Arrests

The world’s “Biggest Pot Shop,” a Bay Area cultural and political staple, has escaped the claws of the federal government yet again. Federal officials agreed in May to give up their four-year attempt to shutter Harborside Health Center of Oakland, a shop with more than 100,000 patients. Local leaders announced the decision early in the month. The news was music ...

Most of the time, when you hear a dire warning issued by police about marijuana, you know it’s going to be a farce. Maybe not this time. In a typical effort to scare stoners away from their favorite drug, the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department issued a warning in May that might actually make some sense: Wash your weed. We all ...

It has been a long time since Ricardo Montes and Luke Scarmazzo opened their medical marijuana dispensary in Modesto. But they are still paying the price. Montes and Scarmazzo are serving mandatory 20-year prison sentences for doing something that is now widely accepted: selling medicinal pot out of a retail store. Times have changed around them, but their circumstances have ...

A California sheriff’s deputy, a local postal worker, and two other Golden State residents face federal felony charges for allegedly trafficking large amounts of marijuana to Pennsylvania. U.S. Attorney Peter Smith of Pennsylvania said in March that the four defendants have been indicted by a grand duty on charges they shipped cannabis from Yuba County in Northern California to York ...

Prosecutors in Orange County have charged three Santa Ana police officers with stealing snacks and smashing surveillance cameras while raiding a marijuana dispensary in 2015. Each of the officers was charged with petty theft, while one was also charged with vandalism for destroying five closed-circuit cameras. The cameras were destroyed “by banging and smashing the camera lenses,” according to the ...

A California marijuana grower was charged a $100,000 fine in March for polluting a local water source, state officials said. The fine is one of the largest ever imposed on a legal cannabis farm for a water violation. Brent Alan Vanderkam was accused of illegally clearing land for his pot plants and unwittingly washing 427 cubic meters of top soil ...

Marijuana is going mainstream by the day. For proof, look no further than Orange County, where workers at a local medical cannabis dispensary voted to unionize in March. That makes the employees of South Coast Safe Access some of the first in the nation to join a union – specifically, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 324. The ...

A California marijuana bust led police to arrest an ex-convict whose extensive face tattoos immediately gave him away as a gang member. Khamprasong Thammavong, 33, was arrested in the San Joaquin valley after police found guns and dozens of marijuana plants at his house, authorities said. He was booked into the Fresno County Jail on several serious felony charges, including ...

Police in New Jersey arrested three men and seized six pounds of marijuana that arrived aboard a commercial flight from California, authorities said. The bust started with a traffic stop by two state troopers, police said. The troopers pulled over a Mazda with tinted windows along a highway in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., police said. The officers allegedly noticed “a strong ...

Authorities in Shasta County say they raided a large cannabis farm in February and seized more than 2,000 plants. Officers with the Marijuana Investigation Team at the Shasta County sheriff’s Office said they served search warrants on two sites in unincorporated parts of the county. The team allegedly found 2,154 plants. One person was arrested, and authorities said they were ...