On 28 January 2016 San Diego police narcotics detectives served search warrants at 8210 Engineer Road in Kearny Mesa, where Med West Distribution operated a hash-oil laboratory.[1] Patrick McDonald, 46, and Daniel Gregg, 48, were arrested and charged with processing and selling THC or cannabis oil.[1] Police said they acted on a tip that the company was illegally producing oil, months after city staff who toured the site in April had found no hash oil.[1]
Med-West manufactured cannabis-oil cartridges for medical use, including Bhang-branded CO2-extracted products sold to state-legal businesses.[2][3] Security footage showed about two dozen officers in helmets and body armor carrying rifles raiding the business, and two employees were handcuffed and detained for hours.[2] Owner James Slatic said officers took the company’s products, hard drives and more than $300,000 in cash and froze his family’s bank accounts, with the total seizure put at about $1.4 million in cash and assets.[2]
The Kearny Mesa site had been inspected by the city attorney’s office, held a business license and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes, according to the local patients’ association.[4] About 20 officers of the cross-deputized Narcotics Task Force’s Team 9 forced staff to the ground at gunpoint, ripped open the safe and seized the operating money and inventory, costing 35 employees their jobs, while no criminal charges were filed.[4] Slatic himself was not arrested or charged in the months after the raid, though he lost access to his personal and business accounts.[2][3]
In May 2017 a judge ordered more than $100,000 taken from the Slatic family returned, and days later prosecutors charged Slatic and five employees with 12 counts including manufacturing a controlled substance, exporting more than four grams of concentrated cannabis, conspiracy to obstruct justice and money laundering.[5] Slatic later struck a deal reducing 15 felony charges to two misdemeanors and recovered hundreds of thousands of dollars seized in the raid, and in July 2018 prosecutors dropped the felony charges against his attorney Jessica McElfresh.[6]
