Human subjects in this research are protected under the Committee for Protection of Human Subjects, protocol number 2018-04-1136 , of the Office for Protection of Human Subjects at UC Berkeley.Siskiyou is a large rural county located in the mid-Klamath River basin in Northern California . Since the mid-19th century, immigrants have historically engaged in agriculture, predominantly livestock grazing and hay production, and natural resource extraction, primarily timber and mining . Public records demonstrate that although the value of the county’s agricultural output and natural resource extraction is declining, these cultural livelihoods still shape the area’s dominant rural values of self-reliance, hard work and property rights . For instance, one county document stated that Siskiyou’s cultural-economic stability depends on nonintervention from “outside groups and governments” and residents should be “subject only to the rule of nature and free markets” . Another document, a “Primer for living in Siskiyou County” from the county administrator, outlined “the Code of the West” for “newcomers,” asserting that locals are “rugged individuals” who live “outside city limits,” and that the “right to be rural” protects and prioritizes working agricultural land for “economic purpose[s]” . We heard a common refrain that localities will eventually succumb to the allure of a taxable, profitable cannabis industry. Indeed, interviewees in Siskiyou universally reported economic contributions from cannabis cultivation, especially apparent in rising property values and tax rolls and booming business at horticultural, farm supply, soil, generator, food and hardware stores . However, a belief in an inevitable free market economic rationality may underestimate the deep cultural logics that have historically superseded economic gains in regional resource conflicts . As one local store owner told us, “I’d give up this new profit in a heartbeat for the benefit of our society.” Many long-time farming and ranching families remain committed to agricultural livelihoods for cultural reasons , even as the economic viability of family farms is threatened by increasing farmland financialization ,hydroponic gutter corporate consolidation and biophysical decline . Many interviewees felt that the recent rapid expansion of county cannabis cultivation and corresponding demographic changes were a visible marker of broader tensions of cultural continuity and endangerment.

As the sheriff expressed, cannabis cultivation would “jeopardize our way of life … [and] the future of our children” . This sense of cultural jeopardy , echoed by numerous interviewees, materialized in a range of negative quality-of-life comments about cannabis cultivation: noisy generators, increased traffic, litter and blighted properties, and unsafe conditions for residents. Non-cannabis farmers also reported farm equipment and water theft, livestock killed by abandoned dogs, wildfire danger, illicit chemical use and poisoned wildlife. Some non-cannabis farmers expressed a sense of regulatory unfairness — that their farms were subject to onerous water and chemical use regulations while cannabis growers “don’t need to follow the government’s regulations.” Enabling cannabis cultivators to pursue state licensure would facilitate just such civil regulation, but some feared that regulating this crop as agriculture would threaten “the loss of prime agriculturally productive lands for traditional pursuits” . If nothing less than the county’s culture and agricultural order were considered at stake, it is no wonder that absolute, even prohibitionist, solutions emerged in Siskiyou, with the Sheriff’s Office having a central role in defending local culture.Siskiyou’s sparsely populated landscape has been home to illegalized cannabis cultivators at least since the late 1960s, largely in remote, forested, and public lands in the western part of the county. Medical cannabis’s decriminalization in 1996 inaugurated a modest expansion of cannabis gardens throughout the county . However, for the next 19 years, Siskiyou did not establish regulations for medical cannabis, in line with locally dominant ideologies of personal freedoms and property rights. Instead, the county relied on de facto management of cultivation by law enforcement and the court system’s strict interpretation of state law . In 2015, informed by public workshops held by the Siskiyou County Planning Division, supervisors passed the county’s first medical cannabis ordinance, which seemingly balanced concerns of medical cultivators and other county residents. Regulation would be overseen by the Planning Division, which placed conditions on cultivation , limited plant numbers to parcel size and would establish an administrative abatement and hearing process for complaints.

The Planning Division, however, had been without code enforcement officers since 2008 budget cuts. Though the county authorized the hiring of one civil code officer in 2015, the Sheriff’s Office felt that the Planning Division “needed outside help” and moved to assist. Soon, the county’s limited abatement capacities were overwhelmed by vigorous enforcement and a wave of complainants. County supervisors, responding to the sheriff’s 2015 reports on the “proliferation” of cannabis gardens on private property, moved to heighten penalties for code violations, place numerous new restrictions on indoor growing and ban all outdoor growing . These strict county measures, which discarded and replaced publicly developed regulations, stoked reaction. When the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors met in December 2015 to vote on these measures, advocates and cultivators presented 1,500 signatures to forestall its passage, a super majority of attending residents indicated opposition, and supervisors had to curtail 3 hours of public comment to vote. Despite this showing, supervisors passed the restrictive measures, prompting cannabis advocates to collect 4,000 signatures in 17 days to place the approved ordinances on the June 2016 ballot. Meanwhile, the Sheriff’s Office enforced the new stricter regulations . The Sheriff’s Office assumption of code enforcement blurred the line between noncompliance with civil codes and criminal acts. Stricter ordinances, still in effect in Siskiyou, created a broad, nearly universal category of “noncompliance.” No one we interviewed, including officials at the Planning Division and Sheriff’s Office, knew of a single cultivator officially in compliance. One interviewee estimated that growing 12 indoor plants would cost $40,000 in physical infrastructure, in addition to numerous licensing and inspections requirements, effectively prohibiting self-provisioning. The Sheriff’s Office notified the public that it would initiate criminal charges against “non-compliant” cultivators, specifically those suspected of cultivation for sale , child endangerment or suspected drug trafficking . Since the county regulations produced a situation where no one could comply, law enforcement could effectively criminally pursue any cultivator. The slippage from civil noncompliance to criminality was mirrored in enforcement practices. Investigations were “complaint driven,” meaning not only that warrants could be issued in response to disgruntled neighbors upset about a barking dog on a cultivation site, as one person reported, but that police officers could serve as a kind of permanent, general complainant and take “proactive action” when they spotted code violations .

