The parallels to wine don't end there. In addition to meticulous cultivation, growers pride themselves on their blends, each strain with a specific taste and potency. The workers are both farmers and connoisseurs. For growers, a corresponding aspiration is that one day it will be legal not only to sell their crop like wine producers do, but to be taxed like wine producers as well.

"Seventy patients times six mature plants," James Bowman says with mischief. "How's your math?" For Bowman, who as a caretaker is permitted to grow 420 plants, this altered state of Jefferson has less to do with the borders of Oregon and California than the borders of federal and local law. These forces constitute the legislative gray zone in which he and other medical marijuana growers live and work.

Goateed and lanky with placid blue eyes, Bowman carries himself with a half-century's relaxed confidence. Iowa-born, Bowman considers farming to be part of his blood, the work a way of life. Like many here, he sees the world through one lens, often speaking of marijuana sacramentally and likening the struggle to legalize cannabis to anything from the American civil rights movement to the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

His fields, collectively called High Hopes Farm, are a picturesque drive away from the town of Ashland, home to Southern Oregon University, Jefferson Public Radio, and the internationally renowned Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Tucked away among the dairies and fishing streams in the aptly-named Rogue Valley, the farm services medical marijuana patients legally according to Oregon law but in defiance of federal law. Oregon employs a caregiver system, which allows growers to cultivate six mature plants per card-carrying patient. As a precaution, Bowman only grows about half as many plants as the law allows.

Since Oregon made the arrangement legal in 1998, federal forces had mainly kept out of the fray. This year's harvest was different. Alleging that medicinal marijuana from Oregon was being sold in other states, federal drug agents conducted four raids last month, seizing hundreds of plants and hauling them away in dump trucks.

While no arrests were made and no criminal charges were filed, growers today operate with the uncertainty that they may at any time end up in jail--as Bowman did for three years in the early 90s--as a result of their vocation. This reality resonates most during the harvest, a time when the intersection between the possible and the indictable stirs to its highest crest.

If allowed to bend your ear, a grower will make his case. According to a 2005 Harvard study by Jeffrey Miron, nearly $8 billion is spent annually enforcing the marijuana prohibition. The study also concludes that if marijuana were to be taxed along the same rates as alcohol, the crop would bring in more than $6 billion in annual revenue. At a time of high unemployment and widespread political peacocking about the deficit, many cannabis advocates believe that the legalization of marijuana and its taxation have never seemed more sensible.