Читать книгу Weed Land - Peter Hecht - Страница 10

THREE

Kush Rush

Stephen Gasparas sensed the inevitability of his life’s journey as soon as he started growing marijuana in the closet of his boyhood home in suburban Chicago. He felt it even after his infuriated mother yanked out his growing lights and skunk-smelling plants. He tried to suppress it as he got older, at least in between the multiple times he got busted for possession or intent to sell and his mom had to bail him out of trouble. He experimented with respectability. He opened a flooring business. For years, he installed carpets, hardwoods, and laminates and met payroll, ever fighting the urge. And then, it came to him one day as he riffed on his guitar and savored the herb: it was his time. There was a world of cannabis to explore. He was going to see it, experience it, and immerse himself in its offerings. The herb, and its spirit, would guide him.

So Gasparas hiked to the base of the Himalayas in India and traversed roads lined with fields of budding Hindu Kush marijuana. He traveled America to gatherings of the Rainbow Family and communed with nature in the company of the traveling tribe born a year after San Francisco’s Summer of Love. He once awoke at a Rainbow encampment in Michigan to find miniature cannabis plants sprouting from the earth around his van. He swore it was neither a vision nor a hallucination. He just knew: “I’m on my path.”

It led him to the far northeastern corner of California, where, over cannabis tokes in the deep woods of the Modoc National Forest, elders of the Rainbow Family nudged him toward his destiny. The old hippies from Haight-Ashbury had scattered long before. Many had migrated to California’s upper northern coast. There, in the Emerald Triangle of Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity Counties, they had moved off the grid and back to the land, raising organic crops and refining the art of growing marijuana. The tricounty region was named for its redwood forests. But Emerald Triangle came to mean only one thing: home of the finest and most readily available pot in California.

In Humboldt County, in particular, hundreds of millions of marijuana dollars flowed into rural towns from a largely illicit growing culture. Marijuana stimulated local spending, boosting businesses that fed, clothed, and equipped the weed farmers. It drove the economy. Weed salvaged the hopes of a region where, over decades, the logging and fishing industries had diminished as mills shuttered and the depletion of fish populations left ever fewer salmon returning to spawn. Long after the hippies and homesteaders made a pilgrimage to the chilly northern coast, medical marijuana and a proliferation of pot dispensaries elsewhere in California ignited a new migration to the Emerald Triangle.

As Oakland emerged as a migratory nexus for cannabis activists and a laboratory for marijuana liberalization and commercialization, the state’s north coast glittered as an emerald beacon for people simply wanting to grow and enjoy marijuana—and seek livelihoods through cannabis—in the permissive seclusion of the redwoods or small towns. Exploiting liberal Humboldt County rules allowing anyone with a medical marijuana recommendation to cultivate one hundred square feet of pot, the newcomers converted neighborhood homes to fragrant indoor grow houses or staked out plots for outdoor pot fields. Nudge-and-wink gardening supply centers, purportedly for organic vegetables, proliferated. They stocked shelves with grow lights and plant fertilizers called Big Bud, Bud Candy, and Voodoo Juice. In a region that had long supplied the marijuana black market of California and beyond, medical marijuana lured in newcomers inspired by new opportunities and a sense of legal cover. The influx would stir a cannabis cultural clash in pot country—and turmoil over the Emerald Triangle’s place in a changing California marijuana economy.

In this environment, the Rainbow elders sensed there was an opening for new-generation seekers such as Gasparas. After he briefly settled in Oregon, one of the leaders of his toking circle from the Modoc forest spoke to Gasparas by phone and redirected him in a guiding voice: “Humboldt, that’s the place you ought to be.”

