The closing of the marijuana frontier: California is not just deciding whether pot should be legal. It's determining the shape of a major new American industry.

• Author: Gravois, John

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When my wife and I bought a house last year in the little town of Ukiah, California, the first person to offer us advice about growing marijuana was our realtor. The house was a stolid 1909 prairie box that had been partitioned into four units, with a front porch, dark green trim, and a couple of fruit trees in the yard. It was charming, but we probably would have settled for a yurt. What mattered most to us was having a foothold in Mendocino County, a place we had long ago decided was the most beautiful in America.

Our realtor, however, drew our attention to the house's electrical meters. There were four in total, one for each unit. If we ever wanted to grow a few indoor pot gardens, he said, we had an ideal setup. I laughed and thanked him for the tip.

Then the advice kept coming. A neighbor offered to help me get started with a few plants whenever I was ready. The owner of a local hydroponics supply store shook my hand and encouraged me to stop by his warehouse. "We'll set you up," he said. Ukiah, I realized, was weirder than I thought.

I'd always known that pot was a huge part of the county's livelihood, accounting for two-thirds of the local economy, by some estimates. But in eight years of visiting the place with my wife--including one gloriously unsuccessful four-month experiment in backcountry living--I'd never so much as set eyes on a seven-fingered leaf. Then, last year, I began exploring the region's cannabis economy in earnest, setting out for dirt roads in the hills and basements in Ukiah, occasionally wearing a blindfold.

Gradually a new picture of Mendocino County began to emerge. Neighborhoods in town were dotted with light-flooded outbuildings packed with plants, quietly paying the mortgages of those who tended them. And the county's amber and green hills were full of homesteaders who for decades had been leading the kind of existence we'd once failed at--men and women who'd come for the land but managed to stay because of marijuana. Many had built their own off-grid homes and outfitted them with elaborate solar arrays, potbellied stoves, and well-tended gardens. In an age of homemade baby food, fire-escape agriculture, and home-brew chic, they'd achieved an almost mythical ideal: economic independence derived from a small piece of earth.

The rub, of course, was that these paragons of yeoman virtue were often antisocial, paranoid wrecks. Marijuana's high price under prohibition made it possible to earn a decent living from a small patch, but someone was always losing a crop, fleeing into the woods, or going to jail. "It's like the sharks come in and just eat a few people," one grower told me. Mendocino County, in short, is as tortured by prohibition as it is dependent on it. But what agonizes the county even more these days is the thought that it could all be coming to an end.

On November 2, Californians go to the polls to vote on whether to start treating cannabis as just another adult recreational drug. The Regulate, Control, and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010--also known as Proposition 19--would legalize the possession and cultivation of pot in small amounts for adults, while handing the authority to regulate commercial marijuana production and distribution down to counties and cities. Polls as of this writing show that the measure might well pass. If it does, the Rand Corporation predicts that the price of marijuana will fall by as much as 80 percent. But even if the referendum doesn't pass, a new initiative will almost certainly reach the ballot in 2012, and growers, dispensary owners, and pro-pot local governments will continue to test the boundaries of the state's fourteen-year-old medical marijuana law. Whatever happens on November 2, the edifice of prohibition is crumbling in California, and one of the largest informal economies in America is inexorably emerging into the mainstream.

In the process, a great scramble has commenced. A sundry cast of industrialists and old-line homesteaders, cartel growers, and hipster dispensary owners are fighting to determine the future of California's largest cash crop. In a replay of history as both tragedy and farce, the mainstreaming of marijuana promises to revive a host of old American dramas: from the contending but always recessive vision of the nation as a prosperous agrarian republic, to the country's founding relationship with lucrative mind-altering substances, to the frenzied migrations of the gold rush, to the industrialization of agriculture, and the closing of the western frontier. Rarely have these events reached conclusions that were altogether happy or fair. The forces of consolidation and backroom politics have usually benefited the big at the expense of the small. But is there any chance that this time, in a comedy of stoners, the story of American industry might find a different end?

