The Marin Medical Alliance, which was founded in 1990 as the Hemp Renaissance Council of West Marin and opened at 6 School Street in Fairfax in 1996, was forced to close over the weekend following an eviction notice from their landlord. The dispensary is one of several in Marin County being forced to close under the recent federal crackdown on the medical marijuana trade in California, and the "School Street" address is the best clue as to why the DOJ went after this particular law-abiding, two-decade-old cannabis club. more ›

For those naysayers who want to believe that this new round of letters to a few S.F. pot clubs and the IRS audit of a huge dispensary in Oakland are isolated incidents, then hear ye now: Federal prosecutors held a press conference in Sacramento today to explain that OH YES, they are bringing their hammer down on the medical marijuana trade in California. more ›

Just days after we hear about a federal crackdown, via the IRS, on several large California marijuana dispensaries, we learn that three Mission-based pot club landlords received strongly worded letters from the Department of Justice stating that their property could be forfeited and rent monies seized by the government because their buildings were centers of drug activity within 1,000 feet of schools. San Francisco has its own law that prohibits dispensaries from operating within 1,000 feet of schools, however several dispensaries -- like the ones which received these letters -- were grandfathered in and exempted. more ›

The largest of the medical marijuana operations in Oakland — one of the largest in the world, and the largest on the West Coast, in fact — is Harborside Health Center, which posted $22 million in revenue last year. But now the IRS has come a-callin, asking for $2.5 million in back taxes for the years 2007 and 2008, citing a 1982 federal law that prohibits "businesses that traffic in illegal drugs" from deducting things like payroll, rent, insurance, and other expenses like a normal business. Harborside executive director Steve DeAngelo, while saying, "We're happy to pay our taxes," sees this new tactic by the feds as an effort to shut them down, and he's probably right. more ›

The Planning Commission has a pile of pending applications for new medical marijuana dispensaries, and the president of the commission, Christine Olague, is putting pressure on the Board of Supervisors to relax rules about where they can open in order to avoid "clustering." At the moment, because of the "green zones" that have been created where dispensaries can operate nowhere near schools or youth rec buildings, there's already a concentration of clubs in the western part of SoMa, and along Valencia near Market. more ›

It shouldn't come as a shock that Oakland's recently enacted ordinance allowing for large-scale medical marijuana grow-houses violates federal law, but now a U.S. attorney has written the City a strongly worded letter to that effect, calling into question whether the government plans some sort of crackdown down the road. more ›

Ever wonder what musical theater people do when they move to L.A. to make it big? They smoke/eat a lot of pot and make YouTube videos containing big production numbers about smoking/eating pot. Today's palate cleanser comes to us from Jake Wilson's YouTube series, The Battery's Down (as in "the Bronx is up and the Battery's down...") in which a young actor's struggle to make it big in New York has led him, inevitably, to L.A.. This latest song called "When You're Low" was penned by Micah Schraft and John Hill.
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Former SF pot club owner Kenneth Hayes (pictured here in 1999), whose Sixth Street dispensary, the Harm Reduction Center, was raided by federal agents in 2002, was sentenced to six months of home confinement today by a federal judge. Hayes' co-defendent, Oakland marijuana advocate Ed Rosenthal got probation, despite a federal law stating that he should get at least five years in prison for supplying Hayes with his pot. Both men existed in murky legal territory, having worked with local authorities to set up their businesses and believing they were acting within the law -- just not the federal one. more ›

In light of yesterday's revelation (via the SFBG) that high school kids in SF aren't smoking nearly as much weed as they did a decade ago, we offer up this palate cleanser, featuring the classic pot-smoking sequence from the late John Hughes' The Breakfast Club. This comes from back in the day (1985) when 26% of high school seniors smoked pot habitually, and comes to us via new GenX-themed blog John Hughes Is Dead -- which is, full disclosure, the latest side project by SFist co-editor Jay Barmann. more ›

The fine folks in the Walnut Creek City Council scheduled an emergency meeting (!) this morning to deal with their very first permit request to open a medical marijuana dispensary. It seems their city doesn't yet have any laws permitting, regulating, or disallowing pot clubs, so the intent of the meeting is to pass a 45-day moratorium, renewable up to two years, while they figure out what the fuck they're going to do about these quickly encroaching marijuana maniacs! more ›