In 2004, Gasparas stopped at a doctor’s office in Crescent City, just south of the Oregon border. He cited congestion and back pain—the latter from a bicycle motocross accident as a youth—to get a physician’s recommendation for medical marijuana. He settled into a house near the Humboldt town of Eureka. Inspired by his travels to India, he perfected a cannabis strain called Purple Hindu Kush. He sold it to a local dispensary and soon celebrated his reviews. “People said my stuff was the first to get them stoned in a long time,” the suburban Chicago transplant boasted. Picking up side jobs as a carpet cleaner, he connected with college kids while shampooing carpets in weed-scented housing complexes near Arcata’s Humboldt State University. He swapped his potent buds for marijuana seedlings the kids were growing in their rooms. He took their baby Purple Urkles and Grape Skunks to a cabin between Eureka and Arcata that he and a partner outfitted with growing beds and blazing lamps. He perfected bending and topping off the plants to make them bountiful with flowers, proclaiming he could produce up to a pound and three-quarters of dried buds per lamp. “The spirit,” he proclaimed, “talked to me as I was going.”

In Gasparas’s explorative, meditative journey from suburban Chicago to India to Humboldt, the spirit also led him to the conclusion that being a pot outlaw wasn’t his dharma. He loved his newfound lawfulness as a medical cultivator under California’s Proposition 215. He loved being part of the great pot migration. Downtown Arcata, with its art deco theater, gingerbread-adorned storefronts, roustabout bars, and a plaza topped by giant palms, was a bustling depot for the north coast marijuana economy.

Arcata had a diverse legacy as a destination. After World War II, it flourished with thirty lumber mills and an influx of workers processing north coast timber. In 1990, a year after the college town passed a resolution proclaiming itself a nuclear-weapons-free zone, Arcata and neighboring north coast communities became activist outposts for the Redwood Summer. Environmental protesters streamed into the region, by then well established as the mecca for nature-loving—and cannabis-savoring—back-to-the-landers. Demonstrators blocked logging trucks in Humboldt and Mendocino Counties, demanding an end to corporate clear-cutting in California’s northern Headwaters Forest that threatened wildlife habitats and imperiled stream systems for endangered coho salmon.

Now a boundless sense of new marijuana freedoms lured people in again. Itinerant bud trimmers, from spike-haired skateboarders to dreadlocked hikers emerging from the woods around Arcata, streamed in for jobs scissor-cutting unwanted leaves from marijuana flowers to prep them for dispensaries or the underground market after the fall outdoor harvest, or throughout the year for indoor yields. Gasparas delighted in Goths, gutter punks, and hippies coming together in a marijuana melting pot.

In 2007, Gasparas opened a dispensary, called the iCenter, later the Sai Center, in downtown Arcata. He added to his marijuana offerings, bartering to buy product from local growers, many of them recast and newly certified as medical marijuana patients. They stepped out of the shadows of the north coast Redwood Curtain, from an illicit, ever suspicious culture that had long since evolved from the hippie nirvana of the Haight-Ashbury transplants. Growers came into the iCenter with turkey oven bags filled with weed. Many recoiled when Gasparas asked them to provide seller’s permits or fill out Internal Revenue Service 1099 tax forms as transparent cannabis venders. Some offered to drop the price a thousand dollars a pound, even two thousand, if they didn’t have to sign anything. Gasparas turned away those uncomfortable with the business protocols of medical marijuana and the dispensary market. But he made one key concession to his weed-growing venders. He wrote no checks. He paid them only in cash.

• • •

In the Emerald Triangle, where marijuana growers cultivated a legacy of earthy outdoor pot strains produced beneath the sun and the stars, years of state and federal drug raids had changed both the community and the art of growing. The raids drove many cultivators indoors. In the forests, diesel fuel leaked from generators in half-buried shipping containers rigged with grow lamps for marijuana. In the Humboldt towns of Arcata and Eureka, or the Mendocino hamlets of Ukiah and Willits, newcomers embracing indoor pot dangerously wired bedrooms, garages, and often whole houses with rows of thousand-watt lights. The sweet stench of weed, much of it produced by new arrivals with little emotional connection to the region or its heritage, washed over neighborhoods. By 2008, when Arcata passed an ordinance restricting indoor marijuana to fifty square feet and a maximum of twelve hundred total watts of lighting, nearly one in every seven homes was presumed to be growing pot. The same year, the sheriff’s department had to call in an environmental cleanup crew for diesel and oil spills after authorities raided a rural southern Humboldt property with four buildings outfitted with cultivation rooms, hundreds of growing lamps for nearly fifty-five hundred plants, and not a single room fit for human habitation. A 2007 study by Humboldt State’s Schatz Energy Research Center estimated that indoor marijuana growing accounted for 10 percent of electricity use in the county of 135,000 residents, enough to power thirteen thousand homes. Between 1996, when Californians passed the medical marijuana law, and 2010, per capita electricity use in Mendocino County spiked by three times the state average. In Humboldt, it went up by sixfold.

