Business
New Podcast Documents Fallout of Adelanto, Its Move To Legalize Cannabis
When a failing prison town sought to change its fortune through marijuana cultivation, city council members took advantage of their power in jaw-dropping ways. Crooked Media’s new podcast series Dreamtown: Adelanto reveals what happened and documents the extraordinary fallout.
In many ways, what happened in Adelanto, California, is an epitomic American tale: a failing prison town wanted to turn itself into a place of prosperity so it turned to another of the country’s greatest commodities, marijuana. In other ways, however, the story of Adelanto is unique, full of twists you would never see coming, and people who defy their own self-curated stereotypes.
In the new podcast series Dreamtown: Adelanto by Crooked Media, reporter David Weinberg delves into what happened when a newcomer on the local council helped the city legalize weed production, and documents the fallout that happened next.
In the middle of the Mojave Desert, on land indigenous to the Vanyume tribe, sits the small city of Adelanto. Home to around 32,000 people, its name comes from the Spanish for ‘advanced’. For many years, this was fitting—the town was founded in 1915 by Earl Homes Richardson, the inventor of the Hotpoint Electric Iron. Covered in glorious orchards nourished by the nearby Mojave River, Adelanto was designed to be a retreat for the recuperation of war veterans, a place of growth and abundance.
But it turned out vets didn’t want to live so far out in the desert, and the river began to dry up, leaving Adelanto less fertile and desirable than ever. When the Great Depression came, decimating the city further, it attempted its first significant change, one that in many ways foreshadows the story at the heart of Dreamtown. It became home to an army base and then, in the eighties, California took advantage of the War on Drugs by building numerous prisons across the state. By 2008, Adelanto had three such institutions, one later becoming the largest immigration detention center in the state.
For a while, this kept the city afloat, but it did little more than that and people were becoming increasingly fed up. So, in 2014 someone decided to try and do something about it. A quirky character by the name of John “Bug” Woodward, a long-haired, handlebar-mustached man who dons a MAGA hat in his Twitter profile picture, ran for city council on the promise of legalizing marijuana in the city. He won, and Adelanto indeed became the first city in Southern California to legalize weed.
David Weinberg was interested in this new development and went to Adelanto to do some short feature stories. “I interviewed all these city council members … and then within a year, some of the people I’d interviewed were arrested,” he says.
At first, things seemed to be going well—as soon as the legislation had passed, tinted Bentleys were seen driving around town, scoping out potential assets, and celebrity investors including Bob Marley’s son Ky-Mani Marley, B-Real and Tommy Chong amongst others were showing interest. Land was cheap, profit margins were enormous, and the city’s prosperity looked set to reach unprecedented highs.
All this glamor was offset, however, by the rudimentary and often childish nature of Adelanto city council meetings. In one podcast episode, we hear elected officials arguing with a man dressed in full clown getup. This isn’t a one-off; he attends every council meeting in the same outfit. The council start berating him, saying they can’t take him seriously. It feels like a fair criticism, but then, with sincerity, one member also says: “If a man comes in here dressed in a cowboy outfit, I can buy that. But not a clown.” There’s audible agreement on this, then discussion unravels into whether it would be fair to pass a dress code that discriminated against a professional clown who came to a meeting following a day’s honest work.
It’s these comedic moments that break up an otherwise serious story of errant authority and power gone awry. Sprinkled into his storytelling, these moments guide our understanding of small-town politics and the eyebrow-raising nature of local government. In doing this, Weinberg creates the perfect backdrop to the astonishing tale of corruption that follows.
Following the initial burst of investment prospects in Adelanto, everything came crashing down. Suspicions of corruption were raised almost right away. They related to council members seemingly taking bribes to pass marijuana legalization zoning bills to benefit certain individuals and businesses. After a sting operation, the FBI arrested council member and pastor Jermaine Wright in November 2017 on charges of bribery and attempted arson. He was found guilty after a trial in June 2022 and sentenced to five years in federal prison.
Of all the individuals involved, his case is the most extraordinary: he ended up essentially snitching on himself to an FBI informant after he’d been caught out trying to commit insurance fraud and, most oddly, requesting to have himself beaten up to the point of amnesia so he wouldn’t have to appear in court. However, at the start of the series, we hear Wright in recordings made before his arrest, speaking of his moral struggle over voting in favor of weed legalization due to his family background and role as a pastor. He sounds sincere, calm, measured. That he then morphs into the central character in what Weinberg describes as “a plot pulled from the pages of a Cohen brothers movie” is a stroke of ironic genius.
