Mendocino County, Calif., Coming Down Hard Off 40-Year High as U.S. Pot Capital

FORT BRAGG, Calif.

The steel-haired old hippies who grow the finest marijuana in the world began taking over Mendocino County four decades ago.

"Going back to the '60s, early '70s in Mendocino County, land was cheap," said Tony Craver, twice elected sheriff, now retired. "Thirty-five hundred square miles, only three population centers, very little law enforcement. . . . The hippies, if you will, moved in and started growing pot. The hippies became the establishment."

Democratic government serves at the consent of the governed; in this jurisdiction, enforcement of marijuana laws would be lax at best. A "grow" became an accepted component of the homesteads established by the back-to-the-land transplants who made their way across the Golden Gate Bridge, past the vineyards of Sonoma and into the woods. At Area 101, a club named for the highway lined with billboards for hydroponics and fertilizer, December brings the Emerald Cup, a public competition for the "best bud" in the county, if not the world.

"It's so a part of Mendocino County," said K.C. Meadows, managing editor of the Ukiah Daily Journal. "There are fairly large businesses in this town that got their start with marijuana money. And that's okay with people."

How, then, to explain what happened to arrests here last year? Pot busts up 60 percent.

And what could account for the vote to roll back the nation's first law ordering police to make enforcement of marijuana laws their very lowest priority?

A paradox indeed: The clampdown was set in motion by the entire state of California barreling down the path Mendocino blazed. In a Rube Goldberg sequence of cause and effect, growing acceptance of marijuana elsewhere in the Golden State unleashed a confluence of demand, tolerance and legal ambiguity rooted in political cowardice.

The result set in motion forces that seriously harshed the mellow here and brought the "war on drugs" to the one place in America it had never really reached.

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Pebbles Trippet arrived in Mendocino in 1970, escaping the drug laws of New York state. "California beckoned," said Trippet, an activist, columnist and grower who has been heard to ask, "Can I pay you in bud?"

The year she arrived, Congress passed the Controlled Substance Act, which ranked all drugs by capacity for harm. Marijuana landed alongside PCP and heroin on "Schedule 1," a ranking even the establishment found reason to revisit just two years later. A commission appointed by President Richard Nixon recommended lightening up.