When the ’60s counterculture era ended, whenever it did—Altamont? Nixon’s resignation? the fall of Saigon?—a lot of its participants went looking for an escape hatch. Some inevitably dissolved into corporate America; others kept up the fight in mainstream politics. And many others found Mendocino County, a rural haven in Northern California defined by towering redwoods on the fog-bound coast and rough-and-tumble wilderness farther inland. As Charlie Harris writes in Mendo, his impressive, wide-ranging history of the region, the place was a magnet for young back-to-the-landers subsidized by well-off parents. “An awful lot of parents helped finance their kids’ move to the country, because a lot of them were frankly relieved to get their kids out of Haight-Ashbury,” he writes.
Prior to the ’70s, Mendocino’s largest economic engine was logging. (It was also an outpost for Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple.) But the environment was well suited for cannabis—never “marijuana,” a term used by racist narcs to malign pot as a Mexican scourge—and by the end of the “Me” Decade, pot had evolved from the center of a small-time barter economy to a more defining, if clandestine, element of Mendo life. As Harris characterizes it, the growth of the pot economy set the hippies against the logging community, as well as the Indigenous community, which would find itself marginalized yet again. But as corporatization and union-busting brutalized local loggers, pot growers gained economic—and by extension political—power.
“The hippies were now literally rewriting state law,” Harris writes, as homesteaders won the right to build their own houses in the mid-’70s. But that was just the start: Mendocino County became the crucible for debates over the ensuing decades about how and when users and growers should be prosecuted, how and when cannabis qualified as medicine, and how, once legalized, it should be taxed. Soon enough, federal agencies felt compelled to intervene. In 1983, a combined 27 state and federal authorities formed the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP), which trained law-enforcement officers in the particulars of the Mendo pot economy and set them loose on the hippies, leading to what one observer called “the Vietnamization of Mendocino County.” Which is to say it unified the growers around a cause, not to mention created a scarcity that helped spike pot prices.
Harris is a writer with Oxford University’s Global History of Capitalism Project, which aims to examine the roots of global trade and corporate structures. He’s done a fine job of demystifying economic trends here, discussing Mendocino’s evolution with a keen eye toward not just economics but sociology, politics, and policing as well. He has a journalist’s appreciation for the public record and how the county benefited from weed-tax schemes, down to the last dollar. (In 2014, they brought $1,791,324 to Mendo’s public coffers.) But unlike a lot of investigative reporters, he grasps that dollar figures are only a function of what happens because of—and to—people, and a key strength of Mendo is Harris’s weaving of individual stories within the macroeconomic ones.
Some of these individuals are famous, like Judi Bari, the Earth First! activist who was paralyzed in a 1990 car bombing. Some are semifamous, like Larry Livermore, a local who, in the 1990s, was a part of zine and punk culture; he cofounded Lookout! Records, Green Day’s first label (subsidized early on by pot sales, natch). Later, as pot growers moved indoors and began to corporatize, he observed how “fossil fuel pot”—grows powered by generators—not only risked wildfires but also eroded the county’s feel-good culture. By the 21st century, there was a lot of weed, but little that resembled a unified cannabis culture.
And today, the same cannabis economy that once thrived doesn’t exist. Legalization got rid of the CAMPers, but prices nosedived as production expanded. By 2016, Harris writes, “California grew more pot than it consumed, by a factor of about five.” One of Harris’s subjects, Shaun, is a third-generation grower; his father, Rocket, recruited him to help with the business, but a down market and the compliance costs that came with legalization meant that, ironically, the only way to make a profit was to serve the black market.
Journalist John McPhee understands that a story about an orange grove or a tidal basin or a port is a story about humanity in microcosm—everything about survival touches how we put land to use. In that regard, Mendo is an admirably McPhee-vian book, as much about America as a whole as it is about one particular place. Harris is comfortable calling out the Mendo mendacity of the weed wars’ worst actors, especially the authorities that supported the for-profit prison system. But he also recognizes that Mendo’s diversity created a variety of stakeholders, and he delivers crystalline depictions of their varied motivations.
It’s a tough task, because those motivations are ever-shifting. With the pot economy in decline, Harris writes, “Mendo is now most valuable as a simulacrum of itself,” attracting tourists for the old hippie culture. But it has also drawn tech bros snatching up the landscape (last year, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly bought a more-than-100-acre parcel there) and a growing Latino community that was once a pot-culture scapegoat. As the earth grows hotter, Harris notes, coastal Mendo will become a “climate haven” because, as dire as predictions for its future are, it is still considered less vulnerable than adjacent metro areas in Northern California. It will have to confront wildfires, money, leadership, and what it means to be a community. It will, like most American communities, define itself again and again.•
MENDO: HOW AN UNLIKELY GROUP OF REBELS TURNED CANNABIS INTO CALIFORNIA'S CASH CROP, BY CHARLIE HARRIS
MENDO: HOW AN UNLIKELY GROUP OF REBELS TURNED CANNABIS INTO CALIFORNIA'S CASH CROP, BY CHARLIE HARRIS
Mark Athitakis is the author of The New Midwest (Belt Publishing), a critical study of contemporary fiction set in the region. He lives in Arizona.
