Emerald Triangle : Marijuana Crop--an Uneasy Life

A year or two ago, it was not unusual for a scruffy-looking person to wander onto the car lot where Paul Fitch works, pick out a fancy new four-wheel-drive truck and pay for it on the spot with a heap of $100 bills.

At local travel agencies, people would use bundles of $100 bills to buy airplane tickets, allowing them to flee the long, rainy winter and visit sunny tropical climes. In the spring, they returned with more $100 bills to buy miles of irrigation pipe and bat guano fertilizer.

Those were the days, Fitch said, when a lot of people welcomed northwestern California’s world-reknowned marijuana growers as a boon to the area’s sagging timber- and fishing-based economy.

Loss of Tolerance

Those days are gone. As the industry grew--both in size and reputation--its problems grew with it, and growers lost much of the local support, or at least tolerance, they once enjoyed.

“The whole thing has been overblown a little bit,” said Michael Scannel, an economic analyst for Mendocino County. “People get it in their minds that it (marijuana) is grown everywhere and that people here are glad to have it--and that is just not true.”

Stepped-up law-enforcement efforts to eradicate North Coast pot crops--especially the paramilitary Campaign Against Marijuana Planting now in its third year--have caused many growers to go underground. They continue to grow in the area, but now they spend their money in big cities, where their telltale cash purchases are harder to trace.

Although their benefit is gone, their drawbacks remain: Violent crime and hard drugs are more common, police costs strain local budgets, image problems threaten the tourist trade and local residents are left with an uneasy sense that it is unsafe to wander too far into the mountains and redwood forests.

Reports of Shootings

Last fall brought a rash of reports about people being accosted or even shot when they walked into parts of the forest--including state and federally owned lands--that are planted with marijuana and jealously guarded with booby traps and shotguns.

“They make it downright unpleasant to live here from August to October,” said Paul Ehrlich, a farmer from Petrolia, a tiny town in the remote mountain areas favored by growers. He was referring to the fall harvest season, when growers are forced to guard their lucrative crop from poachers.

“A friend of mine, a retired postal worker, loves to hike around the hills here, but he is afraid to do it in the fall,” Ehrlich added. “It’s not just the danger; at that time of year you just run into a lot of strangers who are just nasty and unfriendly.”

About 75% of the state’s $2-billion marijuana crop is estimated to be grown in the so-called Emerald Triangle--Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity counties. The quantity bothers even counterculture refugees who moved here during the back-to-the-earth movement of the early 1970s.

Most of them are willing to tolerate people who grow marijuana for their own use or for sale to their friends as a way to supplement low wages paid by many local businesses. They are less happy with large growers who come from Los Angeles and San Francisco in search of huge profits.

“The people who grow more than 10 (marijuana) plants are looked down on in this community,” said Paul Katzeff, a Fort Bragg coffee importer. “They are considered greed-heads, here only for themselves.

‘Danger in the Woods’

“They bring crime; they bring danger in the woods; they bring the police. They don’t grow just to live here. They grow to go on vacation for six months out of the year in Mexico or Geneva. They don’t contribute anything to the community.”

Although it is difficult to tell whether the important tourism industry has been hurt by the attention marijuana growing attracts--including stories last year about booby traps, beatings and other violence--local residents agree that it has not helped.

“You can be anywhere on earth, and when people see Mendocino on a passport, they don’t talk about the coast or the redwoods. They say, ‘Oh, that is where the green stuff is from!’ ” said Fitch, sales manager at Ken Fowler Motors. “It happened to me the last time I went to Europe.”

Indeed, Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Floyd Gustin said he recently received a call from Scotland Yard because potent sensemilla marijuana--the kind that has made Northern California’s reputation--was arriving in England packed in brown paper bags from a Garberville grocery store.

“Some people, they hear so much about it that as soon as they cross the county line, they start looking for marijuana growing alongside the road,” said Norm Vollman, an assistant district attorney in Mendocino County.

Most distressing to local residents are news accounts of last fall’s drug-related crime--three murders, one booby trap that crippled a teen-ager, assorted beatings and assaults and more than a few warning shots. No one challenges the accuracy of the reports, only the impression they give of the area.

‘Black Eye’ for Community

“It gives the entire community a black eye,” said Jeanie Heise of Ukiah.

