Restraining Order Closes Outlet for Medical Marijuana

The owner of Ventura County’s only medical marijuana outlet closed her doors Wednesday and will not reopen them before March 2, allowing a judge time to consider whether to shutter the cannabis center for good.

With the consent of county prosecutors and medicinal marijuana activist Andrea Nagy, Superior Court Judge William L. Peck on Wednesday issued a temporary restraining order against the Rainbow Country Ventura County Medical Cannabis Center in Thousand Oaks.

The order will prevent Nagy and her boyfriend, Robert Carson, from selling marijuana to people with such diseases as cancer, glaucoma, AIDS and multiple sclerosis at least until the March court hearing.

It was the second blow to Nagy’s operation in two days, coming after a decision by the Thousand Oaks City Council to write stiff new zoning rules that could ban marijuana dispensaries.

“Let me issue this temporary restraining order without it being any indication of how I’m going to rule” on prosecutors’ requests for preliminary and permanent injunctions, Peck said Wednesday.

“It’s simply restraining the defendants from distributing, selling or otherwise making available marijuana to anybody other than themselves for medicinal purposes,” he added. “It’s shutting down the facility for a short period of time.”

However, “Andrea and Robert will be able to grow and possess and cultivate medical cannabis for their own personal use,” said Nagy’s attorney, James M. Silva. “They cannot provide cannabis to others.”

At the March 2 hearing, Peck will consider a request from the Ventura County district attorney’s office for a preliminary injunction that would close the area’s first and only marijuana dispensary until a civil suit against Nagy goes to trial. In the interim, Nagy’s legal team will have time to file briefs explaining why the center should remain open.

Contending that the cannabis center is a threat to public health and safety and engages in “anti-competitive, unfair, fraudulent and unlawful business practices,” the district attorney’s office on Monday filed a civil suit seeking to permanently close the pot outlet. Nagy opened the center in Thousand Oaks about a year after California voters approved the medical marijuana initiative, Proposition 215, in 1996.

County prosecutors are also requesting permission to seize the cannabis center’s furniture, destroy its thriving back-room crop and possibly fine Nagy and Carson more than $25,000 each. But the ultimate goal is compliance with the law, not fines, Deputy Dist. Atty. Mitch Disney said.

By agreeing to temporarily close her doors, Nagy avoided a harsher restraining order proposed by Disney. Nonetheless, the prosecutor called the order fair.

“The judge enforced California law,” Disney said. “The restraining order recognizes that the people of California, in enacting Prop. 215, did not intend to legalize the sale of marijuana or the warehousing of large quantities of the drug.”

However, Peck would not allow police to seize Nagy’s thriving marijuana crop, as Disney had requested.

Recently, the 28-year-old Nagy has found herself embroiled in legal and zoning battles with county prosecutors and Thousand Oaks city leaders.

Officials treated her gingerly when her cannabis center opened in an office park in September, awaiting court interpretation of the state’s voter-approved medical marijuana initiative.

The topic is a tricky one because the new state law conflicts with federal laws that prohibit growing, distributing or possessing the illicit weed. But a December appellate decision, which said Proposition 215 did not make cannabis centers legal, seems to have emboldened local authorities. That decision, which was related to a very large San Francisco pot club, is being appealed to the state Supreme Court.

Now Nagy, a legal secretary who uses marijuana to treat her chronic migraines, has been barraged with challenges to her dispensary. The first was the civil suit filed by the district attorney’s office.

The next salvo landed Tuesday night, when the Thousand Oaks City Council gave initial approval to new zoning regulations that would ban all marijuana dispensaries in the city.

Furthermore, city leaders decided that the new rules--which would not take effect for several months--should be used to put the cannabis center out of business.

But Nagy’s clients were fuming about the council’s action.

“I’d like to know what we’re supposed to do for our medicine now,” said Kathleen DiSilva after the vote. The 37-year-old mother, who has undergone 13 intestinal surgeries in two years, uses marijuana to treat her Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.