Legal Cannabis Operation Shutdown by Sheriff in Calaveras County, California

On Thursday, October 27, a large-scale cannabis growing operation was shut down in Calaveras County. Raids are not unheard of in the cannabis industry; however, this particular harvesting operation was licensed and legal. The facility was located in an unused airport hangar in San Andreas and had obtained a permit to grow cannabis and also paid the necessary fees, but the local sheriff still believes they were in violation of the local Calaveras County “Urgency Ordinance.”

According to Sheriff Rick DiBasilio, the department received a tip about a large amount of traffic coming in and out of the area. After his team investigated the property, he came to the conclusion that the licensed grow operation is only allowed to grow, and not allowed to process, manufacture, test or perform anything else with the cannabis. Following the raid, $10 million dollars of cannabis seized at the facility was reportedly dumped into to a local landfill.

CULTURE got the chance to speak with Ata Gonzalez, founder of G FarmaLabs, who consulted the licensees involved in the reported situation. Following the event, the company attorney wrote a letter to the Sheriff’s Attorney describing the situation and defending their legality. “Yesterday they did respond to us, the city council, or the county council, which is basically the attorney of the sheriff, the one that is supposed to read him what the laws are supposed to be, to be educated,” Gonzalez said. “[He] agreed with the opinion or attorney completely, that we are in the right to dry, we’re in the right to trim, we’re in the right to do everything that we’re doing; transport, cure, everything. The sheriff’s comments [on] why he shut it down were completely wrong.” Instead, the sheriff’s attorney revealed a new reason as to why the operation was shut down, “They said what was wrong was that we took the cannabis where it was grown into another property and they stated a certain provision in the ordinance that says that two licensees cannot be registrants under one parcel.” Gonzalez also noted that there was no second license registered for that property, “We were just bringing our product to that facility which was licensed, and we didn’t go to a warehouse where it wasn’t licensed, we didn’t register a second license on that property,” he said.

Gonzalez also had suggested that the decision by DiBasilio, who is an opponent of cannabis, might have been to make an example of cannabis with the upcoming voter election on Measure D. If passed, the measure would replace the current Urgency Ordinance with a new set of regulations. “The activity of Measure D allows the processing of cannabis extract, of making chocolates, tinctures, processing as we know processing to be,” Gonzalez said. “What we were doing there is harvesting. We were drying, we were curing, trimming and packaging a dry product. We were not making oil, we were not making a chocolate bar, we were not doing any of that.”

Attempts to reach the sheriff’s department for comment have gone unanswered. Gonzalez however has plants to take the sheriff to court for the raiding of a legal cannabis business. “I cannot believe it at all. We have worked so hard that I cannot believe this has happened, but after the storm there will be a brighter day, and we will see a brighter day in court after this. There was nothing we did wrong.”