Full-Court Press: Feds Go After Mendo Marijuana

 

Photo: Ganja Farmer’s Emerald Triangle News

​By Jack Rikess

Toke of the Town

Northern California Correspondent

I love my job.

Every time I leave San Francisco for Mendocino like I did the other day, whether it’s for an interview like I had arranged or for snooping and sleuthing for an upcoming story, I get giddy. It brings out the Tom Sawyer in me.

I’m like that kid the movie, The Black Stallion, when during the climax of the big horse race he throws off his racing goggles and grabs Big Black’s mane like they are one. He rides the galloping horse like they did back on the island when it was just the two of them.

Riding like the Old Spice guy au naturel to the finish line, we, the viewers, are given a chance to relive the best of our own childhood dreams as we watch unemcumbered youth experience the pure bliss of freedom as he wins the race the old-fashioned way, without all those city contraptions like gloves, shirts and protective eyewear.

Photo: Cannabis N.I.

​ That’s me going to Mendo. Being up there’s this sense of walking free and barefoot, even when I have to wear my tight-ass business Doc Martens.

Also, after Cloverdale going north on 101, I like to look up. When I see my first stage-diving hawk or eagle, I know I’m home.

But the other day, there were no hawks or eagles in the air. Only helicopters. Many, many helicopters. More helicopters than in L.A., on a fast news night.

Black helicopters patrolled like nosey crop-dusters or eager teenagers on Toro lawnmowers doing summer work. Going East-West in straight lines and then banking and returning to the next row over. Spotting. Observing. Looking. Inspecting.

With only one goal on the taxpayer-supported to-do list: Try to find marijuana.

I stopped for gas in Ukiah a little before 8 a.m. At the station, strapping young men like trim bodybuilders in green shorts, green khaki short-sleeved shirts with big ol’ guns, 357s or some other large-mouth pistols holstered to their sides, joked and cajoled with each other as they take hits off their Slurpees and Red Bells.

Photo: StoptheDrugWar.org

​ A few grab coffees, smiling, making their way back to their Forest Ranger jeeps. They remind me more of Everglade bush pilots than cops. They seem too wholesome to be police.

They’re more like jocks on a road trip, piling out of a car ready and cocked, waiting for something to happen, then after a pit stop and a look around, it’s back to the two-lane blacktop.

They seem innocent enough.

But then you see they’re everywhere. There are cops catching breakfast in the restaurants and coming out of 20-room motels along the frontage roads. Official cars with patrol lights are suddenly in front of you as the pickup you were behind makes a left. Chrome-plated Hummers close you in from behind.

Before I hit the panic button, I realize I’ve entered a convoy of five or six cars and trucks on their way to somewhere.

And still, there’s more helicopters buzzing overhead.

Welcome to Operation Full-Court Press.

Four hundred agents have invaded the Emerald Triangle for at least a month or so. At first they were doing a little surgical striking north and then south and then just to confuse us, somewhere in the middle.

Photo: Ganja Farmer’s Emerald Triangle News

​ As of this writing, it looks like they’re starting around Covelo and going north. Yesterday it was reported on radio station KMUD that there were roadblocks on 162 West with DEA and INS vehicles prominent. Seventy-seven people have been arrested. About 305,000 plants have been “confiscated.”

The official statement is they are going after the growers who illegally raise marijuana in our national forest. They will leave the permitted growers who are following Mendocino’s 9.31 alone. All of us agree this is a good thing.

The other major counties like Trinity and Humboldt are adopting the same policy of leaving the local growers who are quietly doing their own thing, while going after the more transient growers.

But everyone knows they’re going after the Mexicans in the mountainous country.

From what is being gossiped about, there’s some heavy profiling going on in Norte California. All press releases make it clear that this “concerted effort” between multiple governmental law enforcement agencies has the main objective of going after only organized growers with their massive outdoor industrial grows who have been shooting at and scaring the straights who have the bad luck to go too deep into the woods.

Again, the locals agree this is a good thing. Plus, the price of marijuana should go up.

Photo: Felipe Buitrago/Metroactive

​ Even so, some of the locals are getting very nervous and stressed with the helicopters strafing the compound, looking for illegal grows. The best the legitimate grower can do is pain a 4×8 sheet of plywood with his or her permit numbers, so when Sky King’s looking for the bad guys, they leave Ma and Pa Kush alone.

This still doesn’t satisfy some of the local fears.