The Emerald Triangle was no longer the haven of Lelehnia Du Bois’s childhood memories. Her mother, Carole Du Bois, was a naturalist who settled her daughters in a wooded sanctuary in Trinity County in the 1970s. She immersed them in growing pesticide-free corn, beans, peas, tomatoes, and peppers. Lelehnia was with her mother and a younger sister on a mountainous highway when a tumbling boulder crashed onto the road. Her mother swerved the car to avoid it, and their vehicle flipped into a riverbed. Lelehnia crawled up a rocky slope to the road to summon help. Her younger sister died; her mother suffered a broken back. They stayed in Trinity County, grieving, recovering, and embracing nature and their neighbors. Her mother smoked a nightly joint in the tub to quell her pain, and Lelehnia became familiar with the neighbors’ marijuana gardens. By the age of nine, she was helping trim the buds at harvest time. She grew up loving the autumn and the celebratory community passage when neighbors would get together for potluck dinners to mark the end of another outdoor growing season and hail the potent, plentiful crop.

Lelehnia moved on to Southern California, became a model, worked in the retail fashion industry, and ran a restaurant and a school of dance. She didn’t envision a future in pot. But in 1994, Lelehnia moved back to the Emerald Triangle after her mother, by then living in Humboldt, fell ill. Lelehnia studied nursing at Redwood College in Eureka and took a job in a senior-care facility while working toward her RN degree. In 1999, she caught a falling patient and suffered ruptured disks in her back. Suddenly, she was a patient herself, winding up on disability and, for an extended time, in a wheelchair. She got a medical marijuana recommendation and reembraced the region’s cannabis arts, only this time bathed in the yellow light of an indoor growing space built next to the living room of her small Eureka apartment. Her Sweet God strain soothed her spine and brought in extra income on top of her disability checks. She supplied marijuana, homemade cannabis tinctures, and baked goods to a Eureka dispensary called the Hummingbird Healing Center. Week by week, there seemed to be new neighbors. They churned the electrical circuits, producing a cumulative mountain of weed.

In 2009, an Arts & Entertainment Network documentary depicted Arcata in Pot City, U.S.A., while MSNBC’s Marijuana Inc. chronicled the cannabis crush in the Emerald Triangle. People coming in didn’t care to grasp that the marijuana market, even in California, and especially on its north coast, was already glutted. At the Humboldt Collective dispensary in Arcata, known as the THC, Tony Turner, a public school counselor who went into the marijuana business after retirement, greeted a continual procession of out-of-state dreamers. One day, Michelle Cotter, an Arizona woman who had studied alternative medicine and the healing powers of nature at the Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine, stopped by. Cotter had never even smoked pot. But she came to the THC with friend Jaye Richards, a former Arizona property manager who had experience growing corn and soy beans on a family farm in Illinois. They had just gotten their California recommendations for medical marijuana, their tickets, they hoped, to a new lifestyle and livelihood. They looked over Turner’s jars of Pot Pourri and Bud Crumble, bought a few marijuana caramels and peppered him for advice on growing. “Best to look for a place in the countryside,” Turner suggested. “And get a security system.” He smiled in bemusement as the women moved on, happily exploring their California cannabis adventure. Turner wondered where it would end. Just because Humboldt was pot country and marijuana was legal for medicinal use didn’t mean that so many people were fit to grow medical weed or that there was a market waiting.

