New documentary lets Humboldt legacy cannabis growers tell their story

A new documentary series is trying to fix Humboldt’s cannabis story in the voices of the people who built it. Tangled Roots: The True Story of Humboldt County dropped on Vimeo on April 22 as a four-part release from Outlaw Films, the production company of filmmaker Seth Ferranti, with a first episode that runs 44 minutes.

The series frames Humboldt growers as people who championed the plant for 50 years in the Emerald Triangle, the three-county region that includes Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties. Its description says corporations are now taking over the industry and freezing out the trailblazers who sacrificed everything for the plant, a message that lands in a county where cannabis has long shaped work, land use, politics and family identity.

That history goes back well before legalization. Humboldt County’s cannabis timeline notes marijuana sales in the county in the 1960s, with arrests increasing toward the end of that decade. It also points to a public marijuana-reform forum at Humboldt State University on May 28, 1968, showing how deeply the debate had already taken root. By the time the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors adopted an ordinance regulating commercial cannabis operations in the county’s unincorporated areas on Feb. 26, 2016, the region had already spent generations living under a mix of cultivation, enforcement and changing public attitudes.

Proposition 64 marked a watershed moment in that shift from prohibition to legalization, but the transition has not been even. Humboldt County’s cannabis equity assessment says the federal war on cannabis distorted local economic development, and Cal Poly Humboldt says it completed cannabis equity assessments for Humboldt County and Mendocino County in 2019 and 2020. Those findings helped shape the county’s equity work, which is meant to reckon with who was pushed out, who was able to adapt and who still carries the costs of the old system.

The documentary arrives as that fight over memory and economics continues. The Humboldt County Growers Alliance says cannabis supports thousands of local jobs and millions in tax revenue, and that Humboldt cannabis has generated more than $55 million in local tax revenue since 2017. State cannabis tax revenues are reported quarterly and change over time, a reminder that the market is still in motion even as the legacy era recedes. For Humboldt, Tangled Roots is more than a film release. It is an attempt to preserve an oral history before aging growers, shifting laws and corporate consolidation decide who gets to tell it next.