The July 28, 2008 issue of "The New Yorker" magazine has an article on page 49 Titled "Dr. Rush."
One section of it has the author choosing an interesting name to conceal the actual identity of the person.

"We were headed up to Topanga Canyon, in the mountains near Malibu, to meet a broker who supplies Blue with some of the best weed in the state. I’ll call him Guthrie. A lifelong resident of Humboldt County, he funds a number of growing operations, ranging from a large underground bunker to smaller outdoor plots of fewer than a hundred plants. He also uses a fat bankroll to buy product from other producers, which he takes to Los Angeles two or three times a month. The house in Topanga, an old hippie enclave, belonged to a friend who let Guthrie sleep outside in a blue-and-green tent that resembled one of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. I ducked to avoid a string of Tibetan prayer flags that hung over the entrance.
Guthrie was a lean, healthy-looking, brown-eyed man in his mid-thirties. “We have a list of all the pot growers in Humboldt County,” he said, repeating an old Northern joke for my benefit. “It’s called the Yellow Pages.” He reached beneath a table and handed Blue a large black trash bag. Blue untied the bag and stuck his head inside, as the rich aroma of Purple Kush filled the interior of the tent.
“Mmm,” Blue said, inhaling. Purple Kush smells like a mixture of cardamom and cloves, with a darker, earthier undertone of dried peat moss, and an acidic top note evoking freshly ground coffee. The two men agreed on a figure of forty-four hundred dollars a pound; the price had eased somewhat since its peak, in 2005. A large number of new growers entering the market had nudged prices down.
Guthrie’s parents had been hippies. Growing up in Humboldt, he and his siblings got used to fleeing their house in the middle of the night when D.E.A. helicopters raided his family’s growing patch. Perhaps a quarter of the kids in his class had parents involved in the marijuana trade. “You’d say, ‘My dad, he fixes our house a lot,’ ” Guthrie recalled with a laugh, as he offered me a loaded pipe. By the end of the summer, the family was usually broke. In October, the harvest would come, and the family would sell their crop and have a great Christmas; by the next summer, they’d be back in a jam.
Guthrie stayed out of the family business until he was twenty-seven. Then he obtained a trucker’s license and began hauling propane. Since truckers who transport hazardous materials are professional drivers who must go through background checks, the police generally leave them alone once they show their license, whether they are driving a truck or not. Guthrie’s trucker’s license gave his family a free pass through the “gantlet”—a stretch of Highway 101 between Humboldt and Santa Rosa where state police routinely search cars for pot.
Guthrie said that the quasi-legal status of smaller growing arrangements, combined with consumers’ preference for potent, high-maintenance weed, has shifted the balance of the pot business away from large-scale farms. “There’s a lot more people doing little scenes,” he said. The welter of laws pertaining to medical marijuana in California has offered careful operators like Guthrie the best of both worlds: prosecution for growing and selling has become much less likely, while federal busts and seizures keep prices high. Guthrie sells about ten per cent of his product to dispensaries and collectives. Starting up a sophisticated indoor farming operation costs about three hundred thousand dollars, he said, including the cost of making a building airtight—to lock in the humidity, and to keep passersby from smelling the pot and calling the cops—and fitting it with thousand-watt grow lights."
Guthrie grows his plants in octagons, a hydroponic arrangement that allows producers to maximize the number of plants in a confined space. The cost of a piece of property upstate can run an additional three hundred thousand to one and a half million dollars, he said. After a few years, if you know what you are doing, you can make your investment back, and then you can pay a sharecropper to run your operation and spend your time travelling. Guthrie told Blue that he would soon be heading to Indonesia. “It’s amazing over there,” he said. The last time he was in Java, he recalled, he stayed in a Muslim village near the beach, and found the people generally relaxed and welcoming, if somewhat hostile to the Western habit of lying in the sun without clothing."