THE CLOSING OF THE MARIJUANA FRONTIER

California Is Not Just Deciding Whether Pot Should Be Legal. It's
Determining the Shape of a Major New American Industry.

When my wife and I bought a house last year in the little town of
Ukiah, California, the first person to offer us advice about growing
marijuana was our realtor.

The house was a stolid 1909 prairie box that had been partitioned
into four units, with a front porch, dark green trim, and a couple of
fruit trees in the yard. It was charming, but we probably would have
settled for a yurt. What mattered most to us was having a foothold in
Mendocino County, a place we had long ago decided was the most
beautiful in America.

Our realtor, however, drew our attention to the house's electrical
meters. There were four in total, one for each unit. If we ever
wanted to grow a few indoor pot gardens, he said, we had an ideal
setup. I laughed and thanked him for the tip.

Then the advice kept coming.

A neighbor offered to help me get started with a few plants whenever
I was ready.

The owner of a local hydroponics supply store shook my hand and
encouraged me to stop by his warehouse. "We'll set you up," he said.
Ukiah, I realized, was weirder than I thought.

I'd always known that pot was a huge part of the county's livelihood,
accounting for two-thirds of the local economy, by some estimates.
But in eight years of visiting the place with my wife-including one
gloriously unsuccessful four-month experiment in backcountry
living-I'd never so much as set eyes on a seven-fingered leaf. Then,
last year, I began exploring the region's cannabis economy in
earnest, setting out for dirt roads in the hills and basements in
Ukiah, occasionally wearing a blindfold.

Gradually a new picture of Mendocino County began to emerge.
Neighborhoods in town were dotted with light-flooded outbuildings
packed with plants, quietly paying the mortgages of those who tended
them. And the county's amber and green hills were full of
homesteaders who for decades had been leading the kind of existence
we'd once failed at-men and women who'd come for the land but managed
to stay because of marijuana.

Many had built their own off-grid homes and outfitted them with
elaborate solar arrays, potbellied stoves, and well-tended gardens.

In an age of homemade baby food, fire-escape agriculture, and
home-brew chic, they'd achieved an almost mythical ideal: economic
independence derived from a small piece of earth.

The rub, of course, was that these paragons of yeoman virtue were
often antisocial, paranoid wrecks.

Marijuana's high price under prohibition made it possible to earn a
decent living from a small patch, but someone was always losing a
crop, fleeing into the woods, or going to jail. "It's like the sharks
come in and just eat a few people," one grower told me. Mendocino
County, in short, is as tortured by prohibition as it is dependent on
it. But what agonizes the county even more these days is the thought
that it could all be coming to an end.

On November 2, Californians go to the polls to vote on whether to
start treating cannabis as just another adult recreational drug. The
Regulate, Control, and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010-also known as
Proposition 19-would legalize the possession and cultivation of pot
in small amounts for adults, while handing the authority to regulate
commercial marijuana production and distribution down to counties and
cities. Polls as of this writing show that the measure might well
pass. If it does, the Rand Corporation predicts that the price of
marijuana will fall by as much as 80 percent.

But even if the referendum doesn't pass, a new initiative will almost
certainly reach the ballot in 2012, and growers, dispensary owners,
and pro-pot local governments will continue to test the boundaries of
the state's fourteen-year-old medical marijuana law. Whatever happens
on November 2, the edifice of prohibition is crumbling in California,
and one of the largest informal economies in America is inexorably
emerging into the mainstream.

In the process, a great scramble has commenced.

A sundry cast of industrialists and old-line homesteaders, cartel
growers, and hipster dispensary owners are fighting to determine the
future of California's largest cash crop. In a replay of history as
both tragedy and farce, the mainstreaming of marijuana promises to
revive a host of old American dramas: from the contending but always
recessive vision of the nation as a prosperous agrarian republic, to
the country's founding relationship with lucrative mind-altering
substances, to the frenzied migrations of the gold rush, to the
industrialization of agriculture, and the closing of the western
frontier. Rarely have these events reached conclusions that were
altogether happy or fair. The forces of consolidation and backroom
politics have usually benefited the big at the expense of the small.
But is there any chance that this time, in a comedy of stoners, the
story of American industry might find a different end?

In the early-morning hours of October 8, 2009, a category-one typhoon
made landfall on the southern coast of Japan, killing two men,
shutting down twelve Toyota factories, and suspending rail service
across Tokyo. Then it pushed back out to sea and vanished over the
cold expanse of the North Pacific. A few days later the front
reappeared off the coast of Northern California. In Mendocino County,
news of the approaching storm rousted a throng of dusty vehicles from
the hills, causing traffic jams and long lines at supply stores in
Ukiah, the county seat. The backcountry's marijuana growers, hurrying
to prepare for a forced harvest, were out in full strength.

