From Outlaw Hills to Economic Crossroads: New Book Tells Mendo’s Story

One thing RHBB has learned after decades of covering the Emerald Triangle: people around here love reading about themselves.

Maybe it’s because we’ve spent so much of our history tucked away in the hills, doing things our own way. Maybe it’s because every family has a story that sounds too strange to be true but somehow is. Or maybe it’s because we all secretly want to see if we’re one of the “iconoclastic characters” someone else is writing about.

That’s why we suspect Charlie Harris’s new book, Mendo: The Rise and Fall of an American Narcostate, is going to find plenty of readers on the North Coast.

The book traces the unlikely alliance of back-to-the-land hippies, old-timer locals, and outlaw cannabis growers who built an economy that sustained Mendocino County for generations after the decline of logging.

 Many of us know people who grew cannabis, trimmed it, sold supplies to growers, rented homes to workers, hauled water, repaired generators, poured concrete, ran restaurants, or otherwise depended on the green economy that shaped life throughout the Emerald Triangle.

And let’s be honest: half the fun of books like this is wondering if someone you know—or maybe someone who swore they’d never end up in a book—is hidden somewhere in the pages.

Mendo: The Rise and Fall of an American Narcostate will be released June 23 by Counterpoint Press but you can buy it today here.

Press release from Counterpoint Press:

MENDO
The Rise and Fall
of an American Narcostate
By CHARLIE HARRIS
On sale from Counterpoint JUNE 23, 2026 9781640096912
US $28.00 / $35.00 CAN | # pages | NONFICTION
ebook US $14.99 / $17.99 CAN | Hardcover | 5.5 x 8.25 Distributed to the trade by Penguin Random House
On Sale June 23, 2026

Publicity contact:
Andrea Cordova, Senior Publicist, [email protected]

A whip-smart and entertaining work of narrative history about marijuana cultivation in Mendocino County, California and how it mirrors economic struggles facing rural communities nationwide

Since the 1970s, virtually every inhabitant of Mendo has either been directly involved in the pot trade or been a beneficiary of it. Every industry in the county depends on weed. But how did we get here?
The Mendo we know today was formed by the confluence of back-to-the-land hippies fleeing San Francisco and long-time locals who held traditional conservative beliefs. While these two groups had little in common, they did share a strong anti-authoritarianism streak and a need to create new opportunities after the logging industry retreated from the region. From this uncommon alliance arose a tight-knit, backwoods, outlaw culture. For over fifty years, this cabal has not only sustained the county through the illegal cultivation of marijuana, but it has also developed a de facto legal framework, becoming, in the process, a proxy for the story of weed across the United States. It’s a fascinating and often humorous story that intersects with the counterculture and the War on Drugs; with race, class, and capitalism; with climate change and increasingly destructive wildfires; and features an extraordinary cast of iconoclastic characters and corrupt government officials who all colluded to keep a community afloat. But the very things that make Mendo ideal for
black-market weed—rugged terrain bordering the Pacific Ocean, winding two-lane highways descending into dense and fecund redwood forests, and a cheerful disregard for the rule of law—are ill-suited to a legal industry rapidly being overtaken by massive corporations.
Today, Mendo is back where it started, on the precipice of economic ruin. The story of scrappy Mendo is a bellwether for rural America facing extinction at the hands of large-scale, consolidated power.

CHARLIE HARRIS is a writer and researcher from the United Kingdom who has done his time on America’s west coast. He left the pot industry for academia, where he has worked since 2018 as a writer for Oxford University’s Global History of Capitalism Project.

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