I live in the heart of the Emerald Triangle, where the air turns skunky in the fall and everyone seems to be paying with sticky hundreds at the grocery store, even, perhaps especially, the people in ratty, tattered clothes, who totter out to the parking lot with their organic cheese doodles to remotely unlock their $60,000 German cars. The grow houses in my neighbourhood blow out the transformer so regularly that when I call PG&E to report another outage, they say ‘Stewart Street, again?’ Shrewd Craigslist browsers look for the keyword ’215′ in listings, a reference to Proposition 215, California’s 1996 medical marijuana initiative, to see if prospective landlords will be down with a little dope in the backyard. When I travel and say I’m from Mendocino, I either get a blank look or ‘oh, Mendo, I had some really good weed from there once.’

Proposition 19, The Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010, is perhaps the hottest measure on California’s 2 November ballot (although the controversial Proposition 23 is also rather important) and it’s attracting nationwide attention. California already has some of the most liberal marijuana policy in the nation, including the first regulation allowing medical use. Locally, Mendocino County voters in 2000 approved Measure G, an initiative to decriminalise cultivation and possession of marijuana for personal use, making it a low priority for law enforcement, only to repeal it in 2008 with Measure B, reflecting some of the cracks and flaws in the legalisation movement, where opposition to legalisation comes from some surprising places. Continue reading →