"Weed Land, " an up-close journalistic narrative that chronicles a transformative epoch for marijuana in America.From the 1996 passage of California s Proposition 215, the nation s first medical marijuana law, through law enforcement raids, clinical studies that revealed medical benefits for cannabis, and the emergence of a lucrative cannabis industry, "It "offers an independent, meticulously reported account of the clashes and contradictions of a burgeoning California cannabis culture that stoked pot liberalization across the country."

Alfred Ryan Nerz is a Yale-educated author, journalist, and TV producer. He's also a longtime marijuana enthusiast who has made it his mission to better understand America's long-standing love-hate relationship with our favorite (sometimes) illegal drug.

Martin A. Lee traces the dramatic social history of marijuana from its origins to its emergence in the 1960s as a defining force in a culture war that has never ceased. Lee describes how the illicit marijuana subculture overcame government opposition and morphed into a dynamic, multibillion-dollar industry.

To some it's the Holy Herb, the healer of nations, the potential saviour of the planet, banned because of a conspiracy involving J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, the petrochemical industry and the yellow press. Others still see it as the deceptive weed that undermined Arab civilization. For millions of others in the west it's no longer even controversial - legalized for many patients under American state laws, tolerated in Holland, and openly planted in hundreds of acres of Swiss Alps.