An Exhilarating, Drug-Fueled, True-Crime Thriller
- Scott Eden’s book "A Killing in Cannabis" chronicles the murder of Tushar Atre, a wealthy tech entrepreneur and cannabis company founder, found shot execution-style on his Santa Cruz property in 2019.
- The story begins in 2016, focusing on Rachael Lynch, a cannabis farmer who moves her ailing mother to Santa Cruz and rents an Airbnb owned by Atre, sparking a connection between them.
- Lynch shares her vision of an ethical, medicine-focused cannabis operation, which Atre agrees to fund, leading to a complex business and romantic relationship amid California’s evolving cannabis industry.
- The book explores the darker, violent roots of the cannabis industry, contrasting the legal market’s growth with the industry’s fraught and sometimes deadly history.
A KILLING IN CANNABIS: A True Story of Love, Murder, and California Weed, by Scott Eden
Legal cannabis markets are proliferating across the United States, reshaping city blocks and cultural norms, drawing new customers and overwhelming venture capital, promising a clean break from the drug war. It’s easy to forget the industry’s not-so-distant, not-so-legal roots. Enter Scott Eden’s enthralling “A Killing in Cannabis.”
The book, Eden’s second, opens with the grisly, puzzling kidnapping and murder of Tushar Atre, a wealthy Indian American tech-bro surfer type who’d made his money designing websites for Silicon Valley start-ups, and, later, founded a cannabis company. Raised in Westchester, Atre, then 50, had been in Santa Cruz for some 20 years and become a fixture in its insular surfing community.
On Oct. 1, 2019, sheriff’s deputies found him lying shoeless under a redwood tree on his own property, hands bound behind his back and “shot, execution style.”
Rewind to 2016, when our story begins in earnest. Upon learning of her mother’s cancer diagnosis, Rachael Lynch, an experienced California pot farmer originally from Vermont, persuades her mom to move with her to Santa Cruz in an attempt at palliative care far from the frigid New England winter. They decide on the trendy Pleasure Point neighborhood and move into an Airbnb owned by Atre, roughly 17 years Lynch’s senior.
Over time, Lynch opens up to Atre about her background in cannabis — her degree in environmental science, her bona fides as an agriculturist in permaculture. She tells him about a concept she’s been developing for years: a seed-to-sale, medicine-focused, ethically grounded and spiritually framed cannabis operation. Atre, intrigued and smitten, says he wants to fund her dream. She finally relents and the pair fall into a volatile business — and romantic — relationship.
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