Words&Dirt

“Humboldt County, California, lies about two hundred miles north of San Francisco along the Pacific Coast.  It is vast, mountainous, heavily forested, and sparsely populated country, home to a sizable portion of the state’s towering redwood trees.  Over the last several decades, the county’s immensity, forest cover, and terrain have made it ideal for covert marijuana cultivation––and the hippie, agrarian pot culture that goes with it.  And that has often put Humboldt County in the crosshairs of the drug warriors.  On April 4, 1972, just a few weeks after the new Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE) was up and running, Humboldt was also the setting for the violent death of twenty-four-year-old Dirk Dickenson, the first fatality in Nixon’s new ‘all-out war on drugs.’

Local Humboldt County law enforcement had already produced one drug war casualty.  Deputy Mel Ames, a hard-nosed, fifteen-year cop, had a knack for spotting drug offenders.  In the spring of 1971, Ames had sniffed out two four-foot-high marijuana plants growing along the Eel River.  After setting up a stakeout nearby, he watched for days in hopes of catching whoever had planted them.  When the weekend came, he handed watch duty off to twenty-seven-year-old deputy Larry Lema.  On October 4, 1970––a bright Sunday afternoon––Lema spotted twenty-two-year-old Patrick Berti, who was on his way to law school in the fall, and a friend walking along the river.  When the two stopped to inspect the plants, Lema realized he’d found his pot cultivators.  He emerged from the bushes to apprehend them.  Lema and Berti, it would turn out, had known one another all their lives.  When Lema confronted Berti, Berti turned still holding a twig from one of the plants in his hand.  Lema mistook it for a gun and shot him.

‘Christ, Larry, you shot me,’ Berti said.  Those would be his last words.  He died there in the woods.  Berti’s friend had grown the marijuana.  Berti had merely come to see the plants out of curiosity––he’d never seen pot plants that tall.  A Humboldt County grand jury ruled Berti’s death a justifiable homicide.”

––Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, by Radley Balko, pg. 105-6

“There was an argument, of sorts, for staying on.  It was treacherous, stupid and demented in every way––but there was no avoiding the stench of twisted humor that hovered around the idea of a gonzo journalist in the grip of a potentially terminal drug episode being invited to cover the National District Attorneys’ Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

There was also a certain bent appeal in the notion of running a savage burn on one Las Vegas Hotel and then––instead of becoming a doomed fugitive on the highway to L.A.––just wheeling across town, trading in the red Chevy convertible for a white Cadillac and checking into another Vegas hotel, with press credentials to mingle with a thousand ranking cops from all over America, while they harangued each other about the Drug Problem.

It was dangerous lunacy, but it was also the kind of thing a real connoisseur of edge-work could make an argument for.  Where, for instance, was the last place the Las Vegas police would look for a drug-addled fraud-fugitive who just ripped off a downtown hotel?”

––Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, by Hunter S. Thompson, pg. 80