The party is over in the world’s pot-growing heartland, Humboldt County, California, which begins tracking and tracing every legal pot plant in its medical supply chain this Summer — beginning with official stamps for each package (shown below).

Beginning August 1, the county’s pilot tracking program will begin to control the massive amounts of medical marijuana grown in Humboldt, which supplies California’s billion-dollar medical cannabis market as well as the nation’s multi-billion dollar black market.

Americans consume an estimated 4,000 to 8,000 metric tons of cannabis per year, with a significant chunk of that amount coming from Northern California. All across California, counties are gearing up to handle the local aspects of statewide medi-pot regulation, which became law in October.

Every grower, wholesaler, transporter, and retail store will need a dual state-local license by 2018. In contrast to most counties in California, Humboldt is positioning itself as the state’s legal pot bowl — with cultivator-friendly regulations and engaged officials working to daylight the decades-old underground economy.

Humboldt is trying encrypted tax stamps, “which have been successfully used by the California Board of Equalization for tobacco control since 2005” which “fight counterfeiting and allow for data collection and business intelligence, enabling local agencies and licensed operators to communicate with dispensaries.”

“After a cultivator harvests and packages their crop, they apply a traceable, counterfeit-resistant stamp to the packaging. The stamp includes a QR code and unique stamp number that is coded with information about the product, including size, strain, grower and more. As the package goes through the supply chain—from cultivator to manufacturer to distributor to dispensary—the stamps are scanned by each licensee so they can be tracked until the product is sold to a patient. Patients can use the stamps in conjunction with a free smartphone app, which will be available when the program launches, or via the website humboldtorigin.org to make sure a product is authentic, retrieve product and provenance information, see test results and more (for example, were any pesticides used, is the grower Clean Green or do they follow organic principles, and so on),” Humboldt County states.

This July, Humboldt County officially permitted its first mega-grow of nearly seven acres of cultivation area, including fields and greenhouses for Honeydew Farms, LLC. Growers without a local license will be subject to law enforcement raids.