One grower complained of paying the $85 per permit and still having to live under this scrutiny as the climate changes concerning the growing of marijuana.

“I went to the Sheriff’s Office and paid my money for permits, which is kinda like taxes and kinda like blood money,” my bandana-wearing source said. “But I did it because that’s what needs to happen on our side for change to occur.

“Now the Feds are here,” he said. “It feels like they’re taking over the town.”

Do you worry that the Feds will go to the Sheriff’s Office to get a list of growers who have come forward?

“No, Sheriff Allman told us that wouldn’t happen,” the grower assured me.

Photo: USA Today

​ “Right now, the Sheriff is stuck between us and that very hard rock called the Feds,” he said. “The Sheriff lives here. The Feds are like the growers they’re trying to catch. They’ll be here for a month or two, then leave. It is Sheriff Allman that is left to keep the peace. And because the Feds don’t understand the culture up here… Let’s just say things are going to be tense before they’re better.”

Another legitimate grower chalked up the whole operation — the Feds, the tension — to the cost of doing business in Mendo.

A gentleman in his 60s with a silver ponytail wrapped in leather laughed at the other locals who were getting upset with the flyovers and the heavy police presence.

“It’s the cost of doing business up here,” he said. “There’s nothing illegal about hating marijuana. Some cops and most of the Feds hate marijuana. But you’ll see the pendulum swings wildly one way and then slowly, it starts to swing to the other side. That is the way it is up here.”

You don’t seem too worried.

“Today it’s the Feds. Come the middle of September, beginning of October, the rip-offs come. When it starts getting close to harvest… time to start sleeping in my grow, locked and loaded.”

You’re pretty serious when it comes to guns and intruders?

“We don’t give warning shots up here. We don’t give the courtesy over-the-head warning.”

Really?

Photo: Cannabis Culture

​ “Naw, that’s the way it was maybe five years ago, maybe even three,” the old coot continued. “See, that’s what the Feds don’t understand. If I have someone trying to steal my crop, now, I call 9-1-1. I call the cops. It wasn’t that long ago that we shot to kill. See, stealing is stealing, to us and the cops.

“Last year in Laytonville, a couple of kids — that’s who most of your unsophisticated robbers are, kids through about 24, y’know, stupid kids trying to get rich quick. These kids try to rob a Mom and Pop. A small local garden with white picket fence at the end of someone’s road.

“Well they come into these folks’ living room with a pellet gun… I can’t really remember, maybe it was as big as a .22. One kid shoots the husband in the leg with his toy gun while the wife grabs the Dirty Harry and blows the kid away in her living room with a .357. Cops came and left just as quick, saying it was justified.”

It seems better for the community to not have the frontier justice kind of retribution that you’ve had up here for the past half century.

“That’s what the Feds don’t get,” the veteran grower said. “This isn’t Iowa. This isn’t Virginia. It’s Mendo. We’re changing. We’re trying to become more law-abiding citizens. I don’t know what they have against us.”

Sitting in hand-carved wooden chairs in the hot sun in front of his cabin, we listen to the clamoring birds in the trees and the rotor blades slicing the air as helicopters migrate above us.

“But it’s like Buddha says, this too shall pass.” The old man’s eyes traced the copters as they fly out of sight over the mountains as they go north to their next observational gig.

Photo: Jack Rikess

Toke of the Town correspondent Jack Rikess blogs from the Haight in San Francisco.

Frontline: ‘The Pot Republic’ Airs On PBS July 26 & 29

By Steve Elliott

Photo: Frontline

Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman (left) visits a marijuana farm run by Matt Cohen (right), as featured in “The Pot Republic,” airing July 26 and 29 on PBS.

​

Frontline is presenting “The Pot Republic,” a report on the effort to legalize marijuana in California, this month on PBS.

While the bulk of cannabis used in the United States used to come across the border from Mexico, Colombia, Canada and elsewhere, more than half of it is now believed to be domestically grown, much of it in California, “where an enormous black market has emerged under the cover of the state’s medical marijuana law,” at least if PBS is to be believed.

With more than a third of the U.S. now experimenting with some form of legalization and decriminalization — and several California counties attempting to openly regulate cannabis production — Frontline and the Center for Investigative Reporting teamed up to take a look at the country’s oldest, largest and most wide-open marijuana market.

Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice fired a shot across the bow to states which have legalized, and are regulating, the growing and distribution of medicinal cannabis.