I happened to be riding shotgun in one of those dusty vehicles, a
creaking white delivery van driven by a blue-eyed, ponytailed
marijuana grower named Matthew Cohen. A lanky thirty-two-year-old
with wraparound shades and a goatee, Cohen had agreed to show me the
ropes of harvest season.

The inland hills of Mendocino County reliably see no rainfall between
the months of May and October, an interval during which the sun
blazes, as one 1880 history of the area put it, "as if fully
determined to prove to mankind that it can shine more fervidly to-day
than it did yesterday." That plenitude of sun, which is shared by
Mendocino's neighbors, Humboldt and Trinity counties, has helped
cement the region's status as the capital of American cannabis
production-known collectively as the "Emerald Triangle." Topography
has also helped.

The region is essentially a crumple zone emanating from an offshore
junction of three tectonic plates.

Seen from the air, it resembles a sheet of green aluminum foil that
has been tightly balled up and then only loosely flattened out. The
area spreads from the Pacific in the west to the mountains above the
Central Valley in the east in a shatter-pattern of canyons,
occasional bowl-like valleys, and arcing slopes.

It's virtually unpoliceable.

With full sun, healthy marijuana plants in Mendocino County can reach
heights of fifteen feet. But fully grown specimens-gangly
things-break up in wet weather.

The outdoor cannabis growing season thus becomes a race to bring
one's crop to maturity before the first heavy October rains, whose
forecast each year ordains a rare moment of synchronicity in an
otherwise atomized trade.

Every farmer with plants in the sun has to bring them down at the same time.

Like most of his peers, Cohen was on his way into town to pick up
supplies for his trimmers, the laborers who break the resinous crop
down into so many perfect little buds, working as fast as possible to
get the product out to market.

It's painstaking, labor-intensive work, and getting stoned in the
process is hard to avoid-so snacks are important.

Our first stop was the Ukiah Natural Foods Cooperative, the area's
premier depot for goods like solar-brewed beer, organic corn chips,
and Tofurkey. In one of the aisles, Cohen slowed his shopping cart to
chat with another grower about the approaching storm. "Big one," said
the other guy with a hint of melodrama. "Like 1.8 inches, high winds.
So-keep that in mind." The store had the feeling of a base camp
before an expedition.

In search of Pepsi, we headed across the street to Safeway. Just
inside the automatic doors was a large product display at the head of
an aisle. "Turkey bags," Cohen said. "You ever heard of these?"

A turkey bag, I learned, is a Reynolds product designed for roasting
poultry. It also happens to be the industry-standard container for
transporting pounds of pot. The chemical properties that keep a
plastic roasting bag from melting in a 350-degree oven also make it
impervious to the skunk smell of marijuana. "I've seen guys buy cases
of 'em," said the checkout clerk, dragging two boxes of turkey bags
for Cohen across the infrared scanner.

He looked up with a grin. "I mean, I guess they could use them to
cook turkeys."

By now I was beginning to recognize the signs of harvest everywhere.
At Home Depot, just down the road, bins near the checkout lanes
heaved with Fiskars Pruning Snips-small florist's shears that are the
tool of choice for marijuana trimmers.

On Highway 101 on the way out of town, Cohen and I zoomed past
several hitchhikers-would-be trimmers-stationed along each of Ukiah's
dry brown interchanges. One of them, thumb out, wore a pair of
pruning snips on a piece of twine around his neck.

After traversing an ever-narrowing series of county roads, Cohen
pulled up to his farm on a gravel driveway.

A keypad-activated electric gate opened onto a sprawling organic
garden flush with tomatoes, corn, broccoli, beets, and other
vegetables. A more distinctly fragrant crop grew in a greenhouse
toward the back of the property.

In his bid to weather the transition to a post-prohibition business,
Cohen had just launched a medical marijuana cooperative with an
unusual model: there would be no marijuana dispensary. Instead, the
cooperative, called Northstone Organics, would deliver sustainably
grown cannabis "farm direct" from Mendocino County to the Bay Area.
Included in the deliveries would be fresh organic vegetables from
Cohen's farm: mizuna alongside the marijuana.

As time went on, Cohen hoped, other small organic growers would join
the cooperative and do an end run around the big-city medical
marijuana dispensaries, which folks in Mendocino were beginning to
regard as high-handed and domineering. Ultimately, in a
post-prohibition era, he wanted to see the county bloom with scores
of "cannabisseries"-roadside farms with tasting rooms pitched to the
day-tripping connoisseur. "As you're driving the 128 through
Boonville, tasting champagne," he enthused in his farmhouse office,
"you'll be able to roll into a facility that's processing 500 pounds
of cannabis a year-a nice little microbrew, they specialize in a
specific varietal of Bubba Kush." In his vision, the entire county
would be branded under the line, "Small farms, strong communities,
sustainable living."