But with new residents burning brilliant plant lights and paying soaring electric bills and ballooning rents, Du Bois sensed a darker edge. There was competitiveness between growers, distrust, and a loss of neighborliness. Envious residents who couldn’t access the dispensary market threatened to report more successful ones to the feds. Many simply winked at the idea of medical marijuana as they packed up product and shipped it out of state for maximum returns. The explosion of indoor growers hardly reminded Du Bois of Trinity County in the 1970s. “There is no honor system,” she thought. “The integrity has gotten lost.” The entire culture was changing.

The newcomers weren’t born into this region. They had never awakened before the fall outdoor harvest to the roar of narcotics officers’ wind-whipping helicopters scouring the mountains in the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting. They had never initiated emergency calls from pot-growing neighbor to pot-growing neighbor to warn that the feds or state authorities were coming. They hadn’t faced the excitement or fear of selling to buyers from across California, and America, who might show up flashing stacks of bills one day and brandishing guns the next.

In southern Humboldt County, native son Joey Burger started growing pot at fourteen. He matured in the trade. He appreciated the covenants of a place where displaced loggers made their living planting marijuana and chipped in to buy fire engines or pay for paramedic training for the local volunteer fire district. By age twenty-eight, with premature flecks of gray in his hair, Burger was a community-conscious businessman who honored the pot-growing traditions but worked to bring his neighbors into the future. Burger ran an agricultural products showroom, Trim Scene Solutions, in the town of Redway. He marketed crop trimmers, drying racks, bagging machines, and scales. He posted online photos and demonstration videos for harvest equipment, including his signature Twister machine that could do the work of more than two dozen bud trimmers. His demo videos depicted processing hops for beer—not buds for bongs. But he saw his machines, with their whirring hum, as the sirens of an emerging, legitimate marijuana industry.

Burger shunned the black market to supply licensed medical marijuana dispensaries in Sacramento and other cities. He grew a meticulously tended marijuana grove, with his outdoor plants towering up to fifteen feet high before the November harvest and his buds landing among featured “top shelf” strains at dispensaries. In 2010, he worked to form the Humboldt Growers Association. The group cosponsored a fund-raiser to help pay off the campaign debt of Humboldt County district attorney Paul Gallegos. It hired a longtime county supervisor, Bonnie Neely, as a lobbyist. And it pushed a plan for the county to issue permits to medical marijuana growers with proof of providing for the dispensary market. Burger wanted to bring Humboldt County, particularly its outdoor growers, into the light of a sanctioned economy. That meant government oversight, documented sales and paperwork, and transparent relationships with cannabis stores. But many of his brethren saw county permits and oversight as intruding on a right of nature. They were too accustomed to the old ways to go legit. Burger tried to convince them they needed to adapt to survive. But his call was far from eagerly received.

Humboldt County was both paranoid about pot and hooked on marijuana dollars gained largely from illicit cultivation and distribution. As much as local officials tried to tout the region’s Humboldt Creamery, its grass-fed beef, or rich oyster beds, everyone knew what kept the county afloat. A study by a local banker, Jennifer Budwig, calculated that, judging from authorities’ 2010 marijuana plant seizures, local marijuana growers raked in $1 billion in gross annual revenues. Of that, $415 million was spent in area businesses, accounting for one-fourth of the economy in the county of 135,000 residents. Budwig characterized her study as a conservative analysis based on an estimate that law enforcement was eradicating one-fourth of the marijuana crop. If the cops were getting only 10 percent, Budwig calculated, Humboldt’s gross annual marijuana revenues would be as high as $2.6 billion. To the south, the Ukiah Daily Journal and Willits News used her methodology to calculate that marijuana stoked the economy in Mendocino County with $675 million in direct local spending. In the county of 87,000 people and charming small towns tucked between golden hills and an enchanting coast, the estimate was more than double Mendocino’s combined income from tourism, timber, wine grapes and other farming, cattle ranching, and commercial fishing.

