10:30am | Last week’s conviction of Joe Grumbine and Joe Byron for selling cannabis out of three storefront collectives may have huge ramifications for the medpot community. 

That is, if the verdict survives the appeals process.

The reasons why it may not aren’t hard to fathom. For starters, courtroom observers –including OC Weekly writer Nick Schou — have marveled at the perceived bias of Judge Charles D. Sheldon (“Sheldon’s intense dislike of the defendants and their lawyers [was] obvious,” Schou writes), whose questionable efforts ranged from trying to prevent the jury from considering the California law allowing patients to ” associate within the State of California in order collectively or cooperatively to cultivate marijuana for medical purposes” — an effort an appeals court thwarted a day before the trial began — to erecting a screen so as to prevent the jury from viewing trial attendees. 

Then there is the issue of whether Sheldon and the prosecution misinformed the jury of the exactly what the Compassionate Use Act authorizes and what it prohibits. 

This would have been a non-issue had the prosecution argued simply that Grumbine and Byron’s three collectives — Fourth & Elm Natural Health Collective and the 2200 Health Collective in Long Beach, and Unit D in Garden Grove — sold marijuana for profit, since no one disputes that California law does not provide protection for such activity. But as a spokesperson for L.A. County District Attorney Steve Cooley told the Long Beach Post last spring regarding this case, “There is no such charge as ‘sale for profit,'” but only “SALE/OFFER TO SELL/TRANSPORTATION in violation of HEALTH & SAFETY CODE SECTION 11360(a).” 

Presumably this is why the prosecution’s case ran together the concepts of sales and profit-making. “What the law does not allow is straight, over-the-counter sales,” said Deputy District Attorney Jodi Castano during in her closing argument, “and it does not allow for profit.” 

Problem is, in an August 2008 set of guidelines for interpreting and enforcing medpot law, then-State Attorney General Jerry Brown opined that “a properly organized and operated collective or cooperative that dispenses medical marijuana through a storefront may be lawful, [although] dispensaries that do not substantially comply with the guidelines set forth in sections IV(A) and (B), above, are likely operating outside the protections of Proposition 215 [viz., the Compassionate Use Act (CUA)] and the MMP [viz., Medical Marijuana Program], and that the individuals operating such entities may be subject to arrest and criminal prosecution under California law. For example, dispensaries that merely require patients to complete a form summarily designating the business owner as their primary caregiver — and then offering marijuana in exchange for cash ‘donations’ — are likely unlawful.”

What does all that mean? Well, according to Brown, it doesn’t mean that over-the-counter sales are disallowed. “Members also may reimburse the collective or cooperative for marijuana that has been allocated to them,” he writes at IV(B)5. “Any monetary reimbursement that members provide to the collective or cooperative should only be an amount necessary to cover overhead costs and operating expenses.”

Though the jurors did hear about the CUA, courtroom observers report that Sheldon prevented Byron’s attorney, Christopher Glew, from discussing Brown’s guidelines at all. Why, considering that a state’s attorney general would be about as authoritative a source as there is on state law? That’s a good question.
“What we’re asking you to do is look at the big picture,” Castano said during closing arguments, whether or not she was thinking of just how big the picture in question might be. “[T]his case is not about the right of patients to get their medical marijuana. […] What this is about is whether this was a storefront dispensary a) selling marijuana and 2) making a profit; or was this a collective or cooperative defined under the law, in which it was democratically controlled, in which everybody would have a say in how that money that they all owned was to be handled?”

Brown himself points out in his guidelines that “California law does not define collectives”; and, contrary to the gist of arguments advanced by the prosecution, nowhere does state law require medpot collectives to operate as cooperatives as defined by the California Corporations Code.

Nonetheless, Castano and company convinced the jury that Grumbine and Byron broke the law. And whether the jury arrived at the conclusion that the pair’s collectives sold cannabis for profit or whether these 12 men and women were persuaded that all sales of cannabis are illegal is a state of affairs that will become clearer as further details emerge regarding what took place in Department K of the Long Beach County Courthouse.

Whatever the case, those details may reverberate far beyond our city limits.