Weed Land. Peter Hecht
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