Berkeley, Calif. ? Medical-marijuana growers in Mendocino County — a Northern California outpost that is home to vegans, vintners, libertarians and aging hippies — want to have their pot certified as organic.

The notion of pesticide-free pot is making some people smile. But county officials say the issue is serious, and they are asking the state whether they can regulate pot-growing and pronounce some crops organic.

They say that with no system to regulate cultivation, consumers are at risk.

“We regulate wine grape growers and pear growers and everybody else, so why shouldn’t we also regulate pot growers?” said Tony Linegar, assistant agricultural commissioner for Mendocino County. “It’s really an agricultural crop. In our estimate, it should be subject to a lot of the same laws and regulations as commercial agriculture.”

California, one of 11 states with medical marijuana laws, allows people to grow, smoke or obtain pot with a doctor’s recommendation. Across the country, medical marijuana has slowly moved toward the mainstream, with local law enforcement agencies issuing “user cards,” and insurance companies honoring claims for stolen plants.

If the county received the go-ahead to regulate organic medical marijuana, it would be “absolutely a first,” said Allen St. Pierre of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Regulating cultivation would be “a huge leap in the public discourse and policy-making, in that it recognizes that medical cannabis is legal but it needs to have some sort of local controls placed on it.”

Acting on a request for two marijuana growers who want their crops to be certified organic and concerned by reports of someone getting sick in another county from pesticide-treated marijuana, Mendocino County Agricultural Commissioner Dave Bengston wrote to the state Department of Food and Agriculture last month.

Bill Britt, director of the Association of Patient Advocates who suffers from epilepsy and post-polio complications, uses cannabis to help ease his chronic pain in Long Beach, Calif. California's Mendocino County is moving toward a new agriculture frontier with a proposal to certify medical marijuana as organic. County officials say that with no system to regulate cultivation consumers similar to Britt are at risk.

Bengston asked whether the county could certify pot as organic and whether employees should be inspecting marijuana nurseries to check for pests and other problems as they do with other crops.

Marijuana plants can be threatened by mites, mildew and cornmeal worms. But with no products officially developed for marijuana cultivation, some growers have been using chemicals intended for ornamental plants, which could make users sick, Linegar said.

Linegar said he could not estimate how much marijuana was grown in Mendocino County, about 100 miles north of San Francisco, but it is generally considered prime pot territory. And clearly not all of it is being grown for medicinal purposes.