Marijuana is so ubiquitous here that everyone, from schoolteachers to kids, can tell you when a sinsemilla bud is ripe. From late summer to fall, the county reeks with the skunk-like stench of ready-to-harvest weed. The annual $1.5 billion pot crop constitutes two-thirds of Mendocino County's entire economy.

"You tell people from other parts of the country that folks grow pot all over town, and they think this is just a freak show here," said Ross Liberty, who owns a welding shop in Ukiah. "They're not far off."

Earlier this year, Liberty and others who used to be benign about the issue decided enough was enough. They put Measure B on Tuesday's ballot to repeal the nation's most liberal rules for growing pot, which for eight years have allowed anyone to grow up to 25 plants for personal use. If Measure B is approved by a majority vote, the per-person limit will revert to the statewide limit of six plants.

But then there's the other side.

Opponents of Measure B call it a meat-ax approach to an emotionally volatile issue and say that going after the weed in Mendocino's backyards and spare rooms is wrongheaded at best, cruel at worst. What is really needed, they argue, is a better effort to eradicate large-scale plantations that are hidden in the heavily forested mountains and guarded by thugs toting assault rifles.

The forces against Measure B are led by an ex-congressman's daughter who was busted and later cleared for growing a medical pot garden.

"We need to harness this gigantic industry, not try to kill it," said Laura Hamburg, whose arrest last fall so infuriated her that she decided to head up the anti-B push. "There's this caricature about this county that we're all hippies sitting around smoking joints, but that's the last thing from reality. Medical users truly need this plant."

The homegrown weed in most of those yards and rooms is medicine to be used by those who grow it, Hamburg said, or sold to the 400 medicinal marijuana clinics in San Francisco, Berkeley and the rest of the state. These grow-farms are not the problem, she insisted - flashy out-of-towners are.

Problems with small farms

But that's a key assertion with which Measure B advocates vehemently disagree. And to illustrate how bad they think neighborhood pot farms have become, they point to a 2004 incident in Ukiah.

That's when a would-be robber leaped the fence of Larry Puterbaugh's backyard and shot and wounded his neighbor, Memo Parker. The man was trying to steal from Parker's pot farm, police said. Puterbaugh had already complained for years about the stench from the hundreds of pot plants over his back fence - but even after the shooting, police did nothing about it. Parker had doctor-signed cards authorizing medicinal growth on the farm.

Parker later pleaded no contest to cultivating too many plants in a separate case. But in 2004, all Puterbaugh could do was fume.

"That's when I began thinking we have to do something," Puterbaugh said. "Why should we be scared in our own neighborhoods, in a quiet town like this?

Measure B backers date the genesis of their troubles to 2000, when 58 percent of the county's voters passed Measure G, which allowed anyone to grow as many as 25 marijuana plants for personal use - far exceeding the state guideline of six plants per person for medicinal use only.

The "personal use" reference, in practice, has meant growing for medical use - but the kicker for critics was that each lot of 25 plants required only a doctor-signed permission card saying the grower would use the pot or that the grower was cultivating it for another patient. Some houses began displaying as many as 12 cards, leading to complaints that the new rule was allowing people to grow commercially for cash, not medicine.

"It's like we kicked the door open and said to the rest of the nation, 'Come on in and grow pot!' " said Mike Sweeney, an environmental activist who is helping direct the Measure B campaign. "Now, what we want to do is slam that door shut. We want people around the country to know that Mendocino has changed its ways."

One who answered Mendocino's siren call is Ukiah Setiva Morrison. After hearing in North Carolina about the area's legendary pot leniency, he changed his name from Ronald Matthews and, in 2005, moved to Ukiah to run a short-lived church called the Hemp Plus Ministry.

"I really believe that cannabis isn't bad for you - stupidity is bad," he said, standing in his garden of 11 outdoor plants in Redwood Valley. Now he is running for county supervisor.

Measure B's proponents and opponents agree on one thing: the necessity for a prohibition on large pot-farming operations, some of which sport as many as 500 plants, no matter where they are.

But as for crimping everything back to a six-plant limit? A popular local T-shirt speaks for Measure B opponents. "Let It Grow," it reads below a jaunty pot-leaf drawing.