Administrative warrants allowed deputies to enter properties with a lower evidentiary bar than they would have needed for criminal warrants, leading one patients rights group — Siskiyou Alternative Medicine — to file a lawsuit alleging county violations of Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure . In effect, cannabis’s criminal valences in the county endured through California’s shift of cannabis from criminal to civil provenance. Formerly illegal activities continued to be formally or informally treated as criminal matters,u planting gutter as researchers have noted with other stigmatized activities and groups, for example, after the decriminalization of sex workers in Mexico . Also, enforcement of civil matters can lead to substantive criminalization when those matters are stigmatized, as in the regulation of homelessness . While it is not unique for police officers to enforce civil codes, what is unique in Siskiyou County is the assumption of the entire civil process under the sheriff’s authority. To understand how this civil process became criminally inflected, in a county that voted for statewide cannabis legalization in 2016, one must first understand significant contextual shifts in who was growing cannabis where — and the challenge this posed to dominant ideas of land use, agriculture and culture. Since 2014, cannabis gardens have emerged on many of the county’s undeveloped rural subdivisions in unincorporated areas of Siskiyou. Subdivided into over 1,000 lots each in the 1960s, these subdivisions contain many parcels that are just a few acres in size and relatively inexpensive. Previously populated mostly by white retirees, squatters and a few methamphetamine users and makers, the parcels were often bought sight-unseen as investments or potential retirement properties, with most remaining unsold and undeveloped until the mid-2010s. In 2014, these subdivisions became destinations for Hmong Americans from several places, including Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Fresno; many of them cultivated cannabis. The inexpensive, sparsely populated, rural subdivisions enabled Hmong-Americans to live in close proximity to ethnic and kin networks, which multiple interviewees expressed was especially important for elders who had migrated to the United States as refugees after the Vietnam War. The county sheriff estimated that since the mid-2010s around 6,000 Hmong-Americans had moved to Siskiyou, purchasing approximately 1,500 parcels . In an 86.5% white county with just 745 non-cannabis farms and fewer than 44,000 people , this constituted a major demographic shift. Cannabis growers in Siskiyou’s subdivisions are especially vulnerable to detection. The subdivisions are often sparsely vegetated, dry and hilly, making them not only unproductive as agricultural lands but also highly visible from public roads, horseback, neighboring plots, helicopter and Google Earth. Green screen fencing, wooden stakes, portable toilets, generators, campers, plywood houses, or water tanks and trucks often signal cannabis cultivation but would be necessary for many land uses, especially since many lots are sold without infrastructure like water, sewer or electrical access. If detection of code violations depends upon visibility, Hmong Americans on subdivisions have been made especially visible and vulnerable to detection.

One lawyer, for instance, reported that 90% of the defendants present at administrative county hearings for code violations in fall 2015, when the first complaint-driven ordinance was put in place, were Hmong-American. One Hmong-American resident reported being stopped by police six times in 3 months and subjected to unfriendly white neighbors patrolling on horseback for cannabis — one of whom made a complaint for a crowing rooster, a questionable nuisance in this “right to farm” county. Numerous Hmong-Americans and sympathetic whites echoed these experiences. County residents confirmed their antagonism toward Hmong-Americans by characterizing them in interviews and public records as dishonest, thieves, polluters, negligent parents and unable to assimilate, and making other racializing and racist characterizations. While written regulations and enforcement profess race neutrality, in a nuisance enforcement regime based on visibility, Hmong Americans were more visible than others, leading many to argue that they were being racially profiled. Rhetoric emerging from the county government amplified racial tensions and visibilities. Numerous Sheriff’s Office press releases located the “problem” in subdivisions and attributed it to “an influx of people temporarily moving to Siskiyou” who were “lawbreakers” from “crime families” with “big money” and who threatened “our way of life, quality of life, and the health and safety of our children and grandchildren” . Just 2 days before the June 2016 ballot on the strict cannabis ordinances, state investigators responded to county reports that newly registered Hmong-American voters might be fraudulent or coerced by criminal actors and visited Hmong-American residences to investigate, accompanied by sheriff’s deputies . The voter fraud charges were later countered by a lawsuit alleging racially motivated voter intimidation; the suit was eventually dismissed for failing to meet the notoriously difficult criteria of racist intent. The raids may have discouraged some Hmong-Americans from voting, charges of fraud may have boosted anti-cannabis sentiment, and, one government official explained, “creative balloting” measures enabled some municipal voters in conservative localities to vote while others in more liberal places could not. The voter fraud charges, raids and legal contestation drew widespread media attention that further linked Hmong-Americans and cannabis. Amidst these now-overt racial tensions, the restrictive June 2016 ballot measure passed, allowing the Sheriff’s Office to gain full enforcement power over the “#1 public enemy to Siskiyou citizens … criminal marijuana cultivation” . Shortly after the June 2016 ballot measure affirmed stricter regulations, the Sheriff’s Office formed the Siskiyou Interagency Marijuana Investigation Team with the district attorney to “attack illegal marijuana grows” “mostly” around rural subdivisions . Within a month, SIMIT had issued 25 abatement notices and filed 20 criminal charges, in addition to confiscating numerous plants. Meanwhile, the Planning Division’s role had diminished — code enforcement officers were relegated to addressing violations not directly related to cannabis .