A Killing in Cannabis

Tushar Atre was a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur when, in 2017, lured by the promise of a growing market, he launched a startup aimed at revolutionizing the extraction of cannabis. Within two years, he was dead and trailed by a cloud of questions about the true nature of America's newest gold rush.

- By Scott Eden. Illustration by Katherine Lam

The neighborhood of Pleasure Point stands on cliffs overlooking one of the more famous surf breaks in California, a menacing swell that locals call Sewers. Some four miles from the Santa Cruz boardwalk, the break takes its name from an old underwater pipe that once disgorged the town's sewage into Monterey Bay. Today, the Sewers can draw a rugged crowd, and woe betide the newcomer who does not pay the proper deference to those locals, for the surfers of Santa Cruz have earned a reputation for being as hostile as they are skilled.

A stretch of opulent oceanfront villas also looks out over the surf at Pleasure Point. Ever since San Francisco first got rich-more than 170 years ago, from the California gold rush-the city's elite has treated Santa Cruz as its favored beach resort. But in the past two decades, there has been a wealth invasion unlike any before. Just on the other side of the Santa Cruz Mountains, an easy commuter's drive away, sprawls Silicon Valley. From there, the tech titans have come. When Reed Hastings and (rumor has it) Mark Zuckerburg bought glamorous pads in the Santa Cruz area, their hirelings at Netflix and Facebook began snapping up nearby properties in aspirational emulation. The pattern repeated with other tech barons, and other hirelings, until today the median price for a single-family home in Santa Cruz is $1.3 million.

The villa at 3034 Pleasure Point Drive has a multilevel deck that's built out over the cliffs. The view from there is a panorama of changeable seas and histrionic sunsets, with the Monterey Peninsula hovering on the horizon like a blue-green mystery. On the night of September 30, 2019, the owner of the home slept alone in his master suite. There and throughout the house, the ocean's waves were soporifically audible, rumbling against the rocks and sliding back again in their lunar rhythms.