Do you guys remember The Blair Witch Project? I know a lot of people say it wasn’t scary, but I saw it in the theater with friends and I was scared sh*tless. I knew the spoilers ahead of time too. The lead actress on that indie movie, 37 year-old Heather Donahue, has a new memoir out about how she quit Hollywood, which wasn’t that fond of her anyway, to become a medical marijuana grower in California. Apparently it’s sort-of legal if you follow certain guidelines, but it’s a gray area and growers and dispensaries have been busted by the feds.

The world got its first glimpse of Heather Donahue thanks to her role in 1999’s terrifying “Blair Witch Project,” but don’t expect to see the actress on the big screen anytime soon. She ditched acting to pursue a new career growing marijuana.

It may seem like an odd career choice, but it’s a decision Donahue hopes to profit from thanks to her new memoir, “GrowGirl: How My Life After ‘The Blair Witch Project’ Went to Pot,” which will be released Jan. 5.

Donahue explains her decision to quit Hollywood in favor of farming on her website.

“I wanted to change my life, see what else was out there for me, what else I might become,” she says. “So I burned most of the stuff from my life in LA (resumes, headshots, lingerie, lint) in the desert.”

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Donahue first received a prescription for medical marijuana in 2007 to treat PMS, and decided to cultivate the herb herself — mostly for medical use — for a year in “Nuggettown,” a Northern California community known for growing weed.

“I had no idea what to do next, and growing pot was what presented itself,” she says on her website. “I felt better about putting medical marijuana in the world than I did about about making another terrible movie.”

However, Donahue decided to leave her pot business behind in order to write “GrowGirl,” and admits she was put off after a fellow grower friend got busted.

As to whether or not she thinks pot should be legalized, she thinks medicinal marijuana is here to stay, but she would hate to see big business eradicate local growing communities.

“‘Cannabusiness’ has been a place that some people have been able to turn to in this tough economy,” she writes. “I’d hate for legalization to take that away. I’d hate to see corporations suck up large swaths of land and leave the mom-and-pop small time growers who have built this business no option but sharecropping.”

[From Huffington Post]

I get PMS too, sign me up. I’m from the east coast and I’ve always lived there, so I don’t know much about medical marijuana apart from what I’ve seen on TV and in brief visits to California. Pot is much less available here and it’s prosecuted quite heavily depending on where you live. On the west coast it’s a totally different world. I saw a documentary on Current.TV’s Vanguard called “The War on Weed” that contrasted the two coasts in regard to pot use and prosecution. It’s jaw-dropping how different it is. So this is interesting to me as a kind of anthropological study. The book has been getting good reviews too. This chick’s cheese moved and she followed it to her buzzed bliss. Donahue has since quit growing pot, though, after a friend of hers got raided. At least she says she’s quit. That’s probably the best stance to publicly take.