The CAMP Raids: Helicopters Over Mendocino

When the redwood and Douglas-fir timber industry collapsed across Mendocino, Trinity, and Humboldt counties in the nineteen seventies, it did not leave a vacuum. The remote ridges and canyon drainages that had hidden the mills now hid something else.

Cannabis cultivation had been spreading through the inland hills since the late nineteen sixties, carried by the back-to-the-land movement that brought thousands of people from the Bay Area to these mountains to build a different kind of life. By the middle of the decade, growing marijuana on the inland ridges had become a primary source of cash income for whole communities, replacing the timber wages that had evaporated. The economy was real, the scale was significant, and it was entirely outside the legal system.

The state and federal response came in nineteen eighty-three. The Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, known as CAMP, assembled over one hundred law enforcement agencies under the direction of the California Department of Justice, with participation from the National Guard, the Forest Service, the BLM, and the DEA. At its peak, CAMP conducted paramilitary operations across Northern California's rural counties using helicopters, automatic weapons, and tactics borrowed from military counterinsurgency doctrine. National Geographic covered the CAMP teams in Mendocino County in June of nineteen ninety-three. German television broadcast a documentary on the same operations in nineteen ninety-five.

CAMP ran for nearly thirty years and failed to stop cultivation. It succeeded, instead, in militarizing the communities it targeted and driving the industry deeper into hidden terrain.

In twenty sixteen, California voters legalized recreational cannabis. The same families who had survived CAMP now faced a transition to licensed cultivation that required capital they did not have. The large commercial operators moved into the market; the small ridge-farm cultivators, the people who had built the industry during the prohibition years, found that legalization was designed around business models, not around them.

The ridges east of this road are the same ridges where those helicopters flew.