Marijuana is still illegal for any purpose under federal law, and the DOJ can even prosecute “those who knowingly facilitate such activities,” including state and local officials. (This hasn’t happened anywhere yet, but both U.S. Attorneys for the State of Washington have openly threatened to do exactly that.)

Can the federal government put the ganja genie back in the bottle? And why on earth would they want to? Stay tuned…

Frontline: The Pot Republic airs on PBS affiliates (and will be available online) Tuesday night, July 26 and will repeat Friday night, July 29. Check your local listings for airtimes, which will be 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. in most markets.

<object width = “640″ height = “364″ > <param name = “movie” value = “http://www-tc.pbs.org/video/media/swf/PBSPlayer.swf&#8221; > </param><param name=”flashvars” value=”width=640&height=364&video=2031962807&player=viral&end=30066&lr_admap=in:pbs:0″ /> <param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param > <param name = “allowscriptaccess” value = “always” > </param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param ><embed src=”http://www-tc.pbs.org/video/media/swf/PBSPlayer.swf&#8221; flashvars=”width=640&height=364&video=2031962807&player=viral&end=30066&lr_admap=in:pbs:0″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” wmode=”transparent” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”640″ height=”364″ bgcolor=”#000000″></embed></object><p style=”font-size:11px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #808080; margin-top: 5px; background: transparent; text-align: center; width: 640px;”>Watch the <a style=”text-decoration:none !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px; color:#4eb2fe !important;” href=”http://video.pbs.org/video/2031962807&#8243; target=”_blank”>full episode</a>. See more <a style=”text-decoration:none !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px; color:#4eb2fe !important;” href=”http://www.pbs.org/frontline/&#8221; target=”_blank”>FRONTLINE.</a></p>

Feds Locking In On California’s Marijuana Industry

• Share

by Michael Montgomery, California Report

With demand for medical marijuana surging around the country, some cities and states are looking to license commercial growing, including in California. Local officials say regulating the industry protects public safety and is a good source of tax revenue. But now the Obama administration is pushing back.

Last October business and city leaders gathered with medical marijuana growers and activists in a gritty industrial compound in east Oakland.

With DJs on hand, the crowd was inaugurating a super-store for pot growing supplies — and celebrating plans to open four industrial-scale medical pot farms under a new city ordinance.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan spoke at the event, welcoming the potential tax windfall.

“When these cultivation facilities come online, we’re estimating in the first few years five to eight million dollars. Now that’s a sizeable chunk of change and it’s going to be an important part of this city’s economy,” said Quan.

Eight months later, Oakland’s plans are in tatters following stern warnings from the U.S. Justice Department that licensing of commercial marijuana growing, even for medical use, violates federal law.

At a large industrial park just off the Oakland’s 880 Freeway, developer Jeff Wilcox walks into a giant concrete and glass warehouse. It’s empty.

“This building was dubbed the football field of cannabis during our heyday. We were going to have 380 employees, and the average pay was about $52,000 [a year] per person,” said Wilcox.

Wilcox thought the facility would be safe from the feds as long as the operation closely complied with the city’s regulations and state laws. But today he sees things differently.

“The industry is scared that there’s a big push back coming against us,” said Wilcox.

The push back isn’t just against Oakland. Recently, the Justice Department warned officials in eight other states that they would be violating federal law if they allowed commercial production of medical marijuana.

“That, in very simple terms, is what drug traffickers do. That is drug trafficking period,” said Tommy LaNier, director of the National Marijuana Initiative, a program funded by the White House Office on Drug Control Policy.

LaNier says the tripwire for the Feds’ tough new posture came last year after Californians narrowly rejected Proposition 19, a measure to legalize recreational pot use. He says officials then zeroed in on local medical marijuana schemes like Oakland’s, and decided to threaten prosecution.

“They’re not going to go after someone who’s standing on the corner or in their home using marijuana. This is going to be targeting those individuals who are facilitating production, trafficking, engaged in the distribution,” La Nier said.

LaNier says the Justice Department letters state pointedly that even local officials could face criminal charges. But Jay Rorty, an ACLU attorney, says those warnings violate previous assurances from the Feds.

“It’s important that the DOJ makes clear that people who are complying with valid state law do not fear federal prosecution,” Rorty said.

Rorty and others insist that was the promise made in a 2009 Justice Department memo, which essentially stated: comply with state law and the feds won’t prosecute you. But Justice Department officials are saying the exemption only applies to seriously-ill people, not commercial growers and not medical marijuana distribution outlets.