In the early-morning hours of October 8, 2009, a category-one typhoon made landfall on the southern coast of Japan, killing two men, shutting down twelve Toyota factories, and suspending rail service across Tokyo. Then it pushed back out to sea and vanished over the cold expanse of the North Pacific. A few days later the front reappeared off the coast of Northern California. In Mendocino County, news of the approaching storm rousted a throng of dusty vehicles from the hills, causing traffic jams and long lines at supply stores in Ukiah, the county seat. The backcountry's marijuana growers, hurrying to prepare for a forced harvest, were out in full strength.

I happened to be riding shotgun in one of those dusty vehicles, a creaking white delivery van driven by a blue-eyed, ponytailed marijuana grower named Matthew Cohen. A lanky thirty-two-year-old with wraparound shades and a goatee, Cohen had agreed to show me the ropes of harvest season.

The inland hills of Mendocino County reliably see no rainfall between the months of May and October, an interval during which the sun blazes, as one 1880 history of the area put it, "as if fully determined to prove to mankind that it can shine more fervidly to-day than it did yesterday." That plenitude of sun, which is shared by Mendocino's neighbors, Humboldt and Trinity counties, has helped cement the region's status as the capital of American cannabis production--known collectively as the "Emerald Triangle." Topography has also helped. The region is essentially a crumple zone emanating from an offshore junction of three tectonic plates. Seen from the air, it resembles a sheet of green aluminum foil that has been tightly balled up and then only loosely flattened out. The area spreads from the Pacific in the west to the mountains above the Central Valley in the east in a shatter-pattern of canyons, occasional bowl-like valleys, and arcing slopes. It's virtually unpoliceable.

With full sun, healthy marijuana plants in Mendocino County can reach heights of fifteen feet. But fully grown specimens--gangly things--break up in wet weather. The outdoor cannabis growing season thus becomes a race to bring one's crop to maturity before the first heavy October rains, whose forecast each year ordains a rare moment of synchronicity in an otherwise atomized trade. Every farmer with plants in the sun has to bring them down at the same time.

Like most of his peers, Cohen was on his way into town to pick up supplies for his trimmers, the laborers who break the resinous crop down into so many perfect little buds, working as fast as possible to get the product out to market. It's painstaking, labor-intensive work, and getting stoned in the process is hard to avoid--so snacks are important. Our first stop was the Ukiah Natural Foods Cooperative, the area's premier depot for goods like solar-brewed beer, organic corn chips, and Tofurkey.

In one of the aisles, Cohen slowed his shopping cart to chat with another grower about the approaching storm. "Big one," said the other guy with a hint of melodrama. "Like 1.8 inches, high winds. So--keep that in mind." The store had the feeling of a base camp before an expedition.

In search of Pepsi, we headed across the street to Safeway. Just inside the automatic doors was a large product display at the head of an aisle. "Turkey bags," Cohen said. "You ever heard of these?"

A turkey bag, I learned, is a Reynolds product designed for roasting poultry. It also happens to be the industry-standard container for transporting pounds of pot. The chemical properties that keep a plastic roasting bag from melting in a 3SOdegree oven also make it impervious to the skunk smell of marijuana. "I've seen guys buy cases of 'em," said the checkout clerk, dragging two boxes of turkey bags for Cohen across the infrared scanner. He looked up with a grin. "I mean, I guess they could use them to cook turkeys."

By now I was beginning to recognize the signs of harvest everywhere. At Home Depot, just down the road, bins near the checkout lanes heaved with Fiskars Pruning Snips--small florist's shears that are the tool of choice for marijuana trimmers. On Highway lox on the way out of town, Cohen and I zoomed past several hitchhikers--would-be trimmers--stationed along each of Ukiah's dry brown interchanges. One of them, thumb out, wore a pair of pruning snips on a piece of twine around his...