Wright wasn’t the only official arrested. In 2021, the FBI arrested the former mayor of Adelanto, Richard Allen Kerr, on charges of bribery and wire fraud. Featured in the podcast is renowned weed reporter Amanda Chicago Lewis. An expert in weed cultivation, when asked whether what happened in Adelanto was unique her reply was simple: no, this kind of corruption happens everywhere, all the time. The difference, she concluded, was that they got caught. “In Adelanto, it was egregiously dumb people doing the corruption.”
The reason the corruption happens at all is in part due to the federal illegality of weed cultivation. Weinberg explains that if you went to the city council to ask for a permit to open a business and were offered to bribe the councilperson, you could reasonably report this to the FBI. But when it comes to weed, no one wants to get the FBI involved. “It’s ripe for this kind of corruption,” he says, “and city leaders know this.”
His assumption about what happened in Adelanto is that the city manager most likely had a conscience, saw what was happening around him and tipped off the Feds. “You kind of need these whistleblowers in local government, because that city manager could have taken a cut, but he stood up for what was right and then ultimately got fired,” Weinberg says.
Although Dreamtown is about political corruption, this podcast also tells the story of someone else, someone we’re introduced to early on without realizing until a few episodes in that she’s the real star of the show. After Wright was arrested and automatically lost his place on the council, long-time Adelanto resident Stevevonna Evans decided to run for his seat.
She was already suspicious of power, having had her children wrongfully taken away from her twice by Child and Family Services. It was a traumatizing moment in her life, but it was also galvanizing. “She stopped trusting these institutions around her,” Weinberg says, and that distrust emboldened rather than disempowered her. After sensing something shady was going on in the council, her determination to weed out corruption and provide better representation for Adelanto residents was firm. In 2018, she won the seat, and in many ways, this podcast is her story of trying to fix a broken system.
At the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, where Dreamtown premiered in the audio section, Evans spoke candidly about her take on the city she calls home and the people who ran it, as she does on the podcast. She’s funny, sharp, outspoken and makes you instantly want to be her best friend. In a world where politicians rarely represent the best interests of their constituents, and particularly against the corruption that took place in Adelanto, Evans stands out as an honest and intentional powerhouse dedicated to improving the lives of her community. This is a podcast about what happened when a city council took on the legal marijuana industry and got burnt, but it’s also a story about hope for a better future, and how we can all be part of making that happen.
Dreamtown: Adelanto is available to listen on all podcast platforms.
Business
New Mexico cannabis operator fined, loses license for alleged BioTrack fraud
New Mexico regulators fined a cannabis operator nearly $300,000 and revoked its license after the company allegedly created fake reports in the state’s traceability software.
The New Mexico Cannabis Control Division (CCD) accused marijuana manufacturer and retailer Golden Roots of 11 violations, according to Albuquerque Business First.
Golden Roots operates the The Cannabis Revolution Dispensary.
The majority of the violations are related to the Albuquerque company’s improper use of BioTrack, which has been New Mexico’s track-and-trace vendor since 2015.
The CCD alleges Golden Roots reported marijuana production only two months after it had received its vertically integrated license, according to Albuquerque Business First.
Because cannabis takes longer than two months to be cultivated, the CCD was suspicious of the report.
After inspecting the company’s premises, the CCD alleged Golden Roots reported cultivation, transportation and sales in BioTrack but wasn’t able to provide officers who inspected the site evidence that the operator was cultivating cannabis.
In April, the CCD revoked Golden Roots’ license and issued a $10,000 fine, according to the news outlet.
The company requested a hearing, which the regulator scheduled for Sept. 1.
At the hearing, the CCD testified that the company’s dried-cannabis weights in BioTrack were suspicious because they didn’t seem to accurately reflect how much weight marijuana loses as it dries.
Company employees also poorly accounted for why they were making adjustments in the system of up to 24 pounds of cannabis, making comments such as “bad” or “mistake” in the software, Albuquerque Business First reported.
Golden Roots was fined $298,972.05 – the amount regulators allege the company made selling products that weren’t properly accounted for in BioTrack.
