Pubdate: Fri, 14 Sep 2012
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Copyright: 2012 Hearst Communications Inc.
Contact: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1
Website: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388

MEDICAL MARIJUANA GOES BACK UNDERGROUND

LOS ANGELES - A stocky onetime mortgage broker is speeding through
Costa Mesa in an old pickup with 2 pounds of weed in a paper bag. He
wears gray cargo shorts and flip-flops and a faded cap with the image
of a marijuana leaf stitched on the front. He just smoked a joint
thick as a knuckle.

For a man whose apartment was raided recently and now faces felony
drug possession and cultivation charges, he doesn't seem particularly
worried about the mission at hand. Ricky rants about a federal and
local crackdown on medical marijuana that closed various dispensaries
that he ran and forced him back to the streets, where he began as a
teenager in the 1970s. (Except then, he was a dealer. Now he is a
"mobile dispensary.")

"It's too late!" he bellows. "The genie is out of the bottle. A huge
demand has been created. It's back to the underground. Anyone who is
smart is just going to take it back to the streets."

He says he knows lots of people scurrying to the shadows as the state
has struggled and failed to regulate the medical cannabis industry and
local law enforcement agencies and the federal government have tried
to curtail it.

A hazy legality line

It's an easy journey to the underground, as the line between the legal
and illegal markets in California has always been sketchy. The medical
cannabis trade did not rise from a boardroom meeting when voters
passed the medical marijuana initiative Proposition 215 in 1996. It
sprouted out of the marijuana networks that already existed, with
largely the same growers, middlemen and customers.

As the medical cannabis industry evolved, sharp differences with the
illicit market developed, but only at the extremes: the AIDS patient
getting his labtested cannabis from a dispensary in a regulated city
like Berkeley on one end, the street dealer selling Mexican cartel
weed to high school students on the other.

In the middle was a vast, amorphous gray zone, and many operators have
found it wise to stay there, keeping their heads low and leaving no
paper trail.

Which is how Ricky does business - no taxes, no permits and no
paperwork. He stashes his cash in safe deposit boxes all over and
buries it in the ground. But he still sells only to people with
medical recommendations, he says, mainly in case he lands in court and
needs a defense.

At 48, Ricky has been an entrepreneur in legal and illegal ventures
since junior high school in Long Beach. I met him through a mutual
friend, and he asked me to withhold his name and key identifying
traits for this story. "Ricky" is an alias he has used and he agreed
to be interviewed on condition he not be identified beyond that. If
prosecutors knew he had resumed growing in the bedrooms of his
apartment after the raid, or that he had 96 plants on the North Coast,
or had two "girls" delivering packages all over Orange County, or that
he used to distribute Mexican and Canadian pot in the 1990s, it would
complicate his legal problems.

Forget complying with city regulations, he says, or the state Board of
Equalization, which collects sales tax. "All you're doing is creating
a record for when they come back to get you later."

"The cops want to make this 'weed' again. It's medicine. I believe in
this. I need it. I got my card. ... It helps me deal with every day."

How it all started

As Ricky tells it, he loved weed since the moment he first tried it in
seventh grade. He never thought it made sense that it was illegal when
alcohol was not.

A friend's older sister was a hippie with stoner boyfriends, and from
them Ricky, at age 14, bought good Mexican sensimilla, divvied it up
and sold it to his buddies. He broke even on the deal, but kept a
portion for himself. He says he met more connections and cut more deals.

He earned a business degree from a respected Southern California
university (which he asked to remain unidentified; officials there
confirmed the degree), and met a friend from Santa Cruz whose brother
was a pothead. Making a couple of dope runs up there, he supplied his
dorms when the rest of the region was going through a weed drought.

With capital from his dealing, he says, he started a car repo business
while he was still in school and managed to buy two homes in the
Inland Empire by the time he was 26. He kept his hand in the marijuana
racket, and in the early 1990s, started working with a man who was
importing 100plus-pound shipments of Mexican and Canadian pot every
few weeks.

Ricky helped distribute the drugs in addition to his legitimate jobs.
He sold the repo business and started a heavy equipment rental firm,
bought real estate and got into the mortgage game. But in 2002, he
says, the cannabis importer lured him away from what he calls a
six-figure job at an Orange County mortgage firm to work full time.

"I used to be a moneyhungry yuppie, believe it or not. I drove a new
BMW. My problem was how to deal with the money physically," he says.

Years of hard partying with booze and drugs culminated in heart
failure in 2005. Then the weed importer's foreign supply dried up, he
says. Ricky tried to regain his health, giving up heavy drinking and
drugs other than marijuana, and set off on his own. He bought cannabis
from growers in Humboldt County (and always grew some on his own) and
sold it to dispensaries popping up around Los Angeles. In the new
verbiage of the medical pot world, he was a "broker" or a "vendor."

He saw how the dispensaries sold his weed for more than twice what he
paid, which showed him how lucrative the retail end could be. So with
a partner, he opened his first shop in 2008 in Long Beach. He did
well, but it closed in a year and a half due to new city rules and he
started another, and then another, growing plants in his apartment to
supplement the supply brought by other brokers and growers.

Prison always looms

Despite the problems, he was in the sunlight for the first time in his
marijuana career and enjoyed it. He had always known he could end up
in prison, and he prepared for it mentally, but things seemed to be
changing. Then he got busted. From a tip, police put his apartment
under surveillance and noticed his Edison meter was spinning like a
ballerina, a sure sign that grow lights were guzzling power. They
served a search warrant last year, seized his plants and about
$20,000, and charged him with drug possession and cultivation. He's
preparing for trial now.

With the cities and the federal government cracking down, he closed
his last shop in March.

He says he learned a lesson from his dispensary interlude. It's about
thinking the government is ever going to accept the drug as legitimate.

Two young women do the smaller deliveries. Ricky does the larger
transactions. On this day, he pulls up in front of a liquor store.
"What's up brother," he says, as he gets out.

"Hey bro," his friend says, slipping him an envelope with
$3,000.

Ricky hands him the bag of bud, and they part, not much different than
it would have gone 30 years ago, except for a broader clientele.
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