5:15pm | The opening salvo in trying to eradicate medical marijuana in Long Beach may have been fired as far back as Dec. 17, 2009 — just as the city was crafting its second draft of the ordinance that would soon codify the legality of medical marijuana collectives within city limits — when Long Beach police raided the 4th & Elm Natural Health Collective and the 2200 Health Collective, a pair of “enforcement actions” (as they called them at the time) contemporaneous with a raid at the Unit D collective by police in Garden Grove.

That week, as a writer for The District Weekly, I was on the phone with the Long Beach Police Department about these busts, wondering if they might be related to L.A. County District Attorney Steve Cooley’s theory that all cash sales of medical marijuana are unlawful. “The enforcement action of Dec. 17 was not taken against nonprofit medical marijuana establishments making sales only to qualified patients with doctors’ recommendations,” said Sgt. Gina Zapalski, a public information officer at that time. 

Looking at the case against Joe Grumbine and Joe Byron, the two driving forces behind the three collectives in question,1  it appears that Zapalski was either misinforming or misinformed. 

It’s easy to get a bit confused. The pertinent charge in the complaint against Grumbine and Byron is “SALE/OFFER TO SELL/TRANSPORTATION in violation of HEALTH & SAFETY CODE SECTION 11360(a),” of which there are 12 counts, all stemming from dispensary sales made to undercover police officers posing as patients — complete with valid doctor’s recommendations — during the five weeks prior to the raids. 

That’s the same charge that would have been filed if the Joes in question had been selling bud on the street for profit. But the opening clause of HSC § 11360(a), “[e]xcept as otherwise provided by this section or as authorized by law,” is what exempts properly-organized nonprofit collectives from being prosecuted for selling cannabis to their patients due to the Compassionate Use Act of 1996.

That is, unless all cash transactions are illegal. And while there’s nothing explicit in the law to this effect — in fact, the terms “dispensary” and “storefront or mobile retail outlet” appear within the text of the law itself (see HSC § 11362.768(e)) — this is the lever by which anti-medpot forces would like to overturn the way medical marijuana is dispensed in practice, if not period.

So in trying to understand what’s really going on in this case, one question needs answering: Is this about busting a collective simply because they sold marijuana for cash? If that’s the haps, then a successful prosecution would mean every collective in Long Beach is in danger, because all of them believe what state Sen. Mark Leno, the law’s co-author, says it’s about: “I can tell you the intent [of the Compassionate Use Act] was not to prohibit dispensaries from engaging in sales of this medicine. In fact it was to clarify the allowance of it.”2 

The simplest way to get the answer to my question should have been to contact Cooley’s office and simply ask, so over the course of a couple of e-mails, that’s what I did:

Is it the intent of your office to prosecute medpot collectives for sales, even if those sales are not conducted for profit? If so, then why aren’t you bringing action against all of the other collectives around town? Or are you planning to?

The answers I received from Sandi Gibbons, a public information officer for the D.A.’s Office, were both vague and semi-contradictory. For example, despite saying that “There is no such charge as ‘sale for profit,'” in the same paragraph she asserted, “Over-the-counter sale-for-profit is illegal.”

Gibbons refused to comment on whether Grumbine and Byron were being prosecuted solely because they dispensed cannabis for cash, so I asked a more general question: “Does your office make a distinction between cash-for-marijuana exchanges and selling marijuana for profit? If not, does your office intend to prosecute all cases where you find there is evidence of a cash-for-marijuana exchange?” But by way of supposed clarification Gibbons simply repeated her earlier semi-contradiction: “Over-the-counter sale for profit is illegal. If the evidence shows that the suspect is complying with the Compassionate Use Act by operating as a cooperative, we do not file charges. There is no such charge as ‘sale for profit.'”


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Ironically, in her unwillingness to straightforwardly address the issue, Gibbons did pretty much answer my question. You can see as much if you peruse the transcript of the preliminary hearing in the Grumbine/Byron case, where Deputy District Attorney Ryan Dibble “object[s] to any defense being presented as far as the medical marijuana dispensaries … Nowhere in the code is there any reference to selling marijuana. … What happened here is that marijuana was sold and in cash transactions.”


This, of course, is what is going down at every medpot dispensary in the city, if not the state. So why only go after Grumbine and Byron? Says Grumbine’s attorney, Christopher Glew, “If you can find out the answer to that, you and I can crack the whole thing.”


Grumbine conjectures that it may be simply that, in the midst of Grumbine and Byron’s getting their ducks in a row to open their collectives, a neighbor’s complaint against one of their facilities for stealing power — a charge eventually dropped — may have landed the pair on law-enforcement sonar as a couple of big fish.


Whatever the reason, nothing in the charges or in the preliminary transcript seems to indicate that Grumbine and Byron were doing anything unusual in the medpot world. “The idea that one collective … was targeted, and that all their sales were per se illegal because there was actual cash [involved] — which is exactly what the Long Beach ordinance authorizes — is ludicrous,” says Glew. “It’s the city conspiring to break state law, according to Steve Cooley.”


Long Beach Deputy City Attorney Cristyl Meyers agrees that the Long Beach ordinance authorizes collectives to recoup expenses related to cultivating and distributing cannabis, though “only for overhead, for utilities and rent and things of that nature. … And I wouldn’t call it a ‘cash-for-marijuana’ transaction at all.” In fact, Meyers says she has a “difference of opinion with Sen. Leno regarding his above-mentioned gloss on the Compassionate Use Act, stating her belief that even the addition of the phrase “storefront or mobile retail outlet” to state medpot law does not authorize retail sales.


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For his part, Grumbine, whose wife and child were made to suffer a gunpoint raid of their home by police3 and who has been made nearly destitute by the financial strain of the ordeal, says he passed up the plea bargain not only because he doesn’t want to cop to a felony of which he is innocent — “I believe I was acting in complete accordance with the law,” he says, “so I never thought in a million years that this was going to happen” — but also because it’s important to “tak[e] a stand against what’s not right. … Hopefully enough people will do it so some sense will [prevail]. I’m just a tiny little piece of that. … I look back on my life, and I’ve not done anything to deserve this. … If you believe in karma or whatever, you say, ‘Well, I don’t really have that coming to me, so what’s the purpose?’ Maybe because I’ve got what it takes to stand my ground and not bend, not take that plea. If enough people do that, maybe this would go away.”


Says Glew, “[With] the way that [Grumbine and Byron] conducted themselves, [and] the way those places were run, I don’t think there’s any way a jury would find them in violation of the law.”


Since the trial is scheduled to begin by June 27 in downtown Long Beach, we should find out soon enough. And the fate of medical-marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles County may hang in the balance.
 

Footnotes

1Unit D is the only collective they continue to operate.

2http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/06/local/la-me-marijuana-confusion6-2010jan06 

3This is a typical law-enforcement tactic when conducting such a raid. For a review of a video I saw regarding a similar raid, go to http://cannabizu.com/component/content/article/59-articles/175-dissection-of-a-dea-raid-by-greggory-moore.html.