Charlie Harris’ book Mendo explores Mendocino County’s pot boom and bust

Quipped my next-door neighbor when I pointed out that his eight-year-son shooting BBs at the deer that browsed through our yards was against the law, “Well, we never cared much about the law now, did we?”

By “we,” he meant boomers, the rat-in-the-snake configuration of those born between 1946 and 1964. He had a point.

The rise and fall of Mendocino County’s marijuana heyday can be tracked to an inflection point between the counterculture embraced by boomers, national law-and-order politics, local efforts to get in on the windfall, and Wall Street.

All this is traced in fascinating detail in Charlie Harris’ new book, Mendo: How an Unlikely Group of Rebels Turned Cannabis into California’s Cash Crop. A history of the region from the mid-‘60s on, the book is replete with portraits of Mendo growers and luminaries, but it is really about the intersection of money and politics. And it is all the more cogent since Mendocino County, unlike any other place in California, embraces a libertarian bent that appeals to counterculture warriors, conservative ranchers—and county law enforcement.

An Oxford-educated historian who specializes in the study of capitalism, Harris lives in Spain and grew up in the UK. So how did he stumble upon Mendocino County? “In 2013, I was hitchhiking up to Vancouver,” he explained. He was picked up somewhere in Marin County, and by the time they reached Gualala, Harris found himself engaged as a seasonal trimmer, manicuring buds for sale. He returned several times for that seasonal work and found himself fascinated with the culture and how the business operated. “I asked way too many questions for a trimmer,” he said.

When he returned to Oxford for a graduate degree, the idea of writing about Mendocino County kept intruding. In 2016, he began researching. Ten years later, after hours of interviews and repeated visits, he’s got a book—and it’s a read that will appeal to anyone who appreciates a bird’s-eye view of how social norms can be overturned while economic realities still hold fast.

Harris traces how the federal government’s war on drugs served a nefarious purpose: Richard Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman said in 1994 that the “War on Drugs” was engineered to associate the antiwar movement with marijuana and black people with heroin, criminalizing both groups and giving law enforcement an excuse to arrest leaders and disrupt communities.

Meanwhile, in Northern California, those who had a romantic association with living simply on the land—and who could afford to do so, however humbly—headed up to Mendocino County, where cheap land, especially in the inland hills and valleys, awaited eager pioneers. Some brought their drug of choice, Mexican marijuana, with them.

At that time, marijuana was a bundle of twigs, seeds and a bit of dusty flower, about as far from the ‘90s and early aughts manicured buds as you could get. Some of those seeds found their way into the ground, and voila—a seed planted in the right conditions in March could turn into a ten-foot plant in September.

Meanwhile, the war on drugs created both a vast appetite for same as well as a depressed supply. That war, of course, washed into what, by the early ‘80s, had become known as the Emerald Triangle: Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity counties. Harris describes how CAMP, the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, offered jobs in the woods to law enforcement professionals from 27 agencies, many from Southern California. Using spy planes, helicopters and rappelling officers, the group terrorized residents, chopped up water lines, shot people’s dogs, and dragged out thousands of plants.

What this accomplished, predictably, was better camouflage for plants: trellising plants in dense manzanita, for example, buried water lines, growers hiking through brush to reach isolated plants—no sea of green here. Writes Harris: “Their raids hampered supply, very slightly, driving up prices. Perhaps just as importantly, they were still waging an aggressive media campaign about how good California pot was.”

There were other stabs at enforcement over the years, including the mysterious black helicopters over Laytonville and Willits, with unidentified masked men plummeting to the ground to handcuff grandmothers and confiscating cash and other valuables. But then came Prop 215, the Compassionate Use Act, and things got more complicated. Writes Harris: “In the mid-nineties, just before Prop 215, pot prices hit an all-time high. A pound went for around $5,000… Demand was high, but supply exploded. Prices immediately started to slip.”

But 215 also gave county government latitude to be as libertarian as it thought it could get away with. Sheriff Tony Craver advocated decriminalizing marijuana, and so did new District Attorney Norm Vroman, Vroman, writes Harris, “was the architect of the first medical marijuana permit program in the United States. It had no legal framework whatsoever, but that didn’t matter. It was signed by the district attorney, which seemed legal enough to him and everybody else. This became the defining attitude of Mendocino County.”

After a spell came Sheriff Tom Allman’s zip tie program, with bags of 25 zip ties selling for $25 a tie. Lots of people trotted in with their $625 in cash, handed over directly to the sheriff’s department. The idea was that plants sporting that year’s zip tie would not be bothered by law enforcement; the county also intimated that the zip tie program could pay for officers to eradicate environmentally harmful grows on public lands. Save your plants, save the forest, and eliminate the competition!

And then eventually came legalization, but by then the prices had already fallen precipitously, and it would only get much worse. Harris writes about how Flow Kana and its venture capital investors tried to squash the beginnings of farmers’ coops that could have aided the small legacy growers. Meanwhile the county itself had created a quagmire of shifting regulations and costs that mystified and infuriated nearly everyone who attempted to play by the new rules.

Harris portrays public figures: David Eyster (who would not go on record for the book, though he did for an earlier interview), Tom Allman (said Harris, “One of the most charismatic men I’ve ever met in my life—if there was a president of Mendocino County, it was Tom Allman”), Homer Thurston, Sherry Glaser, Tim Blake, many others. The many growers — with one multi-generation family followed in particular — use fictitious names, to protect their privacy and identities.

Harris said that growers were reticent and tight-lipped, but that once they got to talking, often about traumatic memories of raids and weeks spent in dread that a year’s crop could be lost, those he interviewed said it was therapeutic to tell their stories. “Those stories risk disappearing with the people,” Harris said. “It is so important to me that they felt represented.”

Harris sees the years of trust among growers and the sharing of knowledge of breeding, strains, and growing methods as a special time. “It was culturally coherent and cohesive,” he said. “Now there has been a sort of Flow Kana-fication of the pot industry. There is now such an emphasis on THC content. Not a single person I know wants weed to be stronger. It’s like if you had a winery and all you could produce is 80 proof wine.”

He describes that time as anti-monopoly and anti-trust. “It was a great way of making sure that everyone got a piece of the pie,” he said, thinking of all the businesses and services that benefited from the boom. “It kept a middle class alive in Mendocino County long past the time that the middle class collapsed elsewhere. And now… it’s tough how much of [what happened] applies to the rest of America. Something propped up by venture capital really disrupts something that could have been sustainable.”

My neighbor with the BB-shooting son was not looking at the whole picture: he may not care about the law, but the law, in Sacramento and in Washington, D.C., cares about him. It turns out the law and economics impact people on Spy Rock and Bell Springs, no matter how far back into the woods you try to go.