“A summer of reckoning” has indeed befallen the internationally-renowned California cannabis industry as we knew it. But this reckoning hasn’t only come in a stream raids on noncompliant growers from the Humboldt to San Bernardino. Sometimes, the shutdowns arrive in the form of civil suits.
Leafly
- Fines that run as high as $900,000, property liens and — everyone’s favorite — asset forfeiture, are the new thing for Humboldt County growers to fear.
- The fines, leveled in $10,000 increments, are the highest abatement-violation penalties allowable in Humboldt County.
- In Sonoma County, the fines have so dominated 2019 legal life that Attorney Joe Ragoway has abandoned criminal law to focus exclusively on clients facing seven-figure civil cases. “It’s stopping them,” Rogoway said. “They don’t have a choice.”