"You know," he said with a mildly embarrassed laugh, "every good
value that exists in this county is what we're gonna try to embody in
a tourist trap."

The largest dispensaries in California-the entities that Matt Cohen
is hoping to sideline-are based in the San Francisco East Bay,
primarily in Oakland. That a perennially struggling port city should
have emerged as the capital of the nascent marijuana industry was
mostly a political accident.

In February of 2004, the Oakland City Council, alarmed by a
proliferation of fly-by-night medical marijuana storefronts in the
city center, reduced the number of dispensary permits it would grant
to four. Later that year, the neighboring Berkeley City Council
followed suit, limiting its number of dispensaries to three.

For the dispensaries that remained, the two ordinances established
near-monopoly power over a huge medical marijuana market.

The Oakland marina is now home to the world's largest marijuana
storefront operation, a dispensary called Harborside Health Center,
which serves 58,000 patient members and brought in $21 million in
revenue last year. Steve DeAngelo, the dispensary's ingenious
pigtailed CEO, has spared no expense to give the center a wholesome,
unthreatening look, with large windows, soothing interior design, and
biometric locks on every door. The dispensary counter has the feel of
a checkout desk at an unusually nice school library.

Digital readouts on the cash registers stream the words, "Out of the
shadows, into the light."

Essentially forbidden from turning a profit, large dispensaries are
often left with piles of surplus "discretionary income," with which
they have been able to purchase much goodwill.

Harborside offers all of its members free yoga classes,
chiropractics, acupuncture, marijuana-growing clinics, and even rehab.

Other dispensaries put money toward neighborhood beautification and
other civic causes. Berkeley Patients Group, the largest dispensary
in its home city, has become such a local darling that city leaders
officially declared October 31, 2009, "Berkeley Patients Group Day."

When I stopped by Berkeley Patients Group for a visit last year, the
dispensary was in the midst of a rebranding campaign, positioning
itself to expand into other states. "Eventually it'll evolve into
just BPG," explained Brad Senesac, the dispensary's marketing
director. "We won't be Berkeley Patients Group. Then we won't have to
be a patients group, eventually. We can just be a dispensary where
people come and get marijuana." Last year, after Maine legalized
medical marijuana and handed out six permits to dispensaries, a BPG
spinoff called Northeast Patients Group won four of them.

Perhaps no individual exemplifies the consolidated political power
that has accrued to Oakland's dispensaries more than a
wheelchair-bound former roadie named Richard Lee. Headquartered in
downtown Oakland, Lee runs a several-block empire that includes
Oaksterdam University, a trade school he founded in 2007 for workers
in the medical marijuana industry; the Blue Sky Cafe, a coffee shop
style dispensary; and the campaign headquarters of Proposition 19.
While other dispensaries in the area have put their discretionary
funds into acupuncture clinics and out-of-state expansion, Lee has
used the wealth of Oaksterdam-to the tune of over a million
dollars-to get Proposition 19 on the ballot and to run its campaign.

When I interviewed Lee this August, he had just come back from a
Proposition 19 fund-raiser in Los Angeles. An avowed free-market
libertarian, he has always lamented Oakland's decision to limit its
number of dispensaries. But toward the backwoods farmers of the
Emerald Triangle, who complain about his undue influence on the
trade, Lee is unsympathetic. "The growers can operate behind the
scenes quietly.

They don't give anybody their address and Social Security number,
whereas the dispensaries have been right out there leading with their
chin," he said. "Maybe that's why the dispensaries have a little more
political power." Lots of growers see Proposition 19 as a law
designed to give even more sway to Oakland's big pot entrepreneurs,
who would be best positioned to negotiate the most favorable local
regulations. But Lee, from his office in Oaksterdam, views the
initiative as a simple matter of civil rights. "I got into this to
just legalize it," he said. "I didn't get into it to protect the
small grower or the big grower."

"Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens," wrote
Thomas Jefferson. "They are the most vigorous, the most independent,
the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to
its interests by the most lasting bonds." The first marijuana growers
in Mendocino and Humboldt counties were urban castaways who went
"back to the land" in the 1960s and '70s, many of them chasing a
latter-day version of the Jeffersonian ideal.

They came to "unplug" from the ignobility of consumer society, to
find an existence that was at once less fragmented and more
self-sufficient. The Redwood Empire was an obvious destination. The
region's fishing and timber industries had collapsed, and the
countryside was wide open with marginal land that had already been logged.

Property was cheap and abundant.

"We bought 300 acres for $60,000," says John Schaeffer, a
white-bearded homesteader who arrived in Mendocino County in 1971.
"This was at a time when you had people from New York, Los Angeles,
the Bay Area all moving in here." At first the latter-day
Jeffersonians barely got by; they built houses with salvaged timber,
sometimes from old redwood chicken coops, then scraped together
subsistence incomes however they could.

