HAWKING MOCK MARIJUANA

GREENFIELD, Mass. - Joseph White's home office is like a modern-day
hippie hangout.

Books on Buddhism and yoga mingle with business planners and a laptop
computer. An acoustic guitar rests next to a shuffle of sheet music
for "Mr. Tambourine Man," just across the room from a fax machine.

And then there are the marijuana stalks. Towering six-footers.
Pint-sized plants for personal medical use. His stash is for sale,
but it won't get you stoned. These lifelike botanicals are made of
silk and wood. Behold, counterfeit cannabis.

In the past two years, White has rolled his pro-pot activism and
business savvy into New Image Plants, a startup company that sells
the make-believe marijuana online. "The business name reflects
exactly what I'm trying to do - create a new image for these plants," he said.

White won't say whether he smokes pot or has in the past. But he
began supporting marijuana legalization seven years ago after talking
to his son about anti-drug advertising. "He wanted to know why adults
were talking down to kids and trying to scare them," White said.

He rebukes the notion that pot is a harmful drug that inevitably
leads to the use of harder drugs. "Kids know those claims aren't
true," White said. "So when they hear an anti-drug message like that,
they just discount it."

So he started a nonprofit group in 1999 called Change the Climate,
which advocates for the legalization and taxation of marijuana and
better education about the drug.

By getting his artificial plants into private residences and public
spaces, White is betting that more people will start appreciating the
natural beauty of the real thing instead of thinking of marijuana as
an evil weed. His early customers were people looking for gag gifts,
party planners in search of unique decorations and law enforcement
agencies needing replicas for training missions.

Then Hollywood came calling, and New Image Plants hit a financial
high. In April, White got an order for 355 plants from "Weeds," the
Showtime TV series about a single suburban soccer mom who deals
marijuana to support her family.

Although he isn't relying on New Image Plants as his main source of
income, White expects his sales to continue building from the
interests of "the hundreds of millions of people who smoke pot and
the hundred of millions of people who have no problem with it."