POT IS BURNING ISSUE ON MENDOCINO BALLOT

Mendocino County - Marijuana is so ubiquitous here that everyone,
from schoolteachers to kids, can tell you when a sinsemilla bud is
ripe. From late summer to fall, the county reeks with the skunk-like
stench of ready-to-harvest weed. The annual $1.5 billion pot crop
constitutes two-thirds of Mendocino County's entire economy.

"You tell people from other parts of the country that folks grow pot
all over town, and they think this is just a freak show here," said
Ross Liberty, who owns a welding shop in Ukiah. "They're not far off."

Earlier this year, Liberty and others who used to be benign about the
issue decided enough was enough. They put Measure B on Tuesday's
ballot to repeal the nation's most liberal rules for growing pot,
which for eight years have allowed anyone to grow up to 25 plants for
personal use. If Measure B is approved by a majority vote, the
per-person limit will revert to the statewide limit of six plants.

But then there's the other side.

Opponents of Measure B call it a meat-ax approach to an emotionally
volatile issue and say that going after the weed in Mendocino's
backyards and spare rooms is wrongheaded at best, cruel at worst.
What is really needed, they argue, is a better effort to eradicate
large-scale plantations that are hidden in the heavily forested
mountains and guarded by thugs toting assault rifles.

The forces against Measure B are led by an ex-congressman's daughter
who was busted and later cleared for growing a medical pot garden.

"We need to harness this gigantic industry, not try to kill it," said
Laura Hamburg, whose arrest last fall so infuriated her that she
decided to head up the anti-B push. "There's this caricature about
this county that we're all hippies sitting around smoking joints, but
that's the last thing from reality. Medical users truly need this plant."

The homegrown weed in most of those yards and rooms is medicine to be
used by those who grow it, Hamburg said, or sold to the 400 medicinal
marijuana clinics in San Francisco, Berkeley and the rest of the
state. These grow-farms are not the problem, she insisted - flashy
out-of-towners are.

Problems With Small Farms

But that's a key assertion with which Measure B advocates vehemently
disagree. And to illustrate how bad they think neighborhood pot farms
have become, they point to a 2004 incident in Ukiah.

That's when a would-be robber leaped the fence of Larry Puterbaugh's
backyard and shot and wounded his neighbor, Memo Parker. The man was
trying to steal from Parker's pot farm, police said. Puterbaugh had
already complained for years about the stench from the hundreds of
pot plants over his back fence - but even after the shooting, police
did nothing about it. Parker had doctor-signed cards authorizing
medicinal growth on the farm.

Parker later pleaded no contest to cultivating too many plants in a
separate case. But in 2004, all Puterbaugh could do was fume.

"That's when I began thinking we have to do something," Puterbaugh
said. "Why should we be scared in our own neighborhoods, in a quiet
town like this?

Measure B backers date the genesis of their troubles to 2000, when 58
percent of the county's voters passed Measure G, which allowed anyone
to grow as many as 25 marijuana plants for personal use - far
exceeding the state guideline of six plants per person for medicinal use only.

The "personal use" reference, in practice, has meant growing for
medical use - but the kicker for critics was that each lot of 25
plants required only a doctor-signed permission card saying the
grower would use the pot or that the grower was cultivating it for
another patient. Some houses began displaying as many as 12 cards,
leading to complaints that the new rule was allowing people to grow
commercially for cash, not medicine.

"It's like we kicked the door open and said to the rest of the
nation, 'Come on in and grow pot!' " said Mike Sweeney, an
environmental activist who is helping direct the Measure B campaign.
"Now, what we want to do is slam that door shut. We want people
around the country to know that Mendocino has changed its ways."

One who answered Mendocino's siren call is Ukiah Setiva Morrison.
After hearing in North Carolina about the area's legendary pot
leniency, he changed his name from Ronald Matthews and, in 2005,
moved to Ukiah to run a short-lived church called the Hemp Plus Ministry.

"I really believe that cannabis isn't bad for you - stupidity is
bad," he said, standing in his garden of 11 outdoor plants in Redwood
Valley. Now he is running for county supervisor.

Measure B's proponents and opponents agree on one thing: the
necessity for a prohibition on large pot-farming operations, some of
which sport as many as 500 plants, no matter where they are.

