Anyone driving north along the 101 freeway from Los Angeles will know they’ve arrived in Carpinteria by the smell. The salty breeze caressing California’s scenic coastline is gone in a flash. In its place, a dank aroma more reminiscent of a Grateful Dead concert.
In this beachside enclave, cannabis greenhouses stretch from the mountains to the beach. Thanks to the most lenient policies in California for recreational marijuana, Santa Barbara county is now the state’s undisputed capital of legal cannabis, boasting more acres than the storied Emerald Triangle of Humboldt, Trinity and Mendocino counties.
