Oregon Cannabis Stories

We love our clients. From mom-and-pop shops to multinational corporations, most of them run solid operations and behave themselves pretty well. But when you have hundreds of clients and thousands of transactions over many years in the cannabis industry, you see some crazy things. This list covers crazy things that come to mind in Oregon. This is just for fun.

There was the guy who walked off with a whole bunch of company plants, on camera. Also the brave woman who opened an unlicensed marijuana store on a busy street (and was politely shut down by the Portland police). The same woman for wanting to sue OLCC for not licensing her, although she had not applied. The amazing clients who did not know who owned the LLC they both organized and managed. The opponent who explained away a tax fraud to an arbitrator, saying, “everyone does it. Well, maybe not Mother Theresa! But you know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. (He lost.) The shifty bros who wanted big bucks to license a Wu-Tang member’s IP, although they had no demonstrable connection to that member. The corrupt CPA who forged signatures of his client, a famous actress, to invest her money in a cannabis business. The geniuses who built these all-time terrible business structures. The gentleman who closed on a $2 million piece of real estate, made one monthly payment and just… disappeared. The client we sincerely disappointed by not having a ruler available in the office. That $2 million purchaser, who reappeared a year later to “get the property back” only to promptly disappear again (forever?). Nearly every CBD broker I’ve come across, and especially the ones who later popped up as PPE brokers in our law firm’s China practice, in the early days of COVID. The friendly people who sold “shares” in their nonprofit. The awful person who took LLC investment money from our clients, bought land in his own name, drove the cannabis down to Nevada and chased our clients off the property with a gun. The lawyer who sued us for “conspiracy” because our client allegedly trespassed somewhere, and then never served the lawsuit. The lawyers who told people not to file tax returns for 5^th Amendment reasons. The client who was disemboweled by a crazy person squatting on his landlord’s property (this was terrible; he survived). The client who reluctantly evicted his tenant, after the FBI arrested that tenant driving across the country with many kinds of drugs. The very thoughtful clients who fired us but promised also to endow a university hemp research center in Harris Bricken’s name after prevailing in their lawsuit. The client who won a hefty six-figure settlement, but wanted to leave it here indefinitely and swing by now and again for walking around money (apparently forever). The guy who asked an OLCC inspector what he could do, right now, “to make this little problem go away.” And last but not least, the clients who played this song on giant speakers when an OLCC investigator came to their property. We lost track of them, somehow.