COLUMN ONE : Pot Is Still a Growth Industry : The crafty marijuana producers of Humboldt County have survived despite government efforts to wipe them out. Public tolerance and the drug’s profit potential make eradication difficult.

Grant Mason lives in a rugged glen off a muddy road deep in the woods of southern Humboldt County. He grows much of what he eats, which, judging by his lean appearance, isn’t much at all. Like many of his neighbors, he also grows marijuana.

At first it was a personal thing--just a few plants to feed an old habit and share with friends. Now it’s a bigger deal, a cash crop that earns him about $40,000 a year, a decent living in a depressed region where a living isn’t easy to make.

“It helps pay the bills,” said Mason, 46, whose name was changed for this story. “Growing’s risky nowadays, but it lets me live here in this harmonious, beautiful place.”

Eleven years ago, California launched a war against Mason and other cultivators of the emerald plant with the distinctive leaves and smokable buds. Declaring marijuana a menace that was turning public lands into violent pockets of lawlessness, state narcotics agents joined with federal and local authorities in a quest to eradicate the illicit crop.

The bull’s-eye in their paramilitary-style campaign was Humboldt County, a thinly populated region identified by the government as California’s champion pot producer. Here the anti-marijuana forces have made their biggest and most dramatic stand, using helicopters and armed agents to conduct massive raids on sprawling plantations in the hills.

Although precise measurements of the campaign’s success are impossible, there is little doubt that it has fallen short of its ambitious eradication goal. Although many large-scale growers have been jailed or chased elsewhere by intense enforcement, many others have remained, devising new techniques to stay one step ahead of the law.

Some growers have moved their operations indoors, where the plants grow smaller but the controlled climate and sophisticated lighting allow for three or four harvests a year. Others conceal gardens beneath the forest canopy, or plant in portable containers.

Demonstrating a creative touch, some growers decorate their crop with red Christmas ornaments to make them look like tomato plants from the air. Others go further, altering the bright green marijuana leaves with dyes and paints.

“It’s amazing the lengths they go to,” said Sheriff’s Sgt. Steve Cobine, chief of Humboldt County’s Marijuana Eradication Team. “But there’s big money to be made in dope, so I suppose it’s worth it.”

Community tolerance for marijuana, meanwhile, remains a visible, if not dominant, characteristic of life in redwood country. High Times sits beside Field and Stream on magazine racks, and “Rod Deal and the I Deals”--a home-grown reggae band whose songs condemn anti-pot crusaders--is one of the most popular acts around.

Many residents say they view pot as a benign drug undeserving of the government’s decade-long, multimillion-dollar crackdown. Last month, 425 locals sent a petition to U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, urging her to reconsider drug laws and the use of federal funds for the marijuana war.

Others oppose marijuana’s use and cultivation, but are weary of the eradication campaign. They say its helicopters have shattered the tranquillity they prize and say they believe the widely publicized raids have saddled the region with a negative image that hurts tourism.

“I’m no supporter of marijuana growers,” said Barbara Boyd, a Beverly Hills transplant who lives in the town of Redway, “but the helicopters make this place feel like a police state. It’s dreadful. . . . You start to wonder if all the suffering we’re put through is really worth it.”

Commanders of California’s battle against marijuana insist that it is. They concede that the eradication mission is not yet accomplished but say they have chased off--or locked up--many of Humboldt’s biggest commercial growers, while forcing others to grow less.

The average size of marijuana gardens busted here is considerably smaller than the vast plots raided in the early ‘80s, and officials believe this, coupled with the steady rise in marijuana’s market price, shows that supply is down.

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“There is no way we’ll ever stop everybody from growing marijuana, because the incentives are too great, and there is too much land out there for us to cover,” said Dale Ferranto, commander of the state-run, federally funded Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, known as CAMP. “But it’s not running wild like before.”

Local officials are less upbeat. In fact, they say Humboldt’s marijuana industry enjoyed a resurgence this year. They suspect the end of the drought, an ailing economy, and cuts in both CAMP and the county eradication teams tempted many to plant a crop.

“I wish I could call it a standoff, but it’s not. They’re still way ahead,” Cobine said of his pot-producing foes. Growing “is all people have to do up here. They can’t cut trees anymore, they can’t catch fish anymore. So a lot of them turn to dope.”

Indeed, marijuana growing is not the exclusive domain of aging flower children. This year, those busted included a native son who owned the Garberville sand and gravel company. Just three months after he was profiled by his hometown newspaper, Chuck Studebaker was arrested in June when agents seized weapons, about $20,000 in cash and more than 4,000 plants.

Beyond such anecdotes are statistics supporting the belief that 1993 has been a busy growing season. Through November, Humboldt County’s marijuana raiders had confiscated more than 95,400 plants. Despite staff reductions, that is almost double the number seized last year and marks the highest figure since 1983, when about 120,000 plants were found.

Because today’s plants are much smaller than the towering specimens of a decade ago--and thus produce a smaller volume of potent buds--those numbers are deceptive. But growers need less marijuana to make a living now, experts say, for two reasons: The concentration of THC, the drug’s active ingredient, is about six times what it was a decade ago, and pot’s price has soared, from $1,200 a pound in the early 1980s, to as much as $6,000 a pound today.

In the past, confirms Mason, “I needed a fair-sized garden--a few hundred plants or so--to make my year. With the price up, I can plant three or four dozen and do all right.”

