MENDO: How an Unlikely Group of Rebels Turned Cannabis into California’s Cash Crop
At the end of the sixties, Northern California’s timber industry collapsed. So did the colorful optimism of the hippie movement.
Hippies fled San Francisco in search of a rural paradise and found themselves in Mendo – Mendocino County, on the remote Northern Californian coast. There, they collided with the longtime locals clinging on to the land as logging jobs left. The two camps had fairly little in common, besides a strong antiauthoritarian streak and a need for new economic opportunity. That was enough: by the 1980s Mendocino County was a core part of what the federal government dubbed the “Emerald Triangle” – a sprawling, rugged patch of Northern California that produced the vast majority of America’s pot.
The forests, and the rednecks and hippies within it, were on the frontline of America’s drug war. For fifty years, Mendo’s economy, government, culture, and sense of self revolved around black market pot cultivation. Suddenly, in 2016, California legalized recreational marijuana and the nascent legal industry decided that weed no longer needed to be grown deep in the backwoods by a cabal of misfits and outlaws.
Today, Mendocino County faces deep insecurity as the weed industry stumbles out from the shadows, and California’s wildfire seasons grow more ferocious. It faces the same challenges as so many rural communities across America, where the industries that have long sustained working class communities are in late-stage decline.
Mendocino County, like America itself, is fighting to find itself in the twenty-first century.
COMING WITH COUNTERPOINT PRESS, JUNE 2026
Preorder here, if you’re into that kind of thing. Check out the Goodreads here, add me to your list, you get it.
I’ll probably get in trouble if I tell you not to order it from Amazon, so I’ll stop just short of that.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR MENDO:
"Mendo is a brilliantly observed history of an outlaw economy and the people who lived by it. Charlie Harris writes with rare clarity and humor about cannabis, community, and the quiet violence of economic transition—capturing a forgotten America at the moment it slips into the light."
—Norman Ohler, author of Blitzed and Tripped
“Charlie Harris makes magic out of unlikely figures that otherwise might be lost to history. There are police chases, environmental activists, and nuanced policy explorations. You feel like you've gone back to the land yourself. But this book ultimately isn't just about marijuana or a winding region of Northern California—it's really about this country and where it stands today."
—Nick Neely, author of Alta California
"Little understood by Californians, little known by Americans, Mendocino County has finally received the fast and compelling history it deserves. Charlie Harris tells us about the people, the process, the politics, and the business of marijuana, along with the government’s attack, and how they came together to shape an extraordinary place."
—Steven Stoll, author of Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia
“Riveting reading as Harris vividly spotlights both the militarized overkill of Reagan-era raids, which used tactics seemingly derived from the Vietnam War, and the growers’ clever countermeasures … a raucous look at the renegades that built the Emerald Triangle.”
––Starred review in Publishers Weekly
“I loved this book about the history of weed growing in Mendocino, California… There’s a must-see TV drama with this story.”
––Andy Lewis, The Optionist/Ankler Media
“You have done an incredibly thorough job of recounting a vast and diverse history of our county and particularly of its back-to-the-land and cannabis components. I was/am proudly among those folks, and am familiar with most of the people your book mentions… It’s by far the best recounting of that history I’ve ever seen. I’m happy to see it preserved. Thanks.”
––An unexpected email from a legendary old pot farmer, active since the 1970s; probably the review that means the most to me