Many lived off the power grid, raising their families by kerosene
lamp. "Everyone was struggling," says Schaeffer. "No one had any
money." Meanwhile, in their fields, along with all the food they were
growing, they sowed marijuana.

At the time-the height of marijuana consumption in America-almost all
of the country's commercial supply came from Mexico and Colombia.
"Homegrown" was regarded as something akin to bathtub gin. Then,
beginning in the mid-1970s, the Mexican government began spraying
marijuana fields in the Sierra Madre Mountains with Paraquat, an
herbicide poisonous to humans.

When some of the tainted pot found its way into the American supply,
panic ensued.

The drug trade needed a new source, and in Mendocino County, the
marijuana that people were already growing in their gardens suddenly
began wholesaling for $1,000 a pound.

Almost overnight, the back-to-the-landers-who had just dropped out of
consumer society-found themselves blessed with an abundance of
purchasing power. Many wound up putting their money toward
counterculture ideals that have since gone mainstream: organic food,
localism, sustainability. Before long, businesses cropped up, eager
to create markets around their aims and preferences.

The best example of how pot helped incubate the green economy is
probably John Schaeffer himself.

In 1978, he opened a store in the town of Willits called Real Goods,
aimed at provisioning the off-grid homesteader. Initially, many of
his wares were just supplies for growers: drip lines, chicken manure,
fencing materials.

Then one day a man representing the Southern California energy firm
ARCO Solar showed up at the Willits store in a Porsche. He had with
him two blemished photovoltaic panels; ARCO was manufacturing them
for the space industry. "They didn't meet military specifications, so
they had to dump them," Schaeffer recalls. "They were going for $900
apiece." Schaeffer bought the two panels and set them up in the
store, marketing them as a way to power music systems in the hills.
They were the first solar panels ever sold on the American retail
market. By the mid-'80s, Schaeffer wasn't selling chicken manure
anymore. Today his Real Goods is an $80-million-a-year national solar business.

Unfortunately for those in the hills, the marijuana boom didn't just
bring disposable income; it also brought government helicopters.
After a period of relative freedom in the late '70s, risk caught up
to reward, and growers found themselves the target of an immense,
quasi-military task force called the Campaign Against Marijuana
Planting (CAMP).

"When CAMP started up, they came into these areas really hard,"
recalls Eugene "ED" Denson, a lawyer based in Humboldt County (and a
former manager of the band Country Joe and the Fish). "They would
make bases and be here for weeks. They would quite literally just
start at the river and start walking up the mountain, seizing
everything they'd find, going into all the homes, smashing all the
canned goods in case there was anything hidden at the bottom of the
jar-things like that-destroying musical instruments.

"They would fly great bales of marijuana out in nets on helicopters.
And when the raids were on, people would come streaming out of the
hills and stay at the store," he says. "They would fly the
helicopters with the marijuana past the store, so everyone could see
the crop going out.

"By today's standards," he adds, "they didn't find much."

The cannabis windfall and the modern-day gold rush that accompanied
it changed the culture of Mendocino. "It used to be people came up
here and learned carpentry, plumbing, welding, mechanics-basic life
skills that you need to live in the country," says Schaeffer. In the
case of more recent arrivals-and, all too often, the second
generation of homesteading families-things are different. "All they
know how to do is grow and trim."

Lifestyles of hardscrabble subsistence gave way to private schooling
for kids and vacations in Bali. Today, in some towns, marijuana is
the only major business, and what other businesses there are can
offer no comparable wage. Everyone seems to have a story of some
enterprising high school student who managed to earn $50,000 or
$100,000 growing pot over summer vacation.

For many homesteaders, the dependence on marijuana has fostered a
sense that they live under a different social order altogether. "In
my rural community we have no outside services," one resident of the
Humboldt hill country told me recently. "We had to beg to get phone
here. I have no broadband service.

It's an hour and a half for the cops to get here. The hospital is a
disaster area. The road doesn't come out our way. We get no county services.

Most of our kids don't go to county schools." Out of 300 families in
her community, she said, only five of them don't grow pot. And like
the colony at Jamestown, where leaves of tobacco became the only
practical currency, parts of the Triangle have even seen cannabis
emerge as a local medium of exchange.

The same resident described a recent effort at backwoods revenue
collection: "They passed out marijuana plants to people and said,
'Grow this one for the fire truck.

This plant over here is for the school; this plant over here is for the road.'

"We're paying taxes in our own way," she said, "it's just not in the
conventional sense."

