SMOKY MOUNTAIN HIGH: As restrictions on marijuana use fade, the Cherokees are poised to light a thriving business.

• Author: Martin, Edward

West of Birdtown, Coopers Creek tumbles out of the dark coves of the Smoky Mountains, luring fly-fishing buffs with plump trout. Near Cherokee, in recent years, the fish themselves have become a crop, in stocked ponds where anglers pay to tempt them with exotic flies of elk hair and such.

Eighteen months ago, another crop sprouted here, little noticed by few outside the tightly knit Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians. Its spiky leaves are now flourishing in two-dozen hoop-domed, climate-controlled greenhouses.

This is North Carolina's first industrial-scale, medical marijuana project. If successful, its economic impact on western North Carolina could complement the gambling industry that has become an economic bulwark since 1997. After an investment topping $50 million, it stalled in early May after internal dissent over its financing.

Today, two Harrah's casinos, four hotel towers with 1,800 rooms, restaurants and other developments generate more than $600 million a year. The complex has transformed the once-poor Qualla Boundary, home of the Eastern Band, into a regional dynamo.

Approval of the gambling operations in the 1990s also stalled along similar lines to those recently muddying the future of the marijuana project. Within the tribe, there were concerns over ownership of the casinos--resolved in a deal in which the Eastern Band owns them, and Harrah's manages them--and squeamishness about the morality of gambling. Today's stumbling blocks for the marijuana project include similar concerns.

"They're already the largest employer in western North Carolina and the economic engine of this area," says Mike Clampitt, the N.C. House member for Swain, Jackson and Transylvania counties, which include the Cherokees. "This will have a tremendous impact."

Under best-case scenarios, the tribe's planned medical-cannabis operations could generate $350 million a year in sales of more than 1,000 pounds a week produced and sold at its own dispensary, says Forrest Parker, manager of Qualla Enterprises, created by the Eastern Band to launch the project. It would be "the largest retail center in the world" for medicinal marijuana.

The Eastern Band has already developed two proprietary strains of the plant, adapted specially for the cooler, mountain climate. At peak, he says, it could employ 400, on top of the 7,000 jobs tied to the Eastern Band's casinos, resorts and other enterprises. About 60 people now work on the project.

Cannabis experts say the Cherokee undertaking could serve as a model for an influx of similar businesses in North Carolina. Clampitt and other Tar Heel legislators who've visited the budding project in recent months says its rigid controls aimed at preventing diversion of the psychoactive cannabis for non-medical purposes has influenced the debate over medical marijuana legalization at the N.C. General Assembly. While Cherokees and others expect a bill to...