A medical marijuana dispensary owner who crossed swords with Mountain View city officials when he opened his clinic despite a moratorium said Monday he plans to run for city council, the San Jose Mercury News reports. Matt Lucero, co-founder of the recently shuttered Buddy’s Cannabis Patient Collective, said he plans to lease his Campbell home to his daughter and move to Mountain View in time to draw and submit papers for the upcoming election. Three council seats are up for grabs this year, with the four-year terms of Margaret Abe-Koga, Ronit Bryant and Jac Siegel [...]
Medical marijuana dispensaries have proliferated in unincorporated areas around Fresno since the city started cracking down on them last year. Now Fresno County is considering closing dispensaries as well, the Fresno Bee reports, using the same legal tool Fresno and other local governments have employed — zoning laws. The Board of Supervisors plans to discuss an ordinance today that would force dispensaries to temporarily close while county officials draft regulations for the operations. If the law is approved, county officials would then have to seek court orders to close the dispensaries. Sheriff Margaret Mims, who [...]
Mendocino and Humboldt counties, California’s two most renowned pot-cultivation regions, are among the top counties in per capita arrests for marijuana. And despite a softening of social attitudes towards marijuana, California law enforcement officials arrested 78,514 people statewide for pot offenses in 2008, Peter Hecht writes in “Weed Wars.” Those are some of the conclusions that can be reached from an analysis of 2008 arrest data from the California Department of Justice — and statewide interactive mapping by Philip Reese of The Sacramento Bee. In 2008, the last full year for which figures are available, [...]
Ventura’s experiment in possibly allowing medical marijuana cooperatives in the city could be over before it starts. The City Council, to the delight of medical pot patients, agreed last fall to study the issue, hold public meetings and look at crafting potential land-use language allowing medical marijuana cooperatives and collectives in certain areas, the Ventura County Star reports. Nonprofit collectives and cooperatives typically are operated by medical marijuana users and focused on patient care, in contrast to for-profit retail dispensaries that are illegal. The council tonight will revisit the controversial topic along with an option [...]
I wouldn’t call it a junket, but one of the most fun assignments you can get as a rookie reporter is to tromp along with police on an outdoor marijuana bust. Fly in on a helicopter. Check out the full arsenal of a SWAT unit. Call in a front-page story from the field. In all the action, it’s hard to stop and say, “What good came from this raid, from this expense of your tax dollars?” There’s no real dent in access to marijuana, and officers almost never catch the drug dealers who set up [...]
SAN DIEGO — Federal agents on Friday arrested 12 people in San Diego and Los Angeles and charged them with participating in a massive marijuana distribution ring that sold the drug via a medical marijuana storefront. The ring also is accused of growing dozens of plants in a hidden room in a Rancho Santa Fe mansion. Federal agents served seven search warrants as part of the investigation, including five in San Diego. Two other warrants were served in Los Angeles. At the center of the probe is Joshua John Hester, which federal court records unsealed [...]
The discovery of 1,000 marijuana plants inside a Lockwood Valley house led detectives to a San Fernando Valley dispensary. Investigators later determined the dispensary sold millions of dollars worth of pot illegally and tried to hide the profits by moving the money between fake businesses, authorities say. Three co-owners of the dispensary were arrested recently on suspicion of money laundering, and details of the allegations emerged this week in a search warrant affidavit and interviews with officials. Steven Kall, 55, and Anne Adams, 47, both of Sherman Oaks, and Jimmy Silva, 26, of Northridge are [...]
SAN LEANDRO — Mayor Tony Santos said a group of investors has inquired with him and Councilman Jim Prola about opening a large medical marijuana growing facility in the city’s industrial area, the Oakland Tribune reports. “I don’t want to give the impression that I’m promoting it, because I’m not,” Santos said Friday. “The group is looking for a location to grow medical marijuana — no direct sales. They can only do it in certain locations, and they need a lot of (electricity) to do it.” “There are some people that have made preliminary overtures [...]
Buddy’s Cannabis Patient Collective, the medical marijuana dispensary that Mountain View shut down for flaunting a city ban, has moved to Sunnyvale — another city that prohibits such enterprises. The dispensary’s Mountain View location was forced to close Wednesday under a court order, but reopened Friday in a warehouse on Old Mountain View Alviso Road in Sunnyvale. “It would’ve been a lot easier and less risky for us to relocate to San Jose, but there’s no way that we’re giving up on you guys!” a Craigslist ad advertising the reopening says. Matt Lucero, who opened [...]
Two weeks after Fresno police moved to shut down a Tower District medical marijuana dispensary and evict the business from its Olive Avenue location, it was business as usual Friday, albeit one door down. Police have repeatedly tried to shut down the Medmar clinic and operator Rick Morse has repeatedly been sent to jail for violating a judge’s court order that prohibits him from selling marijuana, the Fresno Bee reports. Morse has engaged in a running battle with authorities since August 2009, when city officials sued Medmar and eight other dispensaries on the grounds that [...]
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