Benjamin Wagner, the US Attorney for California’s Eastern District, says the Justice Department will enforce federal law.

“We’ve met with the DEA in this regard. People from Washington have been out to California to coordinate a statewide enforcement strategy,” Wagner said.

It’s unclear whether the Feds will target the state’s most established medical marijuana operators, like Harborside Health Center in Oakland.

On a recent afternoon at Harborside, dozens of customers were eagerly inspecting gleaming glass cases displaying well-manicured marijuana buds. Despite a grueling audit battle with the IRS, owner Steve Deangelo says Harborside is turning over millions of dollars in sales each month. Still, he says, medical marijuana remains a risky business.

“Until federal law changes, this is not an industry, it’s a movement. And anybody who gets involved in distributing medical cannabis has to be prepared to be arrested and have a monumental challenge on your hands,” said Deangelo.

Oakland city officials say they haven’t given up on plans to license marijuana cultivation. But for his part, developer Jeff Wilcox says the Feds’ warnings have scared off people who wanted to invest in a legitimately regulated business.

“You want to try to start an industry and then you have the IRS working against you, the federal government working against you — you’ve got a real problem,” said Wilcox. “So the problem is if you don’t grow this industry what happens is that it remains a black-market industry, and it’s always going to be that way.”

Medical-marijuana supporters are calling on the Obama administration to clarify the recent warnings. Sources close to the Justice Department say Attorney General Eric Holder is planning to do just that, in a letter that will be released soon.

Superfast Computers Triggering Botched Marijuana Grow Raids

Photo: Bitcoin Miner

Turns out, looking only at electric usage from a residence, the consumption for bitcoin mining won’t look much different from a marijuana grow-op. Cue clueless cops.

You don’t have to be growing marijuana to get raided for it. At least one Bitcoin miner has been raided by police because unusually high power usage led them to suspect he was growing marijuana, according to unconfirmed reports on Monday.

The tip comes from an IRC chat captured by blogger Mike Esspe, though there are no corroborating details, reports Jerry Brito of Techland.

Bitcoin is the anonymous virtual currency that uses distributed computing power to validate online coins. “It’s like gold mining, except that instead of digging, a miner uses cryptographic math,” reports Techland.

Screen capture: Mike Esspe

Does this mean, that with the growing number of bitcoin miners, courts will stop issuing warrants based on energy bills? Not bloody likely.

Like clandestine indoor marijuana growing operations, Bitcoin mining uses large amounts of electricity and runs up big power bills. It does this because it employs super-fast computers.

High power consumption has often alerted police to marijuana growing operations and has thus led to busts.

“The Canadian town of Mission, B.C. has a bylaw that allows the town’s Public Safety Inspection Team to search people’s homes for grow ops if they are using more than 93 kWh of electricity per day,” according to the blog Bitcoin Miner.

Though a typical mining rig will consume only a fraction of that amount, Bitcoin miners are adding capacity, and with multiple rigs, more and more miners are exceeding the level which triggers police interest, according to the blog.

Residents have been charged a $5,200 inspection fee – even if no marijuana or signs of a grow operation are found, reports Cam Tucker at the Delta Optimist.

Some Mission residents who feel their rights have been violated by the arbitrary searches, and have begun a class-action lawsuit against the District of Mission in B.C. Supreme Court.

There had already been speculation that mining Bitcoins will bring unwanted and misdirected attention from the police.

“I’m still waiting for the first bitcoin grow-op raid,” a Bitcoin mining pioneer had commented on an IRC channel back in January.

Increasingly ubiquitous supercomputing could lead to more and more false positives, not just for Bitcoin miners, but for hardcore gamers too, as well as anyone running video rendering farms or web servers from home, according to Techland.

“It will be interesting to see how courts will adapt to such uses when interpreting reasonable suspicion standards,” Brito writes.

Does this mean, that with the growing number of Bitcoin miners, courts will stop issuing warrants based on energy bills? Not bloody likely.

http://www.tokeofthetown.com/2011/05/superfast_computers_triggering_botched_marijuana_g.php#more

DEA Pot Raids Continue

DEA pot raids go on; Obama opposes

DEA Acting Administrator Michele Leonhart

By The Washington Times

5:45 a.m., Thursday, February 5, 2009

Drug Enforcement Administration agents this week raided four medical marijuana shops in California, contrary to President Obama’s campaign promises to stop the raids.

The White House said it expects those kinds of raids to end once Mr. Obama nominates someone to take charge of DEA, which is still run by Bush administration holdovers.