It all made Mendocino County sheriff Tom Allman yearn for the time when the local marijuana industry indeed consisted of a bunch of pot-growing hippies. Allman was raised in southern Humboldt, son of a second-grade-teacher mother and a liquor-salesman father. The former student body president at South Fork High School in Miranda, just north of the town of Garberville, had been friends with youths drawn into the weed culture. Back then, pot was still a whisper. People didn’t flaunt it. Now he was seeing young people driving loaded seventy-thousand-dollar pickup trucks, paid for in cash, and plunking down money on big-acreage lots. In 2001, voters in Mendocino approved Measure G, allowing anyone with a medical marijuana recommendation to grow twenty-five plants. Within a few years, Allman started encountering people in their twenties telling him they were growing for their personal medical needs as they tended massive outdoor gardens producing up to 7 pounds of weed per plant. The sheriff fumed as some guy would tell him he needed 175 pounds of pot for his bum shoulder. “Bullshit,” Allman would answer. He got used to taking “that red bullshit flag” out of his pocket and rhetorically throwing it down.

With purported medical pot growers exploiting Mendocino’s permissive twenty-five-plant-per-patient limit by compiling photocopied lists of sometimes hundreds of medical-marijuana patients to justify thousands of plants on some properties, a fed-up county supervisor, John McCowen, championed a new initiative to overturn liberal local growing rules. Approved by voters in 2008, Measure B put Mendocino County back on the state standard, employed in most California counties. That standard allowed a maximum of six mature plants per marijuana patient unless local governments approved higher levels. But Mendocino’s new limits didn’t stop the influx. By 2012, Allman was spending 30 percent of the sheriff’s department’s more than $23 million annual budget on marijuana cases. Pot growers took over private timberland and national forests. They fouled the environment, clear-cutting trees, diverting streams, and dumping fuel and pesticides.

Many people in Mendocino and elsewhere wanted to blame the worst of it on the Mexicans. For years, a California task force of federal and state drug agents and county sheriffs had eradicated millions of plants grown on public lands and in secluded California back country from the Central Valley to the Sierra Nevada and the coastal ranges. Many of the pot fields, often set up to supply cross-country drug trafficking by Mexican nationals, were tilled by illegal immigrants. They lived in encampments stocked by armed drug bosses with seasonal supplies of tortillas and beans, plus good-luck figurines of Jesus Malverde, a turn-of-the-century bandit from the Mexican state of Sinaloa who was revered as the patron saint for narcotics traffickers. In 2011, Allman spearheaded Operation Full Court Press, working with the Drug Enforcement Administration and sheriffs from Trinity, Tehama, Glenn, Colusa, and Lake Counties. The massive deployment destroyed 460,000 marijuana plants in the vast Mendocino National Forest. Officers seized over fifteen hundred pounds of processed pot and more than two dozen guns. One hundred fifty-two people were arrested. Thirteen percent were undocumented immigrants believed to be part of Mexican drug networks. Allman found the overwhelming remainder to be Caucasians from other states or elsewhere in California who simply figured there was no better place than the Mendocino forest to furtively grow their weed.

• • •

North coast marijuana growers melded in with seemingly legitimate forms of commerce. Living near the Mad River in the Humboldt County town of Blue Lake, David Winkle, a man in his fifties, appeared to be selling bait and tackle through a business he advertised on the Internet as Blue Lake Fishing Products. In a 2011 criminal complaint filed in the United States District Court in Rochester, U.S. drug agents depicted Winkle as a marijuana supplier known by drug dealers in New York as “Papa Winky.” The complaint alleged Winkle shipped off pallets marked as “fish” and containing fishing tackle and thirty to eighty pounds of marijuana per delivery. New York dealers allegedly sent back cash payments of up to sixty thousand dollars through the U.S. Postal Service, and, upon receipt, Papa Winky texted his best wishes: “All is good, everyone accounted for, good luck selling.”

