Most States Legalizing Cannabis Have Yet to Grapple with Power Demand

Here it is folks, cannabis story number three for the first half of the year (with two more in the works: a feature in EHP and a shorter item in Sonoma mag). I've enjoyed taking some of the fields I know a bit about and frequently cover (environmental health, pesticides, energy, agriculture) and applying them to a field that up until eight months ago I knew very little about and had never covered as a journalist: cannabis regulation. And I hope to keep it up.

So here's my latest, and my first piece for a California-based nonprofit investigative news site called FairWarning. It covers policy, regulation, and health for a national audience, and shares its stories with papers across the country. My article, which covers how cannabis-legal states have (but mostly haven't) addressed the massive energy demands of indoor cultivation in their regulations, has been picked up by the Oregonian, the Tuscon Sentinel, IowaWatch, and the Energy News Network. Evidently Salon is running it, too, but it's not up yet.