Two medical pot growers ruled not drug dealers

Federal prosecutors cannot punish two Northern California marijuana growers for violating U.S. drug laws because Congress has protected pot suppliers who follow the state’s medical marijuana law, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

In a 21 ruling, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a federal judge’s decision that two men whose property in Humboldt County was raided by federal drug agents in 2012 had complied with California’s medical

marijuana law and could not be sentenced as drug dealers under federal law.

Both men had pleaded guilty to federal charges in 2014, a year before Congress barred the Justice Department from spending money to interfere with a state’s medical marijuana law. California voters approved the nation’s first such law in 1996, and 20 years later approved another law legalizing possession, use and cultivation for personal use of marijuana by adults over 21.

The appeals court had ruled in a separate case in 2016 that the budget restriction prohibited federal prosecution of growers who could prove they were following the state’s medical marijuana law. A year later, U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg cited that ruling to bar federal sentencing of the two marijuana growers, the first such decision in the nation. Their lawyer, Ronald Richards, said Friday’s decision was the first by a U.S. appeals court to prohibit federal marijuana prosecution under the congressional restrictions.

“People are still going to prison for marijuana offenses, notwithstanding the fact that most states have medical marijuana laws and many states have legalized marijuana,” Richards said. “This ruling paves the way for others to challenge these prosecutions and not have the decision upset by an appellate court reweighing the evidence.”

He said his clients, Anthony Pisarski and Sonny Moore, would ask Seeborg to withdraw their guilty pleas.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Federal policy on the issue has varied under both the Obama and the Trump administrations. ThenAttorney General Jeff Sessions announced in January 2018 that his office would resume federal marijuana prosecutions nationwide regardless of state laws, but his successor, William Barr, promised at his Senate confirmation hearing in January 2019 that he would not prosecute growers who complied with state marijuana laws.

Pisarski and Moore were arrested in July 2012 by officers who said they found 327 marijuana plants, along with two loaded guns and $416,000 in cash on their property in a remote area of central Humboldt County. Searches over the next year uncovered more firearms, cash, and gold and silver bars.

The two men presented evidence that they grew the marijuana for nearby nonprofit collectives, which reimbursed them for their costs, and that they were abiding by the state law’s ban on growing marijuana for profit. Federal prosecutors argued that the cash, gold and silver were evidence of a profitmaking business, but Seeborg disagreed, noting that such transactions were often made in cash because banks refused to serve marijuana businesses.

Upholding his ruling, the appeals court said prosecutors had not presented any evidence of past or future marijuana sales by the growers, other than the legal transactions with the collectives.

“The presence of weapons and excessive amounts of cash on the Humboldt property was equally consistent with the operation of a rural, cashintensive enterprise as it was with an unlawful marijuana operation,” said Judge M. Margaret McKeown in the majority opinion. She was joined by Judge Eugene Siler of the federal appeals court in Cincinnati, temporarily assigned to the Ninth Circuit.

Dissenting Judge J. Clifford Wallace said the cash, guns and ammunition were evidence of a forprofit operation that would have violated California law.