CAMP/War on Drugs

[rich]

interesting piece here:

http://nymag.com/news/features/war-on-drugs-2012-12.

Marijuana has remained mostly illegal, even as many Americans have
come to consider it harmless and normal, and so it now occupies a
uniquely ambiguous place in American law and life. There are a few
places in the United States that have been known for decades for
marijuana—far-northern California, Kentucky—where people are
comfortable with sedition, and willing to live outside of the law. But
during the last decade, as growing and selling marijuana began to edge
out of the shadows, these places have become the sites of this
country’s first experiments with tacit decriminalization. And so the
business has shifted, too. “We have to face facts,” says a veteran
California grower named Anna Hamilton. “We are in a commodity
business.”

The full implications of this first became clear to Kristin Nevedal
one day a few years ago, when some neighbors of hers in southern
Humboldt County, four hours north of San Francisco, noticed a rainbow,
discolored and distended, rising over their yard. This part of
California is gorgeous, and hallucinatory, but even here a weird
rainbow is an unusual sight, and so they investigated. Next door was a
large indoor growing operation, and when they walked over, they saw an
abandoned generator leaking fuel into Hacker Creek. Soon there were
diesel rainbows up and down the stream. “The gentleman who owned the
property was in Thailand,” Nevedal says. Nevedal helped found the
association of cannabis growers in Humboldt, and she is a bit of an
idealist about pot. Everything about the episode—the use of diesel,
the indoor growing, the recklessness, but mostly the
absenteeism—seemed an affront. She says “Thailand” the way a Sufi
mystic might say “Dubai.”

That Humboldt County has remained so much a culture apart has
something to do with the origami folds of its canyons and hills, which
permit a certain isolation, but something more to do with pot. Driving
through Myers Flat once, I saw a dreadlocked blonde girl, obese and
braless, filling a van with male hitchhikers, like a cross between a
community bus and a gender-reversal Manson Family. Most other
back-to-the-land communes of the seventies eventually packed up and
retreated, their members quietly reabsorbed into the suburban belt.
The hippies in Humboldt had cannabis, which meant that though they
were in many ways beyond the reach of government, they could pay for
their own schools, for fire departments and private roads. They could
see a future, and so they stayed.

Still, reminders of their alienation were everywhere. By the early
eighties, the California law-enforcement agencies were conducting
annual raids (called by their acronym, CAMP). You would walk onto your
deck, on a sunny south slope, and suddenly a helicopter would be
hovering there, cops with rifles scanning the valley below.
Camouflaged swat teams jumped out of forest groves pointing guns.
“People here can be a little paranoid anyway—there were an awful lot
of Vietnam vets here early on,” one longtime grower says, and the
raids made paranoia seem reasonable. But there were side benefits to
this armed form of prohibition. One joke here is that the Campaign
Against Marijuana Planting was actually the Campaign to Appreciate
Marijuana Prices. If you were savvy enough to dodge through the forest
with helicopters overhead, carrying plants on a canvas stretcher, if
you knew how to trim a tall tanoak in the forest so that its topmost
branches protected the crop from view while still letting in just
enough sunlight, then you could really make it. By 1996, marijuana
here was going for $4,000 a pound.