Medicinal Pot Outlet Closed Pending Hearing

The owner of Ventura County’s only medical marijuana outlet closed her doors Wednesday and agreed not to 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 medical marijuana activist Andrea Nagy, Superior Court Judge William L. Peck issued a temporary restraining order Wednesday 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 civil court hearing.

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

“Let me issue this temporary restraining order without it being any indication of how I’m going to rule” on the district attorney’s request 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.

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

Nagy says she uses marijuana to alleviate chronic migraines.

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.

Claiming 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 its civil suit seeking to permanently close the pot outlet. Nagy opened the center 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.