Weed Land. Peter Hecht
marijuana cultivation,” Pyhtila’s attorney, Ann Moorman, wrote the U.S. District Court before Pyhtila, twenty-nine, and Jeffries, twenty-eight, accepted plea deals in 2009 for six years each in federal prison.
Allman found the audacity of some growers astonishing. In 2008, the sheriff was called out as his officers, along with state and federal drug agents, raided a sprawling marijuana complex in Island Mountain in northern Mendocino. A suspect tried to leap off a ridge with a motorized hang glider and fifty thousand dollars in cash before aborting an escape that surely would have been fit for the movies. Officers found numerous greenhouses draped in black plastic, a light-deprivation technique to fool plants into premature budding to produce multiple yields. There were nearly sixty-eight hundred plants and eight hundred pounds of dried and trimmed marijuana buds.
“Holy shit, eight hundred pounds,” the sheriff said, unable to suppress his grin has he greeted the chief grower following his abandoned flight. “What are you going to do with eight hundred pounds?”
“I don’t know,” the grower responded. “I guess my gardening plan was better than my business plan.”
In five years, Allman had five unsolved homicides at or near marijuana gardens, including the killing of a man in a home invasion and a double murder near the rural Mendocino town of Covelo. In Humboldt in 2010, a local marijuana farmer, Mikal Xylon Wilde, was arrested on charges of shooting and killing one of his gardeners and seriously wounding another in a pay dispute. With the support of District Attorney Gallegos, U.S. prosecutors in San Francisco took the extraordinary step of filing a federal count of murder during the commission of a narcotics crime. Gallegos commended the government for its “commitment to the safety and security of the people of Humboldt County.”
Otherwise, Gallegos, who prosecuted one thousand marijuana cases, strongly believed that marijuana enforcement needed to be triaged. He knew Humboldt County grew up on pot. He didn’t like the idea of criminalizing people, from ranchers to small business owners, “who are otherwise good, law-abiding citizens.” So Gallegos published prosecution guidelines declaring he would bring charges only in cases involving more than three pounds of processed marijuana or exceeding one hundred square feet of grow space or ninety-nine plants. While the Humboldt district attorney pledged to target big traffickers, he also railed about the failures of marijuana prohibition. He publicly endorsed legalizing pot beyond medical use.
To Allman, marijuana was the great social experiment and, in Mendocino County, it was failing. The sheriff was fed up with environmental destruction by illicit cultivators trespassing on private property or invading public lands for commercial-scale cultivation. He was also exasperated with deputies having to waste hours figuring out if somebody with twenty plants was operating legally or not under California medical marijuana laws. He wanted to free his officers to go after the worst offenders, people who imperiled the security and quality of life in his county. To do that, Allman set out to build relationships with marijuana growers willing to openly work with the cops.
In Mendocino, there were few pot growers more open than Matt Cohen, a philosophy major from the University of Colorado who dropped out to become an advocate for medical marijuana in California. Cohen had established his credentials in the movement in Oakland, where he bought groceries and grew free pot for Angel Raich, a medical cannabis user severely ill with a brain tumor and seizures. Cohen was one of two “John Doe” caregivers in an unsuccessful case Raich brought to the United States Supreme Court challenging the federal government’s authority to prosecute medical marijuana in California. In Mendocino County, Cohen formed Northstone Organics. He signed up registered medical marijuana patients from the San Francisco Bay Area and other regions for what he billed as a legal California nonprofit collective and delivery service. It promised “premium, sun-grown medical cannabis—delivered discreetly to your door.”
Thirty-two years old, lean, with a ponytail, Cohen made himself known to Allman and became a familiar presence before the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors, which in 2010 started work on a plan to regulate medical growers. Allman stayed out of the direct negotiations because pot people tended to get nervous when he showed up. Cohen, a newcomer, embraced Mendocino’s marijuana traditions. He formed a local trade association called MendoGrown, promoting environmentally sustainable cannabis. Amid the oak woodlands of Mendocino’s Redwood Valley, visitors found Cohen’s outdoor marijuana farm just beyond a gate marked with the sign “Member, Mendocino County Farm Bureau.” Cohen might have gotten a physician’s recommendation to use medical marijuana for back pain, sleeplessness, and general anxiety, but he was comfortable with the media, poised with politicians, and effective in helping to draw anxious marijuana growers out of the woods to reach an unprecedented accord with the county.
In April 2010, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors approved local Ordinance 9.31. It established California’s first-ever licensing program for medical cultivators and imposed fees in an unprecedented compliance program for pot growing. Ordinance 9.31 set a limit of twenty-five marijuana plants per Mendocino parcel no matter how many growers lived or operated there. But it allowed up to ninety-nine plants for people on more than ten acres who provided verification of supplying licensed marijuana dispensaries or medical users who had physician recommendations. Cohen was one of just seventeen growers who signed up for the ninety-nine-plant regimen the first year. He used his newly minted county permit to promote Northstone Organics as “the one & only licensed, farm direct delivery service in California.” The second year, ninety-four growers signed up for the program, in which the sheriff charged $50 per plant to affix numbered zip ties verifying the plant count. Other licensing fees paid for garden inspections by a Mendocino sergeant and independent monitors. Under Ordinance 9.31, medical growers with twenty-five plants or fewer who wanted guarantees of local certification and protection from arrest could get zip ties attached to plants for $25 each. Through 2011, forty thousand marijuana plants in Mendocino were tagged under the county compliance program. Ordinance 9.31 generated $630,000 in income for the sheriff’s department. It allowed Allman to stave off budget cuts and reduce planned county deputy layoffs, from eleven layoffs to five.
Throughout the process, Allman developed a deep trust in Matt Cohen, a model grower under the program. After two of Cohen’s delivery drivers were busted with marijuana while traveling through neighboring Sonoma County, Allman’s sergeant in charge of 9.31 program-compliance inspections and a Mendocino County supervisor showed up in court to testify to the integrity of Cohen and Northstone Organics. The prosecutor in Sonoma was furious. Agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration office in San Francisco took notice.
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With the advent of locally regulated medical-marijuana-growing, a brave new world of weed dawned in Mendocino County. On U.S. 101, the Redwood Highway, north of the town of Laytonville and just beyond the billboard depicting a hovering alien spacecraft, longtime marijuana grower Tim Blake had lived through the past and now preferred the future. Blake ran Area 101, a 150-acre retreat with a whole foods kitchen serving dishes free of gluten and refined sugars and a dispensary—the Mendocino Farmers Collective—featuring only outdoor, organic cannabis.
Blake had once served five and a half months in the county jail in Santa Cruz on pot charges. In Mendocino, he had once thrived as a black market cultivator. Years after going legit, he admitted he used to run U-Haul deliveries of pot into California’s Central Valley. Back then, the helicopter flyovers and surging raids by DEA agents had the reverse effect of enriching pot growers who didn’t get caught. The raids helped stabilize the price of weed in the Emerald Triangle at five thousand dollars a pound. But the stress of living as a marijuana outlaw became overwhelming for Blake. After a series of life-changing events, he quit the illegal trade, went from “being a kingpin to a no pin,” and became a champion for legal, ecologically pure marijuana.
Before the DEA copters finally spooked him out for good, Blake had once gone to retrieve barrels of weed for a friend who was going to jail. The pot had mold in it called aspergillus, which can breed in improperly dried marijuana. It made Blake sick. He could barely stomach a piece of toast in the morning before falling back asleep “so the mold could eat the food.” He also endured multiple battles with cancer. He rubbed cannabis oil into his skin to heal cancer-related sores. He reflected on his odyssey. He worked on a memoir he called “Dancing with