Judge Clears Way for Pot to Be Seized

Angry that two owners of a Thousand Oaks medical marijuana outlet twice misused a civil court order to fend off law enforcement, a Ventura judge Thursday cleared the way for police to arrest them and seize their plants.

Until Thursday, “there was a cloak of protection over the plants in the garage,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Mitch Disney, referring to marijuana growing at the home of pot activist and migraine sufferer Andrea Nagy. “Now that cloak is gone.”

Nagy and her boyfriend, Robert Carson, ran Ventura County’s only medical marijuana outlet out of a Thousand Oaks strip mall, serving about 60 patients suffering from AIDS, cancer and other serious ailments.

After the district attorney filed a civil suit claiming that the business was a threat to public health, Superior Court Judge William Peck issued a temporary restraining order in February shutting it down.

On March 2, Peck expanded on that order with a preliminary injunction that forbade Nagy and Carson to sell or distribute pot until the issue is settled in trial later this year. The order did allow them to continue cultivating it for their own personal medicinal use.

Thursday’s hearing was meant to determine how many plants the two could grow for their own medical use. In the end, the judge left that decision up to police and prosecutors.

Factored into the judge’s decision were two instances where Nagy and Carson used his civil court order to fend off criminal charges.

The first occurred in February when a CHP officer pulled Carson over for speeding near Tehachapi and found pot in his car. Unable to produce a driver’s license, Carson instead offered Peck’s court order to the officer, Disney said.

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The second incident occurred several weeks later when Nagy gave a copy of the order to officers responding to complaints that pot plants were visible in her garage.

“I did not give anyone permission to possess marijuana,” Peck said. The police “didn’t confiscate the marijuana, but they could have. That is why I am so upset that my court order has been abused.”

He said he wanted to revise his March 2 order to make clear it “in no way encourages or discourages law enforcement officials.”

Peck left to police and prosecutors the question of whether Nagy and Carson have more marijuana plants than they need for their own medical use and whether they have the necessary prescriptions.

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“And if you think they have more than is sufficient for personal use you can go in and bust ‘em,” he told Disney.

Before the judge adjourned to work out wording for a new preliminary injunction, attorneys for Nagy and Carson asked him to spell out what their clients could do.

Peck said they could disseminate knowledge about pot growing, but not give out plants or seeds or create a communal pot garden.

“Once you allow two or three people to get together and grow marijuana, then what is to stop 2,000 to 3,000 people from getting together?” he asked.

Outside the courtroom, Nagy’s and Carson’s attorneys expressed frustration.

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“It is extremely objectionable to me that our clients have undergone considerable expense and quite a bit of disruption in their lives to be given a court order that will have no force on anyone or anything except to tell them that they must comply with the law,” said Nagy’s attorney, James Silva.

Nagy herself decried a system that would deny medicine to sick and dying people and predicted that without further protection her pot plants would be confiscated within a week.

“Mark my words, guys,” she said to a group of reporters as she walked out of the courtroom. “I give them a week before they raid my house.”