Search Results: san-diego (28)

It could mean a clean sweep.

Here’s your daily round-up of pot-news, excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek. Download WeedWeek’s free 2016 election guide here.

Legalization is ahead in all nine states where it’s on the ballot.
The Florida Democratic Party  donated $150,000  to support MED in Florida. Casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson  gave another $500,000  to oppose MED in Florida.

Bobby Earle
Deborah & Dennis Little had their home raided in 2012, now they’re fighting back


Two years ago, in September of 2012, a law enforcement helicopter buzzed over the top of Dennis Little’s land in the quiet country town of Ramona, California. One month later, a joint task force comprised of local law enforcement officers and DEA agents kicked down Mr. Little’s door and arrested him and his wife on suspicion of cultivating illegal amounts of marijuana.
In March of 2013, San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis took them to court on the charges, and one full year later, in March of this year, they beat her at her own game and were fully acquitted of all charges by a jury of their peers.
With two years of their lives turned upside down, thousands of dollars lost to lawyers and courts, and a hard reputation to shake in a small town, one might think that the Little’s would be happy to put it all behind them. But they have some justice of their own to attend to first.

KeoniCabral/FlickrCommons


In February of this year, local pro-cannabis activists in Kern County in Southern California concocted a defense of pot dispensaries that you have to be toking on some top shelf herbs to come up with.
Their argument was that by forcing the closure or re-location of the vast majority of local medical marijuana storefronts, they would be violating the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) by making the region’s cannabis consumers drive their pollution-spewing cars even further to get their medication.
Half-baked or not, the defense stood up in court and the de facto ban on medical marijuana in Kern County was delayed. As we reported at the time, the court’s decision set a potential landmark precedent for other counties or cities on the verge on instituting their own crackdowns on the chron. The example we used was San Diego, and sure enough, America’s Finest City has become the new proving ground.


As the cannabis movement goes more main stream, the hucksters, frauds, snake oil salesmen, and get-rich-quick types are coming out of the woodwork. Nowhere does such a low-level life form thrive better than on the world wide web.
But while information becomes more readily available online, reliable information becomes more of a rare and valued commodity – particularly when it comes to pot. The charlatans trying to profit on the cannabis boom know this, and they are quite literally in a race to cash in as large as possible before the capitalistic opportunity of a lifetime dries up.
This haste – and its consequences – has been demonstrated time and again in the grey-collar world of trading weed-related stocks. As despicable as this practice of pumping and dumping pot stocks is, at least they are targeting adults.

Be careful what you wish for. That is the lesson being realized today by pro-cannabis advocates and activists in America’s Finest City.

San Diego, California


Yesterday, on a nearly unanimous 8-1 decision, the San Diego City Council finally cast a meaningful vote on establishing an official medical marijuana business ordinance in the city, laying down a law on pot shops for the first time since the California Compassionate Use Act, commonly referred to as Prop 215, was passed nearly 18 years ago.

Flickr.com/Simon Strandgaard.td>

It was a Tuesday morning in San Diego, just over a month ago on November 7th, when SDPD received reports of broken glass at a local business, with a possible burglary having had occurred overnight. Police investigators arriving on the scene quickly determined that the business in question was a medical marijuana dispensary, and the focus of their investigation quickly shifted from aiding possible burglary victims, to persecuting law abiding citizens and shuttering a legitimate business.
You see, San Diego was home to nearly 300 storefront medical marijuana dispensaries as recently as two years ago, but an intense crackdown by joint task forces, combining the might of local and federal authorities, led to nearly every single brick and mortar storefront being closed by the end of 2011.

Stay classy, San Diego.

Estimates are that the city of San Diego has over 70,000 medical marijuana patients, yet, the city has never passed an ordinance allowing medical marijuana dispensaries, nor has it passed any official ban on the blooming industry.
This no-man’s-land of cannabis legality in America’s Finest City, compounded by the confusion and grey-area in the state medical marijuana laws, led to a rampant rise in the number of storefront weed dispensaries to nearly 300 at the peak in 2010…and then an equally rapid shuttering and/or raiding campaign that saw all but a stubborn few shops close their doors in 2011.

Almost exactly two years ago, on August 5th, 2011, the Coronado Police Department received an anonymous tip that Michael Lewis and his wife Lauren Taylor were operating an illegal covert daycare operation, and worse, that they were smoking weed around the children.
Acting on that tip, officers visited Lewis’ home on upscale Coronado Island, and were allowed entrance to the residence by Lewis and his wife. Satisfied that there was no secret babysitting cartel headquartered in the home, officers did discover Lewis’ personal stash of pot, for which he promptly provided a valid California doctor’s recommendation. What should have been the end of the story was just the beginning of a two-year-long nightmare for Lewis, his wife, and their two kids.

San Diego mayor Bob Filner.

San Diego Mayor Bob Filner is a friend of medical marijuana patients. Not only has the guy apologized for federal raids on dispensaries in his city, he’s now urging jurors in a local medical marijuana case to ignore federal marijuana laws and find a defendant not guilty for operating a medical marijuana dispensary.
Ronnie Chang was arrested by federal agents in 2009 and faces trial this fall. His attorneys argue that he was following California law allowing him to operate a medical marijuana center. But federal courts won’t allow those arguments to be heard since they don’t recognize medical marijuana at all.

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