British historian Charlie Harris spent years living with his sources in Mendocino County to write Mendo, the first full history of how a logged-out fishing-and-timber county became the cannabis capital of the Americas. He and Richard — a Mendocino resident since 1975 who watched much of it happen — trace the whole arc: the Back to the Land migration, weed as currency, the homestead wars that united hippies and loggers against the government, Reagan’s helicopter raids and the invention of asset forfeiture, the genetics that made California weed famous, and what legalization actually did to prices, potency, and the people who built the industry.
Guest: Charlie Harris — historian and writer; eight years with Oxford University’s Global History of Capitalism Project; author of Mendo: How an Unlikely Group of Rebels Turned Cannabis into California’s Cash Crop (Counterpoint Press, June 2026). Available from Counterpoint, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent bookstore — Charlie asks you to try the indie first.
Chapters
00:00 — Cold open: stories that were never written down
00:31 — Welcome: what happened in Mendocino County
02:24 — Picked up hitchhiking, dropped on a pot farm
06:33 — From trimmer to Oxford historian
08:47 — “Get these stories written down before they disappear”
11:42 — Logging, fishing, and the collapse that emptied the land
14:28 — Back to the Land: the largest urban-to-rural migration in history
17:47 — “We couldn’t grow gasoline”: weed becomes currency
20:21 — The homesteading wars: red tags and a common enemy
22:47 — Hippies, rednecks, and the hipnecks
27:46 — Reagan sends in the helicopters: CAMP, 1983
30:40 — Asset forfeiture is invented in Mendocino County
32:01 — “The campaign to aid marijuana prices”
33:19 — Indica genetics: California weed gets good
35:30 — Traffic reports for police convoys
37:30 — Medical marijuana, 1996: everything changes
40:27 — Overproduction and the price collapse
44:24 — Hedge funds, Flow Kana, and the economics of legalization
48:36 — “Nobody wants stronger weed”: the THC arms race
53:04 — What they smoke in England
56:44 — The book: Mendo
58:07 — “I have a lot of hope for America”: gratitude and close
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