Mendo: How an Unlikely Group of Rebels Turned Cannabis into California’s Cash Crop

Oxford University researcher Harris debuts with a freewheeling history of the grassroots marijuana industry in California’s rural Mendocino County. Marijuana first arrived in the “vast, remote, rugged” county in the late 1960s with a cadre of idealistic hippies who decamped from San Francisco. Part of the back-to-the-land movement, these mostly white, middle-class newcomers purchased cheap land that had no electricity or running water but the ideal conditions for growing pot. Harris follows the rapid transformation of the Mendocino marijuana trade, from personal plots and a local barter economy to, by the late 1970s, a lucrative industry illicitly expanding deep into the forest. Harris also traces the trade’s impact on the region’s preexisting community—including skeptical rednecks, unfairly overpoliced Native Americans, and surprisingly permissive, libertarian-leaning local law enforcement—as well as the hard-lined federal anti-drug crackdowns of the 1980s. The latter makes for riveting reading as Harris vividly spotlights both the militarized overkill of Reagan-era raids, which used tactics seemingly derived from the Vietnam War (“Camouflaged National Guard members buzzed the forests in Hueys, assault rifles slung and ready”) and the growers’ clever countermeasures, including booby traps. Throughout, he highlights captivatingly eccentric local characters—one grower claimed he had “contact with extraterrestrial visitors eleven times”—as well changes brought about by legalization. It makes for a raucous look at the renegades that built the Emerald Triangle. (June)