Despite the risk of law enforcement busting down the door, the high
price of marijuana also brought unprecedented new waves of migration
to the Redwood Empire. In 1996, when California voters passed
Proposition 215, legalizing medical marijuana, the "green rush" began
drawing people from all over the world. "When I defend some of these
things in Mendocino County," says Denson, the attorney, "it's like a
United Nations project or something. It's hard to even find two
people from the same country involved in the case." One day in Ukiah,
I met a young man camped outside of Walmart who was looking for
trimming work. He spoke broken English and said he was trying to earn
enough for a plane ticket home. He was an Israeli Arab from the Golan Heights.

Residents of the Emerald Triangle often draw a hard distinction
between two kinds of pot farmers: those who came to the area out of a
desire to "live with the land," and those who came later just "for
the grow." Of the latter sort, the most notorious offenders are the
alleged cartel growers from Mexico-or, more recently, from Russia and
Bulgaria-who work deep inside the state's public lands and grow
plants by the thousands.

They remain a shadow presence, capable of scaring people away from
the national forests but largely invisible to most citizens except on
TV news reports.

For many of those who make their way to the Emerald Triangle to find
their fortune, however, the line between opportunism and romance is
strikingly blurred: the most recent arrivals sometimes talk like the
most beautiful dreamers, breathlessly extolling the promise of forty
acres and a patch.

Last year, during harvest, I met a twenty-four-year-old woman who had
just moved to Ukiah with her young husband from Wisconsin. "I feel
like I've come to the promised land, I really do," she told me, even
though she and her husband were residing indefinitely in Ukiah's
Discovery Inn. "We're probably gonna settle down and eventually be
farmers, and we're gonna have babies here. It'll allow us to have
children-him to be the one who works, me to be able to take care of
my kids and have a garden. To have, you know, a normal life.
Otherwise we'd both be in a cubicle for sixty hours a week."

When I next encountered the young woman, it was in the local
newspaper this past July. She had been arrested, along with a
partner, and charged with possession of marijuana for sale,
possession of concentrated cannabis, and conspiracy to commit a
crime. The two suspects had been processing hash in a motel room. For
all her dreams of becoming a farmer, she had only managed to switch
hotels-from the Discovery Inn to the Motel 6.

Even those who came to live with the land found their original dreams
warped over time by the wealth marijuana brought to the county. "When
I first came here," says a 1970s homesteader whom I'll call Mark, "we
were all struggling. We cut shakes. We cut firewood and sold it. We
did a lot of stuff to make a few hundred bucks here and there.
[Marijuana] was there and had been around for a few years, but nobody
really understood it too much. Everybody that I knew had 150, 200
plants in the garden and they were growing six inches to a foot
apart. The pot was the equivalent of Mexican $10-an-ounce crap. "My
neighbor over the hill and her husband, they were struggling to make
a living, and he had got a contract to grow some worm beds. Growing
worms was a big thing. You could make a little money on it: you had
the worm castings you could sell, and the worms you could sell. You
built these eight-by-eight beds and filled them full of fertilizer.
And Jill said, 'Don, do you think it would be okay if I put a couple
of marijuana seeds in the corners of the beds? That wouldn't hurt the
worms. And Don said, 'Well, yeah, I guess so.' That year, I remember
he wanted to buy a tractor. Just a little tractor that could plow the
fields and move stuff around. It was 700 bucks, and he was trying to
get the 700 bucks."

"The next scene was, this pot came out and it was amazing. We called
it 'Brand X' because nobody had anything like this, at least not in
our neighborhood. So Jill was over there and I was talking to her and
she said, 'I'm gonna sell this stuff for $15 an ounce.' I said, 'Oh
Jill, that's a ripoff.' I was half joking, half serious.

"Before that season was over, she was getting $600 a pound. That was
a lot of money.

"All of a sudden the next season opened at $900 a pound. Then it was
at $1,200 a pound. That was '77. We couldn't believe it. Now
everybody's growing it. If you could make that kind of money just
putting a few plants in the ground, this is going to be a miracle: we
can make a living, and pay the taxes, and buy the kids presents for
Christmas. It was good, you know?

"The next scene was in '78. I had a round table here in the kitchen.
I'm sitting here, and this guy comes over. He says, 'I'm buying your
pot, and I'm paying $1,800 a pound.' And he's forking out
hundred-dollar bills on the table.

And the next thing, he stands right over there with his back to the
corner and pulls out this little [here Mark sniffs sharply]

"And I said, 'What was that?'

"'Oh, coke. You want some?'

"And the next thing, coke infests the ridge here. An ounce for a gram
was the trade. That was the deal. And that was the beginning of the
end of our innocence.

