It is an exurbo-Republican myth that these growers are rolling in free, if blood-stained, drug money—$13 billion worth—under marmalade skies; this small-scale pot husbandry is closer to the hardscrabble yeoman ideal that most upstanding citizens would celebrate. As usual, the culture has instead tailored the counterculture to its own projections: it envies its irrepressible freedom, its money trees, its lack of alarm clocks.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “Tokeville”