The CCD has been cracking down on cannabis operators accused of selling products procured from out-of-state or not grown legally:
- Regulators alleged in August that Albuquerque dispensary Sawmill Sweet Leaf sold out-of-state products and didn’t have a license for extraction.
- Paradise Exotics Distro lost its license in July after regulators alleged the company sold products made in California.
Golden Roots was the first alleged rulebreaker in New Mexico to be asked to pay a large fine.
Source: https://mjbizdaily.com/new-mexico-cannabis-operator-fined-loses-license-for-alleged-biotrack-fraud/
Business
Marijuana companies suing US attorney general in federal prohibition challenge
Four marijuana companies, including a multistate operator, have filed a lawsuit against U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in which they allege the federal MJ prohibition under the Controlled Substances Act is no longer constitutional.
According to the complaint, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, retailer Canna Provisions, Treevit delivery service CEO Gyasi Sellers, cultivator Wiseacre Farm and MSO Verano Holdings Corp. are all harmed by “the federal government’s unconstitutional ban on cultivating, manufacturing, distributing, or possessing intrastate marijuana.”
Verano is headquartered in Chicago but has operations in Massachusetts; the other three operators are based in Massachusetts.
The lawsuit seeks a ruling that the “Controlled Substances Act is unconstitutional as applied to the intrastate cultivation, manufacture, possession, and distribution of marijuana pursuant to state law.”
The companies want the case to go before the U.S. Supreme Court.
They hired prominent law firm Boies Schiller Flexner to represent them.
The New York-based firm’s principal is David Boies, whose former clients include Microsoft, former presidential candidate Al Gore and Elizabeth Holmes’ disgraced startup Theranos.
Similar challenges to the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA) have failed.
One such challenge led to a landmark Supreme Court decision in 2005.
In Gonzalez vs. Raich, the highest court in the United States ruled in a 6-3 decision that the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution gave Congress the power to outlaw marijuana federally, even though state laws allow the cultivation and sale of cannabis.
In the 18 years since that ruling, 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized adult-use marijuana and the federal government has allowed a multibillion-dollar cannabis industry to thrive.
Since both Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice, currently headed by Garland, have declined to intervene in state-licensed marijuana markets, the key facts that led to the Supreme Court’s 2005 ruling “no longer apply,” Boies said in a statement Thursday.
“The Supreme Court has since made clear that the federal government lacks the authority to regulate purely intrastate commerce,” Boies said.
“Moreover, the facts on which those precedents are based are no longer true.”
Verano President Darren Weiss said in a statement the company is “prepared to bring this case all the way to the Supreme Court in order to align federal law with how Congress has acted for years.”
While the Biden administration’s push to reschedule marijuana would help solve marijuana operators’ federal tax woes, neither rescheduling nor modest Congressional reforms such as the SAFER Banking Act “solve the fundamental issue,” Weiss added.
“The application of the CSA to lawful state-run cannabis business is an unconstitutional overreach on state sovereignty that has led to decades of harm, failed businesses, lost jobs, and unsafe working conditions.”
Business
Alabama to make another attempt Dec. 1 to award medical cannabis licenses
Alabama regulators are targeting Dec. 1 to award the first batch of medical cannabis business licenses after the agency’s first two attempts were scrapped because of scoring errors and litigation.
The first licenses will be awarded to individual cultivators, delivery providers, processors, dispensaries and state testing labs, according to the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission (AMCC).
Then, on Dec. 12, the AMCC will award licenses for vertically integrated operations, a designation set primarily for multistate operators.
Licenses are expected to be handed out 28 days after they have been awarded, so MMJ production could begin in early January, according to the Alabama Daily News.
That means MMJ products could be available for patients around early March, an AMCC spokesperson told the media outlet.
Regulators initially awarded 21 business licenses in June, only to void them after applicants alleged inconsistencies with how the applications were scored.
Then, in August, the state awarded 24 different licenses – 19 went to June recipients – only to reverse themselves again and scratch those licenses after spurned applicants filed lawsuits.
A state judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by Chicago-based MSO Verano Holdings Corp., but another lawsuit is pending.
Source: https://mjbizdaily.com/alabama-plans-to-award-medical-cannabis-licenses-dec-1/
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