Swap the Dungeness crab cakes and peasant skirts for lobster rolls and L.L. Bean khakis, and this snug seaside hamlet a few hours north of San Francisco could be a dead ringer for a New England village. (It was a stand-in for Cabot Cove, Maine, in the long-running TV series Murder She Wrote.)

But if California voters approve a controversial ballot proposition in November to tax and legalize marijuana for recreational use — and it's ahead in several polls — some local growers say Mendocino, pop. 900, might become better known as the tourist capital of a "Napa Valley of cannabis."

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