For nearly 17 years, the federal government has been after Charles Lynch for running a medical marijuana dispensary.
Prosecutors refused to drop their criminal case against him even as marijuana became fully legal in California and 23 other states. They refused to let it go when Congress forbade the Department of Justice from using its funds to criminally prosecute medical marijuana activities that were consistent with state law.
Prosecutors have pursued Lynch’s case — which involves conflicting state and federal marijuana laws — through appeals and delays and criticisms that they were spending too many resources on a case that meant so little.
“Twenty-five percent of my life,” Lynch, now 61, said in a Southern drawl at a hearing in downtown Los Angeles this month.
When federal authorities launched their probe in 2007, George W. Bush was in the White House and Lynch was a respected businessman in Morro Bay with a three-bedroom ranch-style house in nearby Arroyo Grande.
These days, he struggles financially, lives in a single-wide trailer on his mom’s property in New Mexico and strains to remember the details of the marijuana operation that got him in so much trouble.
“I’ve lost track,” he testified at the hearing, as his mother looked on.
Lynch and his lawyers have portrayed the case as a pointless exercise by the Department of Justice that has cost taxpayers — who are footing the bill for both the prosecution and his public defenders — millions of dollars.
Even the federal judge has expressed impatience, telling the prosecutor, “at some point in time, this case has to be resolved.”
Why the federal government continued to pursue the case so ardently remains unclear — even this week, when it took a new twist that caught everyone involved by surprise.
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In April 2006, Lynch opened a medical marijuana dispensary in the seaside city of Morro Bay. As he would later testify in court, dispensaries seemed “like a pretty common business across the state” but there were none in San Luis Obispo County.
Lynch himself used medical marijuana to help with cluster headaches.
“I figured if it could help me along, I understood how it could help other people also,” Lynch said in a recent interview with The Times. “That’s one of the reasons I started up the dispensary.”
The mayor, city attorney and members of the Chamber of Commerce were at the ribbon cutting for the Central Coast Compassionate Caregivers dispensary. A photo captured the mayor shaking Lynch’s hand as he smiled.
Inside the dispensary, Lynch framed his business license and hung it by the front door. Another sign laid out the requirements to purchase marijuana: a valid state ID and a doctor’s recommendation.
Among Lynch’s many customers was Owen Beck, who was diagnosed with bone cancer as a teenager. He visited Lynch with his parents to receive marijuana recommended by his oncologist at Stanford University.
But while cultivating, using and selling doctor-recommended medical marijuana was allowed under some circumstances in California, federal law — which is independent of those of the states — bans the drug altogether.
“We were still in the Bush administration, and the federal government had not only stuck with blanket prohibition, but they had consistently been expressing concern about state laws and state actors that seemed to undermine or violate these federal law basics,” said Douglas Berman, law professor at Ohio State University and director of its Drug Enforcement and Policy Center. “It seemed like in California … that there was a greater emphasis on enforcement.”
Nearly a year after Lynch opened the CCCC, the Drug Enforcement Administration served a…
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