma to talking to people outside of cannabis that's almost like you're snitching.
But it just takes a while. Like one person, you know, who is open to talking, who is in the cannabis business, leads to the next person. And then they vouch for you. You know, if you spend time and you show them that what you're really after is the truth, and what you're really after is being open to hearing people's stories and their perspectives, then you gain their trust and then they introduce you to the next person. And so you build like a network of people. I needed teachers to teach me how the business worked.
AM: Did you find teachers both among people with a history in cannabis and also among some of those entrepreneurs who were trying to get into it, who they themselves maybe had only recently learned the things that you were now asking about?
SE: For sure, yeah. I needed both. I needed to talk to what they sometimes call “Wooks”—there's a slang term for a certain kind of person who's been in the weed business for a long time. You know, they have big hairy beards. They're stoners, essentially. But they also are entrepreneurs themselves, just in a very different way.
And I also needed to meet as many people as I could who were sort of on Tushar’s path and trajectory, coming from outside weed into the cannabis business and bringing their MBAs with them and their kind of... something of an arrogance, like, 'we are the ones who know how to do business, not these stoner kids who've been plying their trade in the shadows all these years.'
AM: You mentioned some of these folks were coming from the medical marijuana arena, but what did it take for some to want to become legal entrepreneurs?
SE: Some people just saw it as another huge financial opportunity. Others, maybe they wanted to kind of continue. There are many people who still believe that cannabis is like a sacred substance, that there's a mystical quality to it. And there were those who still wanted to get into the business as a way to provide medicine for people.
