In late May, a group of armed and masked individuals burst into an Orange County marijuana dispensary, disabled the security cameras, took some of the merchandise for personal use, and allegedly talked about kicking the manager—an amputee in a wheelchair—"in her fucking nub."
They weren't some loose affiliation of bandits. They were uniformed police officers.
The cops didn't manage to disable all the surveillance cameras, and were caught playing darts, as well as apparently eating some cannabis-laced edibles while conducting the raid.
Presumably, those officers also seized cash and product under lucrative state and federal asset forfeiture laws. (In the past, California police have been forced to return assets if a judge rules that the original raid was illegal.)
Compare that with this report of a dispensary being robbed by armed, masked individuals—not in uniform—in Parkland, Washington earlier that same month:
In the report above, Tesa Zanotelli of 8th Wonder dispensary says: "Any dispensary knows it's only a matter of time... Because everybody knows it's a cash-based business." Everybody—cops and robbers both.
The California marijuana collective that was raided by police—a nonprofit called Sky High Holistic—has filed a lawsuit, framing the bust as part of a crackdown on unlicensed dispensaries that is partly driven by favoritism and corruption. (As we all know, there's a lot of potential money to be made in the marijuana business, and lots of potential money doesn't always inspire noble and virtuous behavior.)
Measure BB was one of two initiatives concerning medical marijuana on the November ballot, and the City Council-backed initiative imposed tougher regulations than the citizen-proposed measure, including limited business hours and a lottery system for dispensaries to get one of 20 permits to operate in the city.
Sky High Holistic did not receive a permit in the lottery.
According to the suit, Pulido and other city officials received lavish dinners, money and limousine rides around the time that Measure BB was presented to the council. An unnamed person also solicited $25,000 payments from existing collectives in exchange for a guarantee to be included in the lottery, according to the complaint.
The suit also claims Pulido has a financial stake in an unnamed medical marijuana collective that won a permit in the lottery.
In an interview with The Times, Pulido flatly denied the allegations in the lawsuit and said the lottery system was conducted entirely independently of the city through the accounting and consulting firm White, Nelson, Diehl & Evans LLP.
Whether the California raid was part of a plan by some cannabis businesses to eliminate competition, or whether it was simply another opportunity for asset forfeiture, unregulated marijuana dispensaries are sitting ducks.
To learn more about asset forfeiture—and civil forfeiture, the bizarre practice in which charges are brought against a piece of property, which can be seized even if you have not committed a crime—please enjoy this 2013 New Yorker article and this segment by John Oliver.
And you can read Washington's asset forfeiture laws (which earned a "D" grade from the Institute for Justice a few years back) right here.
