For nearly 17 years, the federal government has been after Charles Lynch for running a medical marijuana dispensary.
Prosecutors refused to drop their criminal case against him even as marijuana became fully legal in California and 23 other states. They refused to let it go when Congress forbade the Department of Justice from using its funds to criminally prosecute medical marijuana activities that were consistent with state law.
Prosecutors have pursued Lynch’s case — which involves conflicting state and federal marijuana laws — through appeals and delays and criticisms that they were spending too many resources on a case that meant so little.
“Twenty-five percent of my life,” Lynch, now 61, said in a Southern drawl at a hearing in downtown Los Angeles this month.
When federal authorities launched their probe in 2007, George W. Bush was in the White House and Lynch was a respected businessman in Morro Bay with a three-bedroom ranch-style house in nearby Arroyo Grande.
These days, he struggles financially, lives in a single-wide trailer on his mom’s property in New Mexico and strains to remember the details of the marijuana operation that got him in so much trouble.
“I’ve lost track,” he testified at the hearing as his mother looked on.
Lynch