Mendo
About This Book
Mendocino County, known locally as Mendo, sits inside California's Emerald Triangle, a thinly populated stretch of country that has produced billions of dollars' worth of marijuana. Since the 1970s, nearly everyone who lives there has either worked in the pot trade or benefited from it, and that includes the government. Charlie Harris's narrative history follows how this one county built an illegal industry that ended up reshaping the world around it, even helping to launch the solar power business along the way. The county's culture came from an unlikely pairing. Back-to-the-land hippies leaving San Francisco settled alongside longtime residents with traditional, conservative views. The two groups had little in common apart from a deep distrust of authority and a shared need for new livelihoods once logging pulled out of the region. Out of that necessity grew a close-knit, backwoods outlaw culture. For more than fifty years, the book shows, this crowd of iconoclasts kept Mendocino County going through illegal cultivation. They also worked out a legal framework that decriminalization efforts elsewhere in the United States have since adopted. Harris tells the story with humor and a good eye for the characters involved. Now that the weed industry is coming out of the shadows, Mendo faces possible economic ruin once again. Its struggle echoes what is happening across the country, where industries that long supported working-class towns are fading, bringing hardship and political division. Like the nation, Mendo is trying to work out who it is in the twenty-first century.
ISBN: 9781640096912
You might also like
Unlock Exclusive Content
Experience the hidden layers of 'Mendo'. Scan the book cover with the Appilog mobile app to see behind-the-scenes videos, author reviews, and interactive digital stories.
Available on iOS & Android