Mason, who has grown marijuana for nearly 20 years, arrived here in the late 1960s as part of the back-to-the-land movement. Seeking a peaceful, isolated place to pursue a life close to the earth, he and other immigrants built homesteads in the southern Humboldt woods and brought a counterculture flavor to a region long dominated by loggers.

They also brought marijuana, which, in the beginning, was viewed much like squash in the garden--part of the daily diet, to be consumed and perhaps shared with a neighbor, and nothing more.

Gradually, however, some homesteaders discovered that selling could augment their meager incomes. Cultivation techniques evolved, and Humboldt soon became internationally renowned for a particularly potent seedless variety, sinsemilla.

As word of the fledgling industry spread in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, outsiders bought up huge tracts of land or brazenly planted crops in the national forest. The newcomers dramatically altered the marijuana business--and the complexion of the community.

Growing “started out as a fairly innocent thing here--honest people with high integrity making an honest living in an illegal trade,” said Paul Bassis, a filmmaker and band manager who left Queens, N.Y., for Humboldt in 1976. “Then suddenly, all these greedy opportunists moved in with the sole purpose of getting rich off the land. They had no interest in the betterment of our community.”

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In a sense, the marijuana boom was a mixed blessing for Garberville, population about 1,400, and other towns. Land values soared. Merchants reaped a bonanza from the huge sums that growers spent.

In the spring, hardware stores sold piles of irrigation pipe, exotic fertilizer and other horticultural staples. After the fall harvest, growers bought magnums of Dom Perignon, new cars and plane tickets to warmer climes, often using paper sacks full of $100 bills for their purchases.

But some residents also remember a downside, because the new breed of growers were not necessarily the neighborly type. Many hired armed guards or rigged booby traps to protect their plots.

Bea Anderson, who owns a real estate company in Garberville, recalled hearing gunfire and spotting a booby trap while showing parcels in the woods: “For several years, we refused to list property for absentee owners during harvest time because it was just too dangerous to show it.”

Such reports spurred the government to form CAMP in 1983. The bulk of the program’s eradication effort occurs in late summer, when state agents and deputies from sheriff’s departments throughout California converge in search-and-destroy missions, whacking down marijuana gardens in areas targeted through aerial surveillance. CAMP’s aggressive, sophisticated approach has made it a national model in law enforcement circles.

Along the way, however, CAMP has riled some residents who say their rights to privacy and peace have been violated by low-flying helicopters and other intrusions.

Ed Denson runs a folk music recording company from his home in Alderpoint, a village over a ridge from Garberville. Much of his time, however, is spent leading the Citizens Observation Group, formed in the 1980s to document alleged abuses by CAMP personnel.

“I really didn’t care much about marijuana when I moved up here,” Denson said. “But when I saw CAMP in action, I got outraged.”

Denson and other members of the Observation Group field phone calls from residents responding to flyers requesting reports on CAMP activities. Callers’ reports are then passed on to Garberville’s radio station, KMUD, which broadcasts CAMP’s whereabouts along with other announcements on its daily public safety report.

Fred Bauer breeds parrots at his ranch in Ettersburg. He says CAMP’s helicopters routinely cause his rare birds to crash into their wire aviary and die, or die from panic.

“I’ve talked to them (CAMP), I’ve sued them, I’ve even painted my roof Caltrans orange to keep them away, but they keep coming back, every year,” Bauer said. “In waging their totally futile war, they’ve cost me tens of thousands of dollars.”

Through the years, lawsuits against CAMP have resulted in legal restrictions on the raids, such as the 500-foot ceiling below which helicopters now cannot fly. But complaints continue, and resentment remains.

A few restaurants in town refuse to serve CAMP personnel, and team members say they have been verbally harassed, pelted with produce and had their tires slashed.

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Cobine, who has been fighting the marijuana war since 1973, said he sought permission this year to use a closed-down schoolyard in Alderpoint as a landing spot for a helicopter. The school superintendent approved the idea until an outcry from nearby residents derailed the plan.

“There’s a certain hostile attitude in southern Humboldt,” Cobine said. “Basically, it’s ‘We hate your guts.’ ”

Like CAMP’s commanders in Sacramento, Cobine is anxious about the future, worried that funding cuts and shifting priorities will erode support. This year, CAMP’s budget was one-eighth of that in peak years, and criticism of the war on drugs appears to be spreading.

Earlier this month, U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders recommended that the government study the idea of legalizing drugs. Even leading conservatives such as William F. Buckley have begun to question spending scarce dollars on programs such as CAMP.

“Waging this crazy war on marijuana is an incredible waste, because they will never succeed,” said Joseph MacNamara, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and former police chief of San Jose. “In fact, it’s been a prophecy of doom. The more they crack down, the longer the prison terms, the more profit there is in selling pot to those who continue to want it.”

Such words ring true with many here in the redwoods, where 500 people celebrated the marijuana plant’s varied uses at the Humboldt Hemp Fest last month. Ted Kogon, a 20-year Garberville resident who wrote the petition to Janet Reno, said, “It’s time for CAMP to pack up and go home.

“They’ve spent zillions of dollars up here over the last 11 years, and they haven’t changed the attitudes here one bit,” Kogon said. “They tried, but people here just don’t believe marijuana is the evil substance they claim it is.”

Times researcher Norma Kaufman in San Francisco contributed to this story.