Elsewhere in Humboldt, Jordan Pyhtila and Jessie Jeffries started out trafficking pot as teenagers in 1999 and went on to become land developers for the underground marijuana economy. The two young men, from Garberville and Rio Dell, used marijuana proceeds to fund their J & J Earthmoving construction company. They bought properties in several towns to launch other marijuana growers, taking a share of profits as they supplied plant clones and fertilizer and paid the pot laborers. By the time Humboldt deputies and U.S. drug agents raided them in 2007, Pyhtila and Jeffries were working with the Humboldt city of Rio Dell to develop a hundred-acre, sixty-house subdivision with five-hundred-thousand-dollar environmentally sustainable homes in a pristine setting near the Eel River. “Tragically, the conduct that brought him before the court was largely the product of a misguided youth growing up in a community that has a permissive attitude toward marijuana cultivation,” Pyhtila’s attorney, Ann Moorman, wrote the U.S. District Court before Pyhtila, twenty-nine, and Jeffries, twenty-eight, accepted plea deals in 2009 for six years each in federal prison.

Allman found the audacity of some growers astonishing. In 2008, the sheriff was called out as his officers, along with state and federal drug agents, raided a sprawling marijuana complex in Island Mountain in northern Mendocino. A suspect tried to leap off a ridge with a motorized hang glider and fifty thousand dollars in cash before aborting an escape that surely would have been fit for the movies. Officers found numerous greenhouses draped in black plastic, a light-deprivation technique to fool plants into premature budding to produce multiple yields. There were nearly sixty-eight hundred plants and eight hundred pounds of dried and trimmed marijuana buds.

“Holy shit, eight hundred pounds,” the sheriff said, unable to suppress his grin has he greeted the chief grower following his abandoned flight. “What are you going to do with eight hundred pounds?”

“I don’t know,” the grower responded. “I guess my gardening plan was better than my business plan.”

In five years, Allman had five unsolved homicides at or near marijuana gardens, including the killing of a man in a home invasion and a double murder near the rural Mendocino town of Covelo. In Humboldt in 2010, a local marijuana farmer, Mikal Xylon Wilde, was arrested on charges of shooting and killing one of his gardeners and seriously wounding another in a pay dispute. With the support of District Attorney Gallegos, U.S. prosecutors in San Francisco took the extraordinary step of filing a federal count of murder during the commission of a narcotics crime. Gallegos commended the government for its “commitment to the safety and security of the people of Humboldt County.”

Otherwise, Gallegos, who prosecuted one thousand marijuana cases, strongly believed that marijuana enforcement needed to be triaged. He knew Humboldt County grew up on pot. He didn’t like the idea of criminalizing people, from ranchers to small business owners, “who are otherwise good, law-abiding citizens.” So Gallegos published prosecution guidelines declaring he would bring charges only in cases involving more than three pounds of processed marijuana or exceeding one hundred square feet of grow space or ninety-nine plants. While the Humboldt district attorney pledged to target big traffickers, he also railed about the failures of marijuana prohibition. He publicly endorsed legalizing pot beyond medical use.

To Allman, marijuana was the great social experiment and, in Mendocino County, it was failing. The sheriff was fed up with environmental destruction by illicit cultivators trespassing on private property or invading public lands for commercial-scale cultivation. He was also exasperated with deputies having to waste hours figuring out if somebody with twenty plants was operating legally or not under California medical marijuana laws. He wanted to free his officers to go after the worst offenders, people who imperiled the security and quality of life in his county. To do that, Allman set out to build relationships with marijuana growers willing to openly work with the cops.

In Mendocino, there were few pot growers more open than Matt Cohen, a philosophy major from the University of Colorado who dropped out to become an advocate for medical marijuana in California. Cohen had established his credentials in the movement in Oakland, where he bought groceries and grew free pot for Angel Raich, a medical cannabis user severely ill with a brain tumor and seizures. Cohen was one of two “John Doe” caregivers in an unsuccessful case Raich brought to the United States Supreme Court challenging the federal government’s authority to prosecute medical marijuana in California. In Mendocino County, Cohen formed Northstone Organics. He signed up registered medical marijuana patients from the San Francisco Bay Area and other regions for what he billed as a legal California nonprofit collective and delivery service. It promised “premium, sun-grown medical cannabis—delivered discreetly to your door.”

