Business reporter Michael Pollick covers Florida’s medical marijuana ballot initiative for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. (Courtesy Michael Pollick)
MIAMI, FL — Michael Pollick remembers 1969. He was an airman first class stationed in Monterey, CA, where he spent weekends exploring the Bay Area, hitchhiking down the Pacific Coast, and, as he’s put it, “soaking up the California culture.”
But today, as he covers the weed beat for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Pollick draws more on his decades of experience as a business journalist than those distant “flower power” memories. With a ballot initiative that would legalize medical marijuana in Florida likely to pass this fall, he is the lead reporter for a microsite dedicated to marijuana legalization news, both in the Sunshine State and around the country.
“I’m a business news reporter,” Pollick says. “That’s all I’ve done since 1973. The very first story I wrote about marijuana was in March of this year. An editor just kind of slouched over and said, we want you to write a marijuana story. The polls showed it passing. He told me, ‘Don’t get into the big debate about pros and cons.’ Instead, we wanted to look at: If it does pass, how is it going to change our landscape?”
Less culture war, more matter-of-fact business story. That’s the mindset behind an innovative (if imperfect) project that has produced the most thorough coverage of the medical marijuana debate in the state, bringing together Pollick’s original reporting with ample aggregation. He’s uncovered plenty of interesting angles along the way.
That first article, which ran before the microsite was launched, convinced Herald-Tribune editors they were on to a big story. Pollick spoke to experts who estimated passage of the amendment could create an $800 million-a-year industry.
The editors threw old-school resources at the story, sending Pollick on a reporting trip to California and Colorado before the site launched over the summer. He looked at lessons to be learned from California, where medical marijuana has been permitted since in 1996. He wrote about how pot entrepreneurs have opened new businesses and how Colorado has seen legal recreational marijuana boost its economy. He found people in Colorado who are eyeing Florida as an investment if the measure passes and wrote about the demographics of medical marijuana users in California.
To open that series, the paper’s editors encouraged Pollick to write an unusual story, a first-person account of his own experiences with marijuana in the late 1960s in San Francisco.
“Mike had a perspective that was unique in the newsroom,” says Matthew Sauer, the paper’s deputy managing editor. “We don’t have too many reporters who were adults at that time.”
While putting the medical marijuana debate in a national context, Pollick is also covering the issue as a local story, writing about how wary Southwest Florida communities are passing new restrictions ahead of potential legalization and how a local company is gearing up to produce medical grade marijuana.
Pollick talks about the issues like a reporter who has been steeped in medical marijuana policy for months, but also like a business reporter. He’s fascinated by the new pot entrepreneurs, including one company he wrote about that has created a medical marijuana vapor delivery system, so patients don’t have to smoke their medicine. The company sells the delivery system, which require cartridges the company also produces.
“It’s like buying a razor from Gillette and then being forced to buy Gillette razor blades,” he said. “It’s fascinating how the products have evolved.”
Another wrinkle: how the outcome of the medical marijuana vote might influence the hundreds of thousands of people who come to Florida every winter, many of them older residents from northern states, or from Canada, where medical marijuana is legal.
“Here’s this country directly to the north that provides a goodly number of our winter visitors, a country that is making medical marijuana part of their national health care system as we speak,” he said. “People are going to be making decisions about whether they come to Florida or go to Arizona.”
And he sees Florida’s decision as a harbinger of what will happen in the rest of the South. “We’re the anchor tenant of the southeast United States mall,” he said. “If we go medical marijuana, it’s like they finally got a Macy’s.”
“I want to know, what’s the future value of this marijuana stock?” he added.
In addition to his own reporting, Pollick aggregates news from other sources to “keep the river flowing.” And that river is flowing pretty fast. On Wednesday, he wrote two stories, posted an AP story out of Georgia on the medical marijuana debate there, and put up a post about a report from the Mortgage Professional of America on how marijuana businesses need credit and another post with analysis of the latest polls. That night, the Herald-Tribune hosted a forum on the issue, drawing about 200 members of the public to hear from opponents and supporters
Busy as the beat keeps him, the Herald-Tribune hasn’t gone as far as The Denver Post, which has hired a pot editor and launched a freestanding site, The Cannabist. Pollick is still covering business news unrelated to marijuana. His efforts are more akin to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Pot Blog.
“I can’t find another newspaper in the eastern United States that’s doing what we’re doing,” he said. “I think I might have a lot more company on Nov. 5.”
It’s not clear just how large an audience the microsite is attracting. Sauer wouldn’t provide specific numbers, saying only that it’s getting “thousands” of unique visitors a month, with about 70 percent of those readers from Florida. The site, which mirrors other Herald-Tribune microsites, can be a bit difficult to navigate, with the most recent posts bumping down Pollick’s more in-depth work. The search function doesn’t seem to be capturing everything.
But overall, Marijuana.heraldtribune.com is a valuable resource for readers and an admirable effort by Pollick and the Herald-Tribune.
Sauer, the editor, counts the project as a success, and he said reader response has been positive. He pointed out that, among Florida’s aging population, there’s a strong interest in healthcare news—and in many ways, that’s what medical marijuana coverage is.
“You kind of brace yourself for a negative reaction, but we really haven’t gotten that,” he said. “The senior citizen generation entering Florida now, they’re that Boomer generation. They lived that, I don’t know what you want to call it, that free love, hippy generation. They’re not the Reefer Madness generation. But even the older generation, they’re now dealing with a lot of chronic things. Some of them see marijuana as an option. They want to know more.”
Susannah Nesmith is CJR’s correspondent for Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. She is a freelance writer based in Miami with more than 25 years working for regional and national outlets. Follow her on Twitter @susannahnesmith.