Hamburg points to her own 39 plants - which were ripped out by police last fall - as an example. They were used as medicine for an intestinal condition as well as for her cancer-survivor mother and two others, and she had doctor-signed growing cards to justify the garden - which the search warrant didn't note, an omission that led a judge to throw out the case in March. It was a typical-size "grow" for the county.

However, Hamburg's political profile was anything but typical, and she thinks that's why she was targeted. Hamburg's father, former Democratic Rep. Dan Hamburg, helped lead the 2000 campaign that liberalized the county's pot laws, and she spearheaded the 2004 drive that passed the nation's first local ban on growing genetically altered food. Hamburg also worked as a reporter at The Chronicle in 1997 and 1998.

"I wasn't going to be 'the pot girl,' leading this campaign, but that all changed when 11 deputies tore out my plants and locked me out of my own house," she said. "Now I just want to make sure that never happens to anyone else."

Push to legalize pot

Hamburg and other Measure B opponents say that instead of limiting pot, Mendocino should be a beacon for the decades-old movement to legalize the $3,000-a-pound weed. The county's liberal guidelines are just that - guidelines tacitly respected by federal officials who still operate elsewhere under U.S. law banning pot of any quantity. But if it were legalized instead of demonized, Hamburg's group maintains, the economically struggling county could tax that $1.5 billion crop and become hugely prosperous.

"This whole fight is like Prohibition," said artist Catherine Magruder, a cancer survivor who says smoking pot erased the pain of chemotherapy. "You can't squish marijuana out of existence, it's too late. So why not figure out, together, how to make it work for all of us? And why not start that movement right here in Mendocino?"

Not surprisingly, considering how firmly pot culture is laced through this county, even Measure B proponents - who include virtually every elected or law enforcement official - say they support medicinal marijuana. The Board of Supervisors and many of those pushing for the rollback supported the lenient rules when they passed in 2000.

But now they say Hamburg and her backers - mainly patients, small-time growers, doctors, the San Francisco office of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Law (NORML) and a former county prosecutor - are deluded.

"What really got to me was when I tried to hire some teenagers for my shop, and they laughed at me," said Liberty. "They said they make so much money harvesting pot for growers that they don't need my $8-an-hour jobs.

"Look, they can make $30 an hour, and I see them driving $50,000 tricked-up trucks all over town," he said. "I can't compete with that. Nobody can. How in the world can we attract new business when the workforce just wants to grow or harvest pot?"

There's more at stake here than just local regulations.

"This is the only battle going on in the entire country about marijuana cultivation, and anyone who cares about this issue in the United States is watching it very closely," said Dale Gieringer, California director of NORML.

'Emerald Triangle'

Marijuana has been a significant presence in this county since the 1970s. Though grapes are the big legal crop here, Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity counties are fabled as the "Emerald Triangle," considered by many to be the premier pot-growing region in the nation.

But at the same time, the area has an outdoorsy charm that draws not just environmental progressives, but also families hunting the kind of solitude that can be found only in a Rhode-Island-size county with 88,000 residents and four small incorporated communities. With the collapse of the local timber industry, poverty here is slightly worse than the state average, but the restored Victorians and tidy ranch houses in most towns and on county roads reflect recovery more than despair.

The only immediate sign to outsiders that there's more going on here than simple rural living is the preponderance of shops selling pot-growing equipment and the occasional sign extolling the virtues of the herb. One of the first sights greeting drivers rolling into Ukiah is the Adopt-A-Highway sign proudly proclaiming cleanups by the "Medical Marijuana Patients Union."

"We definitely go our own way," said longtime resident Randy Bream, leaning against the till at his Mendocino Hobbies shop in Ukiah. "Look, I call myself a conservative, and I don't care who grows pot as long as they don't push it on me or my kids.

"What matters for me is that there are friendly people here. On Memorial Day, the city puts flags up and down the main street. All this fighting over pot? I wish they'd just hurry up and decide whether it's legal so we can stop talking about it."

Inside

Uphill battle: Authorities are able to seize only 20 percent of the county's marijuana crop. A8