Cannabis is so confusing. Not because I’m high or anything. I’m not, I swear. I just use a little bit of CBD ointment on my right wing sometimes because it gets sore—and I definitely don’t inhale.
I was driving up to Grover Beach to buy my muscle relaxation potion from 805 Beach Breaks until almost every law enforcement agency on the Central Coast raided it on March 28. Duuude. Really?! I thought it was legal.
As the image of cop cars in front of one of Grover’s two licensed brick-and-mortar dispensaries blasted across the internet, I started hearing whispers that pot kingpin Helios Dayspring—who everyone loves to hate, thanks to a little rumor mill that I like to call CalCoastNews—had finally gotten his comeuppance. Editor Camillia Lanham even got a mean letter about it! She gets a lot of mean letters, so that’s not saying much, but still Dayspring’s spot is the Natural Healing Center.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Dayspring had something to do with the cop cars that showed up on his competitor’s doorstep, but I don’t want to start any rumors.
Then, later that day, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office Cannabis Compliance Team (CCT) served a search warrant in Los Alamos on the “largest growing operation they have investigated since the team formed,” according to a press release from the Sheriff’s Office. Wow!
Actually, I take that wow back—the team formed in June 2018, like nine months ago, so it hasn’t been that long. I wonder how many future press releases about the Great Green Fighting Machine, aka the CCT, are going to say that? The press release didn’t say much about why the county’s newest crime-fighting team nabbed “hundreds of thousands of illegal plants” and “thousands of pounds of processed marijuana ready for sale”—other than that it involves fraudulent licensing and the black-market division of cannabis. Why?
Isn’t the whole point of getting licensed and permitted to become legal? WTF is going on? It’s like the Sheriff’s Office couldn’t raid any pot operations when it was illegal and being grown anyway—and now that marijuana is being grown out in the open, it’s easy-peasy for them to find, target, and eradicate the grows that they deem to be illegal. We get press releases about it once a week, I swear!
We actually got a pretty slick press release from Coastal Dispensary, which is claiming it’s gobbling up dispensary permits left and right. The company nabbed one in Santa Barbara, one in Lompoc, and one for delivery in San Luis Obispo. Plus, it has another application pending in Goleta. Coastal’s taking over this area, you hear? Dayspring better watch out! And the way that Coastal’s press release sounded, the company’s PR peeps are also trying to put words in the city of Lompoc’s mouth—city spokesperson Samantha Scroggins told the Sun that the city had not vetted the release.
“After a nine-month process, it was clear that Coastal would be a highly qualified business partner for Lompoc,” the release stated. “Santa Barbara and Lompoc’s choices were influenced in large part by the Coastal team.”
Oh, is that what happened? Gross. I vomited in my beak a little.
The Canary needs more CBD for a sore wing. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 4-11, 2019.