A federal court has ruled that California regulators must comply with a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) subpoena that demands information about marijuana businesses.
It was in 2018 that the DEA had initially asked for unredacted documents concerning three licensed cannabis distributors and people associated with the businesses last year.
Officials with the California Bureau of Cannabis Control didn’t turn them over prompting the federal agency to issue the subpoena in January. The state declined to comply, prompting the feds to take the dispute to court.
According to the argument of California officials, the DEA failed to adequately explain the relevance to an investigation and providing the documents would violate state privacy laws. In response, the agency disclosed in a court filing last month that it the materials were relevant to an ongoing investigation into possible illegal importation and transportation of marijuana oil from Mexico by certain licensees.
This week U.S. Magistrate Judge Linda Lopez sided with the DEA and wrote in an order, “The Court finds that the United States has sufficiently established the relevancy of the subpoena to meet the ‘not especially constraining’ standard. The Court does not find that the subpoena is too indefinite or broad.”
“The Court finds that the records sought in the subpoena—’all documents including unredacted cannabis license(s), unredacted cannabis license application(s), and unredacted shipping manifest(s)’—are relevant to an investigation into importation or transportation of marijuana ‘crude oil’ from Mexico by specific licensees. The Court thus finds that the subpoena and the communication between the agencies together are sufficient to establish the relevance of the requested records to the investigation.”
