If you're a medical marijuana user who lives in south Orange County, you may want to consider moving somewhere else. Yesterday, the Orange County Register reported, the city of Lake Forest won a temporary restraining order allowing it to shutter seven storefront marijuana collectives in the city that are operating within 600 feet of a Montessori school. The dispensaries are located in the same building as the school in a mini-mall on Raymond Way and include Vale Tudo Cafe, Lake Forest Wellness Center & Collective, Lake Forest Patient's Collective/Florentina Organic, Independent Collective of Orange County, and The Health Collective.
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According to the article, a court hearing is scheduled for next month on the injunction. Like Dana Point, which has been struggling to shut down several collectives in its city through civil lawsuits and enforcement actions, Lake Forest has been engaged in a host of lawsuits with the various dispensaries for the past year. The city filed lawsuits against two separate collectives and landlords in March, demanding the closure of the collectives and seeking reimbursement of legal expenses.
And last year, Lake Forest sued nearly a dozen dispensaries for allegedly violating the city's zoning ordinances. After a judge ruled in favor of the city in May 2010, numerous dispensaries voluntarily shut down, including 215 Agenda, which was literally next door to the Montessori school cited in the current restraining order. If that name sounds familiar, you may recall it was the shop owned by Mark Moen, the subject of an April 2010 OC Weekly cover story, who was arrested early last year in both Northern California and Orange County while carrying large amounts of cash in his car. Released on bond, Moen faces 174 counts of money laundering and other charges. His next preliminary hearing is June 7 at Orange County Superior Court.
Award-winning investigative journalist Nick Schou is Editor of OC Weekly. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books 2006), which provided the basis for the 2014 Focus Features release starring Jeremy Renner and the L.A. Times-bestseller Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Quest to bring Peace, Love and Acid to the World, (Thomas Dunne 2009). He is also the author of The Weed Runners (2013) and Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood (2016).