But as for crimping everything back to a six-plant limit? A popular
local T-shirt speaks for Measure B opponents. "Let It Grow," it reads
below a jaunty pot-leaf drawing.

Hamburg points to her own 39 plants - which were ripped out by police
last fall - as an example. They were used as medicine for an
intestinal condition as well as for her cancer-survivor mother and
two others, and she had doctor-signed growing cards to justify the
garden - which the search warrant didn't note, an omission that led a
judge to throw out the case in March. It was a typical-size "grow"
for the county.

However, Hamburg's political profile was anything but typical, and
she thinks that's why she was targeted. Hamburg's father, former
Democratic Rep. Dan Hamburg, helped lead the 2000 campaign that
liberalized the county's pot laws, and she spearheaded the 2004 drive
that passed the nation's first local ban on growing genetically
altered food. Hamburg also worked as a reporter at The Chronicle in
1997 and 1998.

"I wasn't going to be 'the pot girl,' leading this campaign, but that
all changed when 11 deputies tore out my plants and locked me out of
my own house," she said. "Now I just want to make sure that never
happens to anyone else."

Push to Legalize Pot

Hamburg and other Measure B opponents say that instead of limiting
pot, Mendocino should be a beacon for the decades-old movement to
legalize the $3,000-a-pound weed. The county's liberal guidelines are
just that - guidelines tacitly respected by federal officials who
still operate elsewhere under U.S. law banning pot of any quantity.
But if it were legalized instead of demonized, Hamburg's group
maintains, the economically struggling county could tax that $1.5
billion crop and become hugely prosperous.

"This whole fight is like Prohibition," said artist Catherine
Magruder, a cancer survivor who says smoking pot erased the pain of
chemotherapy. "You can't squish marijuana out of existence, it's too
late. So why not figure out, together, how to make it work for all of
us? And why not start that movement right here in Mendocino?"

Not surprisingly, considering how firmly pot culture is laced through
this county, even Measure B proponents - who include virtually every
elected or law enforcement official - say they support medicinal
marijuana. The Board of Supervisors and many of those pushing for the
rollback supported the lenient rules when they passed in 2000.

But now they say Hamburg and her backers - mainly patients,
small-time growers, doctors, the San Francisco office of the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Law (NORML) and a former
county prosecutor - are deluded.

"What really got to me was when I tried to hire some teenagers for my
shop, and they laughed at me," said Liberty. "They said they make so
much money harvesting pot for growers that they don't need my $8-an-hour jobs.

"Look, they can make $30 an hour, and I see them driving $50,000
tricked-up trucks all over town," he said. "I can't compete with
that. Nobody can. How in the world can we attract new business when
the workforce just wants to grow or harvest pot?"

There's more at stake here than just local regulations.

"This is the only battle going on in the entire country about
marijuana cultivation, and anyone who cares about this issue in the
United States is watching it very closely," said Dale Gieringer,
California director of NORML.

'Emerald Triangle'

Marijuana has been a significant presence in this county since the
1970s. Though grapes are the big legal crop here, Mendocino, Humboldt
and Trinity counties are fabled as the "Emerald Triangle," considered
by many to be the premier pot-growing region in the nation.

But at the same time, the area has an outdoorsy charm that draws not
just environmental progressives, but also families hunting the kind
of solitude that can be found only in a Rhode-Island-size county with
88,000 residents and four small incorporated communities. With the
collapse of the local timber industry, poverty here is slightly worse
than the state average, but the restored Victorians and tidy ranch
houses in most towns and on county roads reflect recovery more than despair.

The only immediate sign to outsiders that there's more going on here
than simple rural living is the preponderance of shops selling
pot-growing equipment and the occasional sign extolling the virtues
of the herb. One of the first sights greeting drivers rolling into
Ukiah is the Adopt-A-Highway sign proudly proclaiming cleanups by the
"Medical Marijuana Patients Union."

"We definitely go our own way," said longtime resident Randy Bream,
leaning against the till at his Mendocino Hobbies shop in Ukiah.
"Look, I call myself a conservative, and I don't care who grows pot
as long as they don't push it on me or my kids.

"What matters for me is that there are friendly people here. On
Memorial Day, the city puts flags up and down the main street. All
this fighting over pot? I wish they'd just hurry up and decide
whether it's legal so we can stop talking about it."