"By '79 it was getting to be a drug scene rather than a family scene
with a little marijuana in there. I was at a New Year's Eve party at
one of the houses down here. And all of a sudden instead of us
getting stoned, mirrors are laid out and there's lines all over the
place and everybody's just tootin' up. Next thing we know we're
standing there and the sun's coming up. The next day I was over at
Don and Jill's, and Don said, 'You know, a year ago I was struggling
to get enough money for a tractor. And we tooted up my tractor two or
three times last night. Just tooted it up our noses.'"

Then he wasn't expounding on his theory of a virtuous agrarian
republic, Thomas Jefferson was often expressing dismay at the actual
behavior of American small farmers.

When a profitable cash crop like tobacco was involved, stewardship of
the land all too often went out the window. "The indifferent state of
[agriculture] among us does not proceed from a want of knowledge
merely," he wrote. "It is from our having such quantities of land to
waste as we please."

The crackdowns of the 1980s forced some homesteaders out of the
marijuana business, but others just got more creative: while the
risks involved in growing had shot up, so too had the drug's price,
which reached $5,000 a pound in the mid-'80s. At first growers simply
moved their plants into the shade, where CAMP's helicopters couldn't
see them. Some engineered outrageous contraptions that allowed them
to grow on platforms in the tree canopy.

But the paucity of sunlight took its toll on the quality of the crop,
and so the underground industry made its next evolutionary shift: it
sent growers indoors. Packing thirty-six plants into a
four-by-eight-foot shed under thousand-watt lights became an exacting science.

It also caused the use of electricity to skyrocket.

Between 1996 and 2010, per capita energy consumption in Mendocino
County increased at a rate of over three times the average for the
state; in Humboldt County it went up six times more than the average.

And that's not counting the region's innumerable generator-powered
grows, churning out tons of "diesel dope." These can take the form of
a simple garden shed, packed with two or three thousand-watt lights
run off a small diesel generator.

Or, to cite an example from police records, they can take the form of
eight buried shipping containers radiating out like spokes on a wheel
from two massive central power units-the sorts of generators designed
to supply emergency backup power to a hospital.

California's 1996 medical marijuana law took much of the fear out of
pot farming for growers willing to abide by certain limits.

But in a twist bewildering to those who have kept faith with organic
growing, cannabis produced indoors under heavy lights-using
techniques that evolved largely for the sake of hiding from
helicopters-has become the medical industry standard.

For dispensaries, it's a matter of "bag appeal": just as hothouse
tomatoes have a pillowy, unweathered look, indoor pot tends to have a
sheen that outdoor lacks. "The product desirability shifts
dramatically," one former Humboldt grower told me with a fatalistic
shrug. "People like it 'cause it's shiny."

As much as today's younger growers may admire the environmentalism of
the first homesteaders, their primary concerns more often center on
economic survival.

When I was in Humboldt County, in the remote town of Alderpoint, I
met a former small-time indoor grower named Obadiah Switzer, who
belongs to an expanding sociological category in the Triangle:
second-generation growers.

The adult son of "truck gypsy hippies," he looked like a clean-cut
fireman and talked like John Wayne. Whatever bohemian adventurism had
inspired his parents seemed lost on him. "My whole life I've been
here, and weed's always been gettin' grown," he said, letting out a
short laugh. "There's no romance here for me." He might as well have
been a longshoreman's son in Baltimore.

While many in his parents' generation were up in arms about the
heresies of indoor pot, Switzer was focused on mobilizing the county
to protect itself against the disruptions of legalization. He had
recently become the Humboldt County representative of a group that
was informally calling itself a union of marijuana growers.

And the union was against Proposition 19.

To Switzer, the initiative to tax and regulate marijuana was just
paving the way for far-off industrialists to corner the market. "It's
about stealing the economy from the people it's been built by," he
said. "What's gonna happen is there's gonna be a shitload of
minimum-wage jobs out there.

And all these people that have subsistence incomes or a little bit
better in the cannabis economy, their work is gonna go away. And
they're gonna be able to get a minimum-wage job."

The more he spoke, the more it seemed Switzer's new work as a union
organizer was a last-ditch attempt at redeeming a home about which
his feelings were deeply divided.

As he saw it, his parents' generation had tended their homesteads
beautifully, but the county had gone to seed. "After fifteen years, I
go back into the local high school weight room, and the upholstery's
the same and the walls haven't been painted and the roof leaks," he
said. "Considering how much money's gone through here, this place
should be the Emerald shining city. And it is far from it."

Switzer wanted marijuana growers to finally organize to save their
economy. What he seemed unsure about, though, was whether they deserved saving.

The sort of far-off industrialist that Switzer fears-the marijuana
mogul who threatens to bring down the culture of the Emerald
Triangle-is a semi-retired Bay Area businessman who wears golf
shirts. Until a few years ago, Jeff Wilcox was one of the biggest
property developers in Oakland. Today, he is the president of a
company called AgraMed, and he is well on the way to converting one
of his industrial real estate holdings into a marijuana factory.

When I met him, Wilcox was sitting at a cafe outside the campaign
headquarters of Proposition 19, having just attended the initiative's
weekly steering committee meeting.

From there, we hopped into his car, a silver BMW with black leather
seats, to pay a visit to his would-be factory.

"So I asked my attorney," he said from behind the wheel. "'Can I grow
legally out in the open?' and she said, 'Sure, but you need
legislation.'" To get his venture off the ground, Wilcox began by
approaching the most conservative member of the Oakland City
Council-a longtime acquaintance-and introducing him to the idea of
allowing industrial-scale marijuana production within city limits.
Then he commissioned a report from a consulting firm playing out how
much revenue for the city ($1.8 million), how much gross revenue ($59
million), and how much processed marijuana (21,000 pounds) his
facility would generate every year, as well as how many jobs it would
create (371) and what their average annual salary would be ($53,700).
The report not only generated media buzz and helped sell the idea to
local pols, it also revealed another opening for political traction.
"The profit margin right now is extremely high," Wilcox said, "so we
said, well, you can obviously make these union jobs. So I went out
shopping for unions."

Once Wilcox secured the backing of a food and service workers union
for his city legislative campaign, he approached Richard Lee, the
leader of the Proposition 19 effort. "I walked in with a union
representative and gave Richard a check for $10,000 and said, 'I want
in on anything I can do,'" he said. "'I can help you pass this,
because I'm connected.'" Wilcox's ordinance made its way through the
city council, passing in July. Now he was just waiting to see if he
would be awarded the permit, and the rest of the medical marijuana
industry was waiting to see if he would get busted by the Feds.
(Among the most anxious spectators were the denizens of the Emerald
Triangle. This summer, an article in Humboldt County's North Coast
Journal closed with the words, "Oakland is drinking our milkshake.")

Wilcox's would-be factory comprises a set of defunct brick warehouses
laid out on seven acres alongside I-880 near the city's marina. "See,
this is a good example," he said as we walked onto a
43,000-square-foot factory floor, daylight streaming in through a row
of arched windows. "In Oakland, you've got all these buildings where
you look and you say, 'This would be a great building to grow pot in.'"

Guiding me across the site, Wilcox conjured visions of workers in
bunny suits tending a vast grid of marijuana plants underneath
high-powered lights. "This is 10,000 feet," he said in one of the
smaller rooms, his voice still echoing off the walls. "No one grows
this kind of square footage."

Later, as we drove back across the Oakland lowlands on the
interstate, Wilcox reflected on his progress. "Look at me. The only
thing I was was a fan of the plant, really, a year and a half ago,"
he said. "And now I'm probably one of the top ten guys in California
in this business. And you know why? Because I know how to move a
little policy."

When I returned to the North Coast this summer, the mood was bleak.
Last year's harvest had fetched some of the lowest prices since the
1970s, and fewer buyers were coming up from the cities.

In Humboldt and Mendocino, locals had gathered in the spring at grim
public meetings to discuss "life after legalization." The 2010
growing season was shaping up to be the most violent in recent
memory, with five deadly shootouts between police and organized-crime
growers on public land by August. And regardless of how the vote on
Proposition 19 went, the coming year promised to be rough.

Many pot growers had planted double or triple what they did last
season, and the bumper crop seemed bound to depress prices even further.

For all that, the year had been relatively kind to Matthew Cohen and
his farm-fresh pot delivery service.

When I met him one morning in August, he was sitting poolside on his
farm, with three telephones laid out on the patio table in front of
him-each a different business line.

The idea of including fresh vegetables with the deliveries had, alas,
turned out to be ahead of its time: patients accustomed to discretion
in their transactions were flummoxed by the prospect of picking up
baskets of weed and zucchini at public drop locations.

So Cohen had discontinued that part of his service.

But everything else was going smoothly. He was paying sales taxes and
workman's comp for fifteen employees, and he had a fleet of four
drivers who fanned out across the Bay Area in Zipcars. His
advertising in the city had also been successful in overcoming "bag
appeal" prejudices: 700 patients in the metro region were now
receiving regular deliveries of his organically grown, high-grade,
outdoor product.

Cohen had also lobbied successfully for a county ordinance that he
helped to write.

It created a system of county permits allowing medical marijuana
cooperatives to grow ninety-nine marijuana plants on a farm, provided
that they acquire a business license, abide by the county's safety,
environmental, and labor standards, and-most bracing of all for
Mendocino's growers-consent to spot inspections by the sheriff's
department. Now Cohen's cooperative included two county-permitted
ninety-nine-plant gardens.

Where things were going a little sideways, however, was in his
broader mission to preserve the mom-and-pop growing culture of
Mendocino County. For one thing, the county ordinance had
unexpectedly turned out to include fine print requiring compliance
with the Americans with Disabilities Act. That meant that trimming
facilities-once glorified rumpus rooms with DVD players, chips and
salsa, and turkey bags of marijuana everywhere-now needed wheelchair
ramps, handicapped toilets, and accessible parking.

To avoid setting local growers up for tens of thousands of dollars in
renovations, Cohen hoped instead to establish a common processing
facility-something akin to the cooperative slaughterhouses and
community saw mills that help many rural Americans share costs.

But Cohen winced to think that local growers might see it as one more
Oakland-like consolidation.

One of the three phones rang. "This is Matt," Cohen said. "Yeah, I'm
looking for some industrial warehouse space ... We're looking for a
central processing facility for medical cannabis ... I'd say at least
5,000 square feet."

So far, though, growers weren't exactly rushing to join Cohen's
cooperative. Only one had gone through the long process of securing a
permit with him, and many of the others remained distrustful of the
law. "I can't sit there and explain to them that the helicopters
aren't going to land," Cohen said.

Unless more growers came aboard soon, Cohen would be unable to meet
demand in the coming year. Now he was considering a fallback: simply
leasing property on which to grow, bypassing the old homesteads
altogether. The cooperative could set up a ninety-nine-plant garden
on an empty piece of land, fence it in, put security cameras on the
corners, hire a twenty-four-hour guard service and a farm manager,
and harvest everything directly into a refrigerator truck.

Everything would still be organic and sustainable, Matt told himself,
and the cooperative would still be bolstering the marijuana economy
in Mendocino County. But the dream of "small farms, strong
communities, sustainable living" was being shaken by forces beyond his control.

Ultimately, what will happen to Mendocino or to Oakland is likely to
be decided only minimally by "pure" market forces.

Even more so than other industries, the marijuana business will be
shaped by lawmakers-and to the connected shall go the spoils.

People in the emerging marijuana industry sometimes like to imagine a
world in which cannabis is like beer: mass-produced options will sit
on the shelf alongside boutique microbrews. But the analogy is not
actually so sunny.

In the American beer market, pale yellow lagers produced by a handful
of powerful breweries ruled the industry for fifty years following
prohibition-not because demand was unanimous, but in large part
because laws banning home brewing kept tinkerers and innovators from
entering the market until 1978. When it became legal to mix yeast and
hops in your own kitchen, the craft brewing movement exploded.

The damage, however, was already done. Today, for all their seeming
influence, craft brews account for only 4 percent of American beer
consumption. Two conglomerates-Anheuser-Busch InBev and South African
Breweries-control more than 80 percent of the market.

In its relatively brief 100-year career as an American intoxicant,
marijuana has been cast in an alarming number of roles: first as a
scourge that drives users to murder and insanity; then as a narcotic
that reduces them to passivity and indolence; later as a benevolent
herb that can comfort the sick; and now-in the canny propaganda
advancing Proposition 19-as a harmless but popular substance whose
taxation could save California from fiscal ruin. Who knows what
fantasies future Americans will project onto this unsuspecting plant?

If the American marijuana industry goes the way of beer or Big
Tobacco, the answer to that question may one day be hashed out around
boardroom tables, finessed by advertising departments, and subjected
to focus groups.

A marijuana lobby will set up on K Street, and catchy TV spots for
"Marlboro Greens" (a figment of urban legend among marijuana growers
for decades) will air between ads for Miller High Life and Doritos
during the Super Bowl. And we won't have much choice in the matter.

Historically, once the forces of consolidation have been set in
motion within an industry-whether it's oil, agribusiness, tobacco, or
booze-a self-reinforcing cycle of power has a way of stamping out
alternatives and bucking attempts by lawmakers to bring it under control.

Once there is a Philip Morris of marijuana, it is too late.

But until federal law catches up to California's contrarianism, the
future of pot is not such a foregone conclusion. "We've got
forty-nine more states to go, or at least another dozen or two," says
Richard Lee. "It could still be a lifetime until we have to worry
about Philip Morris and Budweiser."

Mendocino County's second-largest product-wine-may provide the best
alternative vision for dope. Thanks in part to a legal loophole that
always allowed for home producers, wine has been much slower to
consolidate than other industries, and no single winery has the
political clout of an Anheuser-Busch. This has been better not only
for small producers, but also-more importantly-for the public.

So maybe we should all hope that Matthew Cohen is right: that
Mendocino will become the Napa Valley of marijuana, and that the
premium growers can charge for a sustainably grown, artisanal product
backed by a helluva marketing narrative-America's last frontier!

Land of the organic outlaw!-won't turn out to be too much lower, in
the end, than the premium they charge now for growing a crop under
conditions of abject fear. It's not such a bad dream, anyway.