In Weed the People (Time Home Entertainment, $27.95), former Seattle Weekly writer/editor Bruce Barcott describes a personal transformation common among people who never imagined they'd see a system of licensed and taxed legal marijuana. After almost voting against Initiative 502, which legalized marijuana in Washington—he worried about the rise of drugged driving and the prospect of kids having increased access—Barcott ends up becoming a medical marijuana patient, attending the Cannabis Cup and Hempfest, and calmly sharing a joint with sources in the alley behind an art gallery. In between, he weaves a rudimentary history of the war on drugs and the campaigns for legalization in Washington and Colorado, threaded with predictable observations about the a-changing times and tired jokes about stoners getting "the munchies."
To be fair, the book serves as an accessible primer for those who haven't been paying close attention to the progress of legalization. It's easy to forget there are many people to whom, after living through decades of antidrug messaging and lawmaking, legal weed is a shocking development in what must seem like a very short period of time. Weed the People seems to have been created with these folks in mind, and it serves their needs reasonably well.
But those who've followed the story at all will find a rehash of issues Washington and Colorado reporters have covered ad nauseam over the past three years. Barcott's telling relies heavily on dusty ironies that have long since become commonplace—weed is legal, but you can't smoke it outside, some marijuana businesspeople wear suits, etc.—and old-line cultural clichés. Reporting on a medical marijuana clinic, he can't resist spotting the "stringy-haired beanpole stoners" in the waiting room. These lapses undermine the seriousness of his inquiry. More importantly, they also prevent the book, even after wandering for 320 pages through the past and present, from substantially answering the question posed by its subtitle: What is the "Future of Legal Marijuana in America"? Weed the People doesn't really say.
Barcott is at his best when he ditches the dad jokes and digs into the stories that inspired the legalization experiment to begin with: the dying AIDS patients who prompted the first medical marijuana clinics in California, or Bernard Noble, a black man sentenced to 13 years in a Louisiana prison for carrying two joints. Barcott also explores still-murky questions about how cannabis interacts with schizophrenia and affects teenage brain development—pressing issues that demand research, the funding for which is expedited by normalization and new tax revenue. A century of prohibition and propaganda has marginalized concerns like these; only now are intelligent people able to have a real conversation about them without being interrupted by boring old stoner jokes.
It follows that Barcott seems genuinely engaged by these segments, which enable the book to take its own premise seriously. He's absolutely right when he argues that "the place of marijuana in our lives is being rethought, reconsidered, and recalibrated." That's why Weed the People would've benefitted from a realignment: more of those meaningful stories, and fewer easy punch lines. 
