writing
In the summer of 1979, sixteen-year-old me landed a job as a houseman at a brand-new Marriott hotel outside Washington, DC — and quickly stumbled into a most unlikely new job. While disco dominated the airwaves and a certain red-haired waitress dominated my imagination, I learned about the painful gap between fantasy and reality.
A few years ago, researching a book about farmworkers in rural North Carolina, I visited a labor camp and got an unexpected answer when I asked what crop the men were growing. What follows is an audio essay about the surprisingly thin line between hemp and marijuana, the H2A guest worker program that brings hundreds of thousands of Mexican men to American farms each year, and what happens when a curious writer and his wife ignore the instructions that came with their THC edibles.
Listen here: