It’s been 50 years since Mendocino County fired Ted Erickson for saying that marijuana was Mendocino County’s number one export crop. Not only saying it, but writing it in his annual crop report. Erickson was the county’s Commissioner of Agriculture. His statement of the obvious was boldly included in his annual report on rural Mendocino County’s cultivated bounty, including its timber, cattle, sheep, pears, apples, grapes and fish. Everyone knew by then that dope farming offered the biggest cash return for effort expended than any other garden produce.
Erickson was Mendocino County’s first pot martyr. He had to go because he said out loud what everyone already knew but didn’t want to admit — marijuana was paying the bills for thousands of county residents. Marijuana is a weed, after all, and how hard is it to grow weeds? Weed as agriculture?
Decades later, pot’s economic primacy was subsequently included in the annual ag report insofar as it could be estimated because it was so prevalent even the supervisors couldn't pretend it wasn't, even the two supervisors who leased their back forty to growers. Erickson’s candor got him the sack, but marijuana was grown on such a large scale everywhere in Mendocino County that the Sheriff himself said without hesitation, “It’s everywhere. And there’s more out there this year than any of us have ever seen. Anybody who flies over the Anderson Valley or any other area of the county will see marijuana gardens.”
More gardens than ever and, the police and consumers alike agreed, stronger dope than ever with new pygmy plants being perfected which were said to produce as much as three pounds of high THC content dope per plant. THC is the chemical agent that gets the smoker high, puts the wowee in Mendo Mellow, which made retail demand for Mendocino marijuana grow faster every year, faster than supply. The new pygmy plants also emitted an odor that law enforcement said was “about ten times smellier than regular dope.” Mostly, though, stoner-approved high-content pot was being raised in the hills and backyards of the Anderson Valley and throughout Mendocino County on the traditional corn stalk-tall plant. It’s the plant one can’t help but see from an aerial vantage point, in some areas like the Rancheria watershed west of Boonville, the grows were so numerous the river’s hillsides look like vertical corn fields.
Twenty-five plants plus two pounds of processed bud was soon legal to possess in Mendocino County. You could say it was your medicine and even get yourself an official ID card saying it’s your meds and “I need my meds, officer. Here’s my card.”
An efficient, experienced pot gardener, assuming he didn't smoke up too much of his product, could easily pull off a cool, tax-free $50,000 a year from his patch off his back porch.
Was it surprising, then, that very tough immigrant hombres, and some very cagey locals, were growing huge amounts of dope in Mendocino County? And growing more of it than any year prior? Is it surprising that they carried guns and helped themselves to other people’s land and water? Is it surprising that they left rat poison and gro bags and plastic pipe and plastic greenhouses and garbage at their grow sites? That they shot wildlife and took water out of imperiled upstream fisheries? That every season several someones were murdered buying, selling or growing marijuana?
Police confiscations of marijuana from the huge gardens had been large every season for years. The annual Campaign Against Marijuana Production, aka the Marijuana Price Support Unit, took off enough dope to keep prices artificially high. There were annual helicopter raids the first week of September, with some airborne fantasists even rappelling down out of the sky into the more remote gardens of Anderson Valley.
Political opinion, it went without saying, remained divided, with pot propagandists and bogus medical pot sales people showing up in force at public meetings to advance pro-pot positions than the “straight” segments of local communities were in showing up to oppose them.
There’s always been a huge downside to the legalization of the drug in the county, not the least of which is convincing young people that marijuana, especially the new, high potency varieties, is a habit-forming energy drain as numbingly handicapping in its way as alcohol and its tendency to induce dangerous schizophrenia in young stoners. The drug’s negatives are numerous.
Early one summer, with cannabis everywhere, a fish biologist began work on Indian Creek, as pristine a stream as there is in the Anderson Valley and, not that many years ago, a significant spawning ground for Coho salmon. The biologist’s work required permissions from landowners whose properties abutted Indian Creek which, without a single demur, was granted. Also abutting the stream, especially where it meanders through boulders so huge and is so strewn with years of winter’s downed trees one wonders how fish could possibly get upstream, marijuana planters had set up shop. The intrepid scientist, like so many people frightened by the pot outlaws, refused to speak for attribution, fear being another negative consequence of Mendocino County’s unchecked marijuana industry.
He summed up his experience with audible disgust, “We had to stop our survey this year because a landowner had found pot gardens on his property. He was worried that we might get hurt. My work takes me everywhere in the county, its most remote areas, and I can tell you that there’s an incredible increase in marijuana growing this year. The increase is enormous. We’re seeing it everywhere. The worst thing about it is that a lot of growers are taking water from the creeks in a very dry year. There isn’t enough water for salmon anyway, and here come people taking the water that’s left this late in the summer.
“We all know the county runs on marijuana, but I don’t think people have any idea of how out-of-control the marijuana scene is this year. I thought we legalized it in Prop 215 to stop this. I know Philo like the back of my hand, and I’ve never had any trouble here, but I got spooked this year by some of the characters I was running into out in the woods, and I’ve worked Usal, Legget, Outlet Creek, the Middle Fork of the Eel, all the hot marijuana spots, but to be spooked in Anderson Valley? What we have is renegade growers trespassing, sucking the creeks dry for their own economic benefit. On top of every other bad thing they’re doing, they’re screwing the landowners who can’t get restoration funding unless they have fish data.
“Indian Creek has never been habitat-typed. I worked real hard to get access, and now I can’t complete the project. There’s one spot where we had to walk in waders through human feces because pot growers were using the spot as a bathroom, and that’s a spot where it took us three hours to hike in to. I don’t think it’s fair that the salmon are being imperiled because of pot planters. I pay taxes, and a portion of my taxes goes for stream rehab for juvenile salmon so we can have commercial and recreational fishing for Mendocino County and the rest of Northern California. Some people say, ‘Oh, it’s a hippie thing.’ Not anymore. It’s organized crime. These are people Mexico would like not to have in Mexico.”
There were reports of growers on upper Indian Creek using generators to pump water out of the stream and up into the hills to their gardens. Generators. Generators with fire-size hoses stuck in the stream’s late summer pools.
The fish biologist said upper Indian Creek had pools containing large steelhead, which meant that Indian Creek, despite the crimes of nature being committed against it by marijuana trespassers, lives on. “It’s in surprisingly good shape,” the biologist concluded, “but it won’t stay that way unless these people are kept out of there.”
Then, one 100-degree Thursday, COMMET, County of Mendocino Marijuana Eradication Team, drove deep into the east hills of Anderson Valley, ignoring as they went, Philo’s perennial pot bustee, the late Jim Dunne’s place. Boonville’s resident deputy, Keith Squires, accompanied the raid team as they drove deeper into the hills, providing running commentary on the personalities of some of the residents of upper Indian Creek. “Big old ugly cranker from Lake County is up in here lately,” and “there’s a whole bunch of derelicts out at Dunne’s, but we went way past them another 45 minutes out to a Mexican grow. They’ve been out there for years now. They dig deep holes for plastic liners then they drive the water in on their pick-ups to fill the holes with water for the summer grows. They do a lot of this kind of digging work during the winter so it’s all set up for planting in the dry months. A lot of people think the growers walk in but they usually have motorcycles hidden around. They’ll walk to the first gate then motorcycle their supplies in from there.
“What happened up there was a caretaker noticed that the growers had tapped into a pond Albert Elmer built way back when he owned the land. Suddenly the water level in the pond went way down and pretty soon they found the garden. We took 463 marijuana plants and five cucumbers and three sleeping bags out of there the other day, but it took us most of the day to do it. We need the helicopters. They can hit a bunch of gardens in a day with a helicopter, but if you have to drive in, well, we used up one whole day to get 463 plants when there’s probably 463,000 plants out there spread all over the place.
“I’ve noticed last couple of years that more and more growers, most of the season, commute to their gardens. They used to live in the gardens, but now they’ll sleep out there for a few nights then come back into town for a few nights. But this time of year they’re pretty much out in the gardens all the time to protect them from thieves. There is a lot more pot out there this year. No doubt about it, and here we are back to doing it by hand one garden at a time like we did 25 years ago because there’s no helicopter. We used to have a helicopter year-round. We got to a lot more gardens when we had it.”
The deputy said that crank labs were a thing of the past in the valley because ready made methamphetamine was now being brought in from outside. “But lots of local kids are smoking dope, and a lot of young girls think meth is a good way to lose weight. They think they can do it without losing their teeth or going nuts, but I tell them it’s like playing Russian Roulette with bullets in all the chambers. There are kids in the sixth grade who smoke pot because they’re growing up around it. I drive around the valley and I see fences with the medical pot cards nailed on them, and big gardens right behind the fence. It’s a joke. And people wonder why kids get into it?”
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