OAKLAND, Calif.-This Northern California city is fighting to protect its biggest medical-marijuana dispensary-which generates more than a $1 million in local tax revenue annually-from a federal crackdown on pot shops. Oakland sued U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and San Francisco U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag on Wednesday in response to a Justice Department civil-forfeiture complaint aiming to seize the building where the Harborside Health Center, a medical-marijuana dispensary, rents space. The pot shop's owner says it sells more than $20 million of marijuana annually. [continues 517 words]
LIVINGSTON, Calif. - When state drug agents first suspected a butcher-shop owner here of selling methamphetamine for a large drug network, they had no idea how big an organization their five-month probe would uncover. The resulting bust in August was one of the largest in state history, netting 11 arrests in four counties and more than 300 pounds of the illegal stimulant. More troubling was the discovery of the gang's approach to logistics: It imported raw powdered meth from Mexico and refined it at Southern California "conversion labs" into crystal form with a higher street value. [continues 776 words]
Hundreds Of Criminal Cases Dismissed In San Francisco Bay Area As Allegations Of Law-Enforcement Corruption Persist SAN FRANCISCO-Bay Area prosecutors have been forced to dismiss more than 800 criminal cases in the past year because of allegations of police corruption that include selling drug evidence, conducting unlawful searches and conspiring to get men drunk and then arrest them on drunk-driving charges. The series of police scandals has taxed the budgets of the district-attorney and public-defender offices, and prompted two federal investigations. [continues 695 words]
As a paid undercover informant, Jaime Martinez helped federal agents take down the San Francisco chapter of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, a violent gang spanning the U.S. and Central America. But while providing information to federal authorities from 2005 to 2008, Mr. Martinez also served as the gang's leader. He ordered underlings to kill and steal, while he himself stole cars and led a home robbery that ended with a stabbing, among other transgressions. Federal rules allow informants to engage in certain nonviolent criminal acts-such as drug dealing-to maintain their covers as long as they get prior authorization from agents. In testimony last month, Mr. Martinez detailed a pattern of violent behavior that violated those rules. [continues 2146 words]
California and federal authorities cracked down on the Nuestra Familia drug gang in the state's rural Central Valley on Wednesday, arresting 75 people and underscoring the persistence of California's gang problem. The arrests, part of a bigger federal effort called "Operation Red Zone" that has netted a total of 101 alleged gang members on gun and drug-dealing charges, took place in such rural towns as Dos Palos and Livingston. The alleged gang members headed to those towns to sell drugs after they were "effectively driven out" of Salinas by crackdowns in recent years, the California Department of Justice said. Before that, prosecutors busted high-level members of Nuestra Familia in 2000 and 2001 without taking down the organization. [continues 272 words]
A new state regulation decriminalizing pot possession, combined with California's almost 15-year-old medical-marijuana law, means weed is almost legal in the state. That doesn't necessarily make it easier to run a pot-related business, as Mario Abad has learned over the past six months. Mr. Abad, 48 years old, is the proprietor of the Canny Bus, a nonprofit pot delivery service based in San Francisco that delivers marijuana to the homes of patients whose doctors recommend it for medical reasons. Since last spring, Mr. Abad has tried to make his pot business more like a traditional company-but has repeatedly run into legal obstacles. [continues 775 words]
Federal drug agents are reporting a resurgence of methamphetamine production in such areas as rural California and suburban Georgia-a consequence, they suspect, of meth crackdowns in Mexico. The resurgence over the past two years comes after more than a decade of falling U.S. meth production, and may signal a return to the days when toxic meth byproducts littered roadsides and polluted waterways across rural America. Illicit meth labs declined after U.S. laws curbed the availability of ingredients needed to manufacture the drug, a potent and highly addictive stimulant. As large-scale production, especially in the West, moved to Mexico, many U.S. dealers began importing Mexican meth. [continues 540 words]
Short-Lived Trademark Category for Marijuana Is Nipped in the Bud For three months until last week, marijuana dealers had something they could only dream of before: the apparent stamp of approval of a federal agency. On April 1, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office created a new trademark category: "Processed plant matter for medicinal purposes, namely medical marijuana." The patent office, part of the Department of Commerce, posted the new category on its website. The patent-office change set off a land rush by pot dealers in the 14 states where laws permit medical-marijuana sales. Some staked claims on rights to long-used names like Maui Wowie and Chronic. Others applied to trademark business names such as Budtrader and Pot-N. Two companies applied to trademark psychoactive sodas named Keef Cola and Canna Cola. [continues 933 words]
IGO, Calif.-Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko, his budget under pressure in a weak economy, has laid off staff, reduced patrols and even released jail inmates. But there's one mission on which he's spending more than in recent years: pot busts. The reason is simple: If he steps up his pursuit of marijuana growers, his department is eligible for roughly half a million dollars a year in federal anti-drug funding, helping save some jobs. The majority of the funding would have to be used to fight pot. Marijuana may not be the county's most pressing crime problem, the sheriff says, but "it's where the money is." [continues 1562 words]
LAKE FOREST, Calif. -- Sellers of marijuana as a medicine here don't fret about raids any more. They've stopped stressing over where to hide their stash or how to move it unseen. Now their concerns involve the state Board of Equalization, which collects sales tax and requires a retailer ID number. Or city planning offices, which insist that staircases comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act. Then there is marketing strategy, which can mean paying to be a "featured dispensary" on a Web site for pot smokers. [continues 1847 words]
SAN FRANCISCO -- While top U.S. and California officials have recently signaled more lenience toward marijuana users, many local authorities are relying on U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency grants to fund raids on pot growers. At least seven California counties, from Del Norte on the Oregon border to Riverside in the south, have approved the use of grants -- some as high as $275,000 -- from the DEA's Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program. California's state and local agencies here typically receive about a quarter of the program's annual budget, which is tens of millions of dollars, said DEA program manager Scott Hoernke. [continues 382 words]
Needle Exchanges Save Lives but May Imperil Workers SAN FRANCISCO -- Pete Morse devoted his life to saving the lives of heroin users. A dreadlocked community activist with a Ph.D in history, he bore a tattoo that read: "Injury to one is an injury to all." So his friends and colleagues were shocked when he was found unconscious in 2007 on a bathroom floor with a needle by his side. Doctors pronounced the 36-year-old Mr. Morse dead from an overdose of heroin, alcohol and cocaine. [continues 2501 words]
California Attorney General Jerry Brown issued restrictive guidelines this week for medical-marijuana sellers, bolstering his tough-on-crime credentials as he looks ahead to a possible gubernatorial bid in 2010. Mr. Brown's guidelines say medical-marijuana dispensaries -- which operate in a legal gray area -- should operate as small nonprofits. The guidelines instruct state law-enforcement officials that "excessive amounts of marijuana" and "excessive amounts of cash" may indicate a dispensary is operating unlawfully. "There's no blank check to sell marijuana in California," Mr. Brown said in an interview, adding that he believes many marijuana sellers are "shadowy enterprises." [continues 670 words]
It was unclear why there was no drum circle on the third floor of the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on Tuesday morning. The dozen or so people assembled outside Courtroom One were certainly loud enough -- despite repeated exhortations by security guards to keep the noise level down -- and the top thing on their minds was smoking pot. And these are people who take their weed seriously: pot lawyers, pot lobbyists, pot activists, pot smokers, a pot reporter and the requisite pot publicists -- a middle-aged assembly that ranged from besuited to bedraggled. [continues 663 words]