“The president believes that federal resources should not be used to circumvent state laws, and as he continues to appoint senior leadership to fill out the ranks of the federal government, he expects them to review their policies with that in mind,” White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said.

Medical use of marijuana is legal under the law in California and a dozen other states, but the federal government under President Bush, bolstered by a 2005 Supreme Court ruling, argued that federal interests trumped state law.

Dogged by marijuana advocates throughout the campaign, Mr. Obama repeatedly said he was opposed to using the federal government to raid medical marijuana shops, particularly because it was an infringement on states’ decisions.

“I’m not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue,” Mr. Obama told the Mail Tribune newspaper in Oregon in March, during the Democratic primary campaign.

He told the newspaper the “basic concept of using medical marijuana for the same purposes and with the same controls as other drugs prescribed by doctors, I think that’s entirely appropriate.”

Mr. Obama is still filling key law enforcement posts. For now, DEA is run by acting Administrator Michele Leonhart, a Bush appointee.

Special Agent Sarah Pullen of the DEA’s Los Angeles office said agents raided four marijuana dispensaries about noon Tuesday. Two were in Venice and one each was in Marina Del Rey and Playa Del Ray — all in the Los Angeles area.

A man who answered the phone at Marina Caregivers in Marina Del Rey said his shop was the target of a raid but declined to elaborate, saying the shop was just trying to get back to operating.

Agent Pullen said the four raids seized $10,000 in cash and 224 kilograms of marijuana and marijuana-laced food, such as cookies. No one was arrested, she said, but the raid is part of an ongoing investigation seeking to trace the marijuana back to its suppliers or source.

She said agents have conducted 30 or 40 similar raids in the past several years, many of which resulted in prosecutions.

“It’s clear that the DEA is showing no respect for President Obama’s campaign promises,” said Dan Bernath, a spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, which advocates for medical marijuana and for decriminalizing the drug.

California allows patients whose doctors prescribe marijuana to use the drug. The state has set up a registry to allow patients to obtain cards allowing them to possess, grow, transport and use marijuana.

Kris Hermes of Americans for Safe Access, a medical marijuana advocacy group in California, called the raids an attempt to undermine state law and said they were apparently conducted without the knowledge of Los Angeles city or police officials.

He said the DEA has raided five medical marijuana dispensaries in the state since Mr. Obama was inaugurated and that the first took place on Jan. 22 in South Lake Tahoe.

“President Obama needs to keep a promise he made, not just in one campaign stop, but in multiple speeches that he would not be spending Justice Department funds on these kinds of raids,” Mr. Hermes said. “We do want to give him a little bit of leeway, but at the same time we’re expecting him to stop this egregious enforcement policy that is continuing into his presidency.”

He said he is aware that Mr. Obama has not installed his own DEA chief but that new Attorney General “Eric Holder can still suspend these types of operations.”

The Justice Department referred questions to the White House.

Feds Remove Anti-Tumor Cannabis Info After Just Days Online

 

Just 11 days after adding a section on medical marijuana to its treatment database, the National Cancer Institute has altered the new page, removing any mention of the evidence that marijuana can diminish and even reverse tumor growth.

In an edit appearing Monday afternoon, NCI replaced a sentence about marijuana’s direct anti-tumor effect with one saying that it is prescribed mainly to control nausea, pain and insomnia for cancer patients, reports Kyle Daly at The Colorado Independent.

The original language, published to the Web on March 17, had read:

The potential benefits of medicinal Cannabis for people living with cancer include antiemetic effects, appetite stimulation, pain relief, and improved sleep. In the practice of integrative oncology, the health care provider may recommend medicinal Cannabis not only for symptom management but also for its possible direct antitumor effect.

After being changed Monday, it now reads:

The potential benefits of medicinal Cannabis for people living with cancer include antiemetic effects, appetite stimulation, pain relief, and improved sleep. Though no relevant surveys of practice patterns exist, it appears that physicians caring for cancer patients who prescribe medicinal Cannabis predominantly do so for symptom management.

Information which acknowledges that marijuana has been used medicinally for thousands of years was left on the site, as were statements regarding cannabinoids and their benefits in ameliorating the side-effects of conventional cancer treatments.

Was Big Pharm behind the changes? Were the pharmaceutical companies protecting their profits derived from harsh and often ineffective chemotherapy?

Do we live in a free, science-based society or one where medical research can be deleted and ignored for political reasons?