Thirty-two years old, lean, with a ponytail, Cohen made himself known to Allman and became a familiar presence before the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors, which in 2010 started work on a plan to regulate medical growers. Allman stayed out of the direct negotiations because pot people tended to get nervous when he showed up. Cohen, a newcomer, embraced Mendocino’s marijuana traditions. He formed a local trade association called MendoGrown, promoting environmentally sustainable cannabis. Amid the oak woodlands of Mendocino’s Redwood Valley, visitors found Cohen’s outdoor marijuana farm just beyond a gate marked with the sign “Member, Mendocino County Farm Bureau.” Cohen might have gotten a physician’s recommendation to use medical marijuana for back pain, sleeplessness, and general anxiety, but he was comfortable with the media, poised with politicians, and effective in helping to draw anxious marijuana growers out of the woods to reach an unprecedented accord with the county.

In April 2010, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors approved local Ordinance 9.31. It established California’s first-ever licensing program for medical cultivators and imposed fees in an unprecedented compliance program for pot growing. Ordinance 9.31 set a limit of twenty-five marijuana plants per Mendocino parcel no matter how many growers lived or operated there. But it allowed up to ninety-nine plants for people on more than ten acres who provided verification of supplying licensed marijuana dispensaries or medical users who had physician recommendations. Cohen was one of just seventeen growers who signed up for the ninety-nine-plant regimen the first year. He used his newly minted county permit to promote Northstone Organics as “the one & only licensed, farm direct delivery service in California.” The second year, ninety-four growers signed up for the program, in which the sheriff charged $50 per plant to affix numbered zip ties verifying the plant count. Other licensing fees paid for garden inspections by a Mendocino sergeant and independent monitors. Under Ordinance 9.31, medical growers with twenty-five plants or fewer who wanted guarantees of local certification and protection from arrest could get zip ties attached to plants for $25 each. Through 2011, forty thousand marijuana plants in Mendocino were tagged under the county compliance program. Ordinance 9.31 generated $630,000 in income for the sheriff’s department. It allowed Allman to stave off budget cuts and reduce planned county deputy layoffs, from eleven layoffs to five.

Throughout the process, Allman developed a deep trust in Matt Cohen, a model grower under the program. After two of Cohen’s delivery drivers were busted with marijuana while traveling through neighboring Sonoma County, Allman’s sergeant in charge of 9.31 program-compliance inspections and a Mendocino County supervisor showed up in court to testify to the integrity of Cohen and Northstone Organics. The prosecutor in Sonoma was furious. Agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration office in San Francisco took notice.

• • •

With the advent of locally regulated medical-marijuana-growing, a brave new world of weed dawned in Mendocino County. On U.S. 101, the Redwood Highway, north of the town of Laytonville and just beyond the billboard depicting a hovering alien spacecraft, longtime marijuana grower Tim Blake had lived through the past and now preferred the future. Blake ran Area 101, a 150-acre retreat with a whole foods kitchen serving dishes free of gluten and refined sugars and a dispensary—the Mendocino Farmers Collective—featuring only outdoor, organic cannabis.

Blake had once served five and a half months in the county jail in Santa Cruz on pot charges. In Mendocino, he had once thrived as a black market cultivator. Years after going legit, he admitted he used to run U-Haul deliveries of pot into California’s Central Valley. Back then, the helicopter flyovers and surging raids by DEA agents had the reverse effect of enriching pot growers who didn’t get caught. The raids helped stabilize the price of weed in the Emerald Triangle at five thousand dollars a pound. But the stress of living as a marijuana outlaw became overwhelming for Blake. After a series of life-changing events, he quit the illegal trade, went from “being a kingpin to a no pin,” and became a champion for legal, ecologically pure marijuana.