“I just got a call from a man in Arizona who wanted a reservation,” said Rachel Binah, owner of a fashionable bed-and-breakfast inn in the small town of Little River on the Mendocino coast. “But first he asked, ‘Is it safe?’ It is crazy what people think.”

A Garberville merchant who asked not to be identified, explaining that being associated with the marijuana trade is bad for business, said:

“People mail us things from the London Times and all these papers from all over the world, and it makes it seem like people (here) are carrying guns and shooting each other all the time.”

“I know people are talking about it; some are afraid of being shot,” said Al Norris, executive vice president of the Ukiah Chamber of Commerce. “But, really, it’s less of a problem than you’d think. It (marijuana growing) all goes on in rural areas, 20 miles from here.”

Perhaps the marijuana-related myth most irritating to local residents is the notion that the pot trade is making them wealthy.

“If we’re all so rich,” grumbled one Ukiah bar patron who declined to be identified, “how come we’re all so poor?”

Indeed, figures compiled by Mendocino County show that in 1982 its average household income was $13,000--nearly 19% below the state average. Even conceding that illegal income from marijuana growing would not be reported, people here say the statistics show there has been no economic multiplier effect.

Also in 1982--the most recent period for which comparable statistics are available--the county had triple the number of welfare recipients as nearby Marin County, even though it had only one-third the number of residents.

This is in addition to a chronic, crushing 14% unemployment rate, which is twice the state average.

“This county has been impacted, no doubt, but not in the positive way a lot of people think,” said Scannel, the county analyst.

“There is no way to measure it,” said Norris of the Chamber of Commerce. “I know the agriculture commissioner tried to report on it--he concluded it was a major industry--but that’s only a guess. Nobody knows for sure because, obviously, nobody keeps records.”

Some residents are convinced that marijuana growing, even at its peak three to five years ago, is a net drain on the economy.

“It was making those who participated in it rich,” said Hank De Warns, a motel owner in Garberville. “They grow it out in the hills, they live out in the hills, and they process it out in the hills. Then they take the money and go to Mexico or the Caribbean over the winter to spend it.”

However, other people, even those who oppose marijuana growing, think that although marijuana money may never have been as helpful as some people believe, its loss still could hurt the region’s economy.

“I know it’s a cash crop, and I know a lot of that cash is spent in the county,” said Bill Lindsteadt, director of the private Mendocino Development Corp. “How much? No one knows. But, I tell you that if everyone as a token gesture stopped growing it today, we’d feel the impact tomorrow. There would be a measurable, noticeable drop in the economy.”

Richard Jay Moller, an anti-Campaign Against Marijuana Planting attorney in the small Humboldt County town of Redway, said people may not need such a voluntary ban to notice the effects of marijuana money.

“I think CAMP will be successful in driving out people who bought property here in the last, say, four years, at inflated prices and hoped to pay it off with pot,” he said. “There are going to be a lot of foreclosures.”

Humboldt County Dist. Atty. Terry Farmer said growers have helped create a “bootlegger economy” that may benefit a few local businesses, but not enough to compensate for lost business elsewhere or added law enforcement costs.

“It’s a hot topic of conversation around here because people’s attitudes are changing,” he said. Many local people, he added, were surprised to learn that marijuana is “so valuable that some people are willing to kill to obtain it and some people are willing to kill to protect it.”

“I think a consensus is developing that something ought to be done to stop it,” he said.

Something is being done: CAMP, the federal and state marijuana-eradication program, and a companion campaign by the Internal Revenue Service to catch growers on tax-evasion charges.

CAMP’s well-publicized helicopter assaults on marijuana gardens have been criticized by some residents, several of whom have filed a federal court suit to protect themselves against allegedly illegal searches and other excesses. But the program is considered a success in many ways.

Farmer said CAMP rounded up perhaps 70% of the illegal weed known to have been grown last fall in targeted areas, although those areas were relatively small. But it was enough to force many growers to avoid going into towns and to spend their money outside Northern California.

“It’s nothing like people’s ideas of paying for cars with wheelbarrows of cash,” Fitch said. “It used to be that way, but not anymore--not anywhere along the coast north of San Francisco.”

“It (marijuana growing) is still here; don’t get me wrong,” said Gustin, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department sergeant based in Garberville. “It’s just that they are not as brazen about it as they used to be.”

Brazen or not, many people in the region hope the big commercial growers leave the area--and take the marijuana raiders, airborne police and “pot war” publicity with them.