Before the DEA copters finally spooked him out for good, Blake had once gone to retrieve barrels of weed for a friend who was going to jail. The pot had mold in it called aspergillus, which can breed in improperly dried marijuana. It made Blake sick. He could barely stomach a piece of toast in the morning before falling back asleep “so the mold could eat the food.” He also endured multiple battles with cancer. He rubbed cannabis oil into his skin to heal cancer-related sores. He reflected on his odyssey. He worked on a memoir he called “Dancing with the Feds: The Spiritual Adventures and Mishaps of the Marijuana Man.” Eventually, licensed as a medical marijuana cultivator under Mendocino Ordinance 9.31, Blake set out to be the champion in restoring a “mystical place of clean cannabis.”

Starting in 2003, Blake’s Area 101 hosted the Emerald Cup, his celebration of the Emerald Triangle’s outdoor marijuana traditions. With live music, joint-rolling contests, and “Guess the Old-School Strains” contests, the Emerald Cup became Mendocino’s state fair of cannabis. For three weeks beforehand, Blake and other selected judges sampled the region’s finest outdoor-grown marijuana. They graded the texture of the buds, discerning the tastes, aromas, and medicinal effects. In 2010, an anonymous Mendocino grower’s Sour Best Shit Ever—a cross-breed of Old School Laotian and Sage strains—won the coveted prize of best marijuana cultivar of the year. A twenty-four-year-old grower known as T-Beezle, the son of a former timber worker, took home top prize—and a signature edition bong—in the cannabis-concentrate category for his Pure Blueberry Hash. Inevitably, the winners also earned something else—the ability to sell their organic products as premium selections in California medical marijuana dispensaries.

At the Emerald Cup, amid its happily stoned throng, Blake disseminated a political, environmental, and marketing message. To Blake, the growth of the medical cannabis market and the proliferation of indoor growing were perilous for Mendocino outdoor cultivators. Their once legendary Northern Lights and Super Skunk marijuana strains had trouble competing with indoor OG Kushes and Purple Urkles, amped with maximum psychoactive THC in climate-controlled growing rooms. To Blake, indoor growing, with its heavy electrical use and carbon footprint, was wrongheaded. He called on outdoor growers to honor their art, to thrive, to protect the planet. For too long, cultivators had planted in the shade to avoid detection by DEA helicopters. Now it was time to bring pot out of the shadows, to let its potency thrive during nine months of outdoor growing under the Mendocino sun. It was time to compete. “We have to get out of the denial,” Blake argued at a public forum. “We are a cannabis place. There is no fishing or logging. We have to take our birthright and embrace the future, or it’s going to bury us.”

But by 2010, there was a new threat, a marijuana legalization effort backed by Richard Lee and Jeff Jones in Oakland. The push to pass Proposition 19, and the inspired efforts in Oakland to authorize warehouse marijuana farms for the medical cannabis market—and eventual legalization for adult recreational use—sent shivers through the Emerald Triangle. People feared an emerging Oakland legal cannabis cartel. Throughout the Emerald Triangle, growers increased their yields, pushing more products onto the market in fear of Proposition 19. Pot prices, already affected by the proliferation of medical cultivation across California, dropped below thirty-five hundred dollars a pound for indoor-grown marijuana and twenty-five hundred dollars for outdoor and continued falling. People feared a meltdown, with the black market for weed collapsing and the price per pound flatlining in the blinding light of transparent capitalism. Some Humboldt County residents replaced their anti-DEA bumper stickers—“U.S. Out of Humboldt”—with a new one: “Save Humboldt County—Keep Pot Illegal.”

Even Gasparas, the cannabis adventurer from suburban Chicago, worried over the changing marijuana economy and prospects of broader legalization. Gasparas had etched the history of his journey into his forearm with an abstract, tribal-patterned tattoo depicting a woman giving birth to a tree of life that leafed with cannabis. The medical marijuana economy in California, and his dispensary in Arcata, had crowned his passage. Gasparas was part of the cannabis establishment now. He lived north of town in an upscale subdivision with a panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean. His once disapproving mom worked in his dispensary. Suddenly, he worried about being pushed out of business by Proposition 19. Gasparas crunched the numbers. He didn’t see himself surviving in a market extending beyond medicinal use. He didn’t understand the need for change. With medical marijuana, he insisted, “it’s already legal.”