In May 2017, Jim and I were attending a political fundraiser at Pebble Beach. I was just leaving the spa in a blissful dopamine haze when my phone rang. The screen displayed the caller’s name, John Duckett, the city manager for the City of Shasta Lake. As he was not one to typically call me, I figured it must be important, so I answered. I could feel the euphoria evaporating as I snapped back to reality and went into work mode.
He asked me if I had heard about the letter.
“What letter?” I asked, the apprehension mounting.
And so began the chaos, starting with a letter to the City of Shasta Lake, in May 2017, in which a “Dr. Smith” expressed his concern over alleged tax evasion on the part of the city’s three cannabis dispensaries: 530 Cannabis, Leave It to Nature, and Queen of Dragons.
Looking beyond the sensationalized content of the letter, the first and obvious question became, On what basis would a medical doctor, without any internal knowledge of or connections to these three organizations, be able to make such a strong allegation?
Precisely. Consequently, the letter had some credibility issues out of the gate—issues that one might think a highly educated individual such as a medical doctor might have foreseen.
Prior to the passage of Proposition 64, California law required that anyone wishing to use medical cannabis obtain an annual recommendation issued by a state-licensed medical doctor. The terms “prescription” or “script” were commonly used interchangeably with “recommendation,” but technically, due to the federal status of cannabis, a doctor could not prescribe a Schedule I controlled substance, but they could “recommend” its use in the same way that they might recommend vitamins or an emotional-support animal.
Throughout the state, many medical doctors had chosen to make cannabis recommendations their specialty, serving the cannabis patients exclusively as opposed to engaging in general practice. There were upward of twenty such doctors in the Redding area, and for several consecutive years, I went to “Dr. Smith” for my annual recommendation.
I liked Dr. Smith. I felt he was more professional than many of the others I had encountered, which was why I kept going back to him. He was also, to this day, the only medical doctor who ever came through 530 Collective’s doors for an educational tour. I held him in high regard. I saw him only once a year, and during those annual appointments, which typically lasted about twenty minutes, he was polite, respectful, and kind. There was never even a whiff of impropriety, malice, or instability in the air during the appointments.
However, since California had legalized cannabis in November 2016 and a medical recommendation was no longer needed, I didn’t renew my recommendation in 2017.
Perhaps it was the ending of the medical-cannabis-dominant era as well as the financial profitability that went with it for the doctors who had chosen to make medical cannabis recommendations their sole source of income; perhaps it was witnessing my success surging on the tide of recreational cannabis—that of a lowly “pot shop” owner—into the mainstream while simultaneously causing his business model to drift into irrelevance, that triggered what appeared to be an unhinged downward spiral. The public documents on file with the California Medical Board tell some of the story; the rest played out as some rather disturbing conduct and Facebook posts for many months.
During that initial phone call with John Duckett, I assured him that the city was welcome to inspect my financial records anytime they wished. I also informed him that 530 Cannabis had rather recently undergone an IRS audit and that he was welcome to review those documents as well.
The city did its due diligence, and I believe the doctor’s allegations were ultimately ignored.
He did not seem to take it well, as evidenced by his subsequent actions.
More letters followed, including letters to the Shasta County Board of Supervisors, the Shasta County Office of the District Attorney, and the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office, all of which he started sharing on social media. I don’t believe any of his letters received a response.
The doctor also began showing up at the Shasta Lake City Council meetings and pressing his concerns and implications during the public comment period. Despite being ignored, perhaps even because of it, Dr. Smith didn’t stop.
He started posting videos, filmed in various locations, including inside his medical office, calling for boycotts of the three cannabis retailers, and attempted to organize picketing events at the stores. No one showed up to his events except him and his videographer. Shockingly, the doctor wasn’t using his personal Facebook profile but was posting everything from his medical office’s official Facebook page.
Over the next weeks and months, the doctor’s videos and posts became increasingly more obsessive and nonsensical. At first, I didn’t pay much attention to them. The man was flat-out wrong in his comments about me and my company, and I had better things to do. But my team was tracking him closely.
It appeared he was not getting the response he wanted, and his obsessive behavior seemed to be escalating. He started posting every day, sometimes more than once a day. My staff was becoming more concerned as the posts and videos became ever more bizarre. Then they told me I needed to see some of them.
The videos in particular were unsettling. They were of him, talking into his camera but rarely making eye contact with it. His face was shiny, as if from perspiration. His speech was fast, sometimes slurred and slightly incoherent. His location in the videos varied: some were clearly filmed at a house, some in an office, others in a vehicle, and others still in, oddly, what appeared to be a long hallway, like what you would find at a hotel. In many of the videos, he wasn’t only taking aim at the three cannabis stores anymore; he was focusing on me personally.
He ranted about how I must have traded sexual favors for my appointment on the planning commission and that I must have bribed my way into a cannabis permit by paying off city officials. He ranted that I was poisoning—even implied that I was killing—patients by selling cannabis laced with pesticides. He sent Facebook messages to a couple of my managers, telling them that they were going to go to jail. (I suggested that my staff block him.) He went on and on about the three cannabis retail owners’ missing money and hidden profits. In one video, he made reference to me allegedly hiding my millionaire status by living in a mediocre house in a middling neighborhood.
Yes, he knew where I lived. My address was part of my medical file, after all.
Had he just glanced at my address in the file and recognized the general area, or had he actually been to my house? That gave me pause. I couldn’t stop his posts, and I had no way of knowing how often he had been to my house, but I could start documenting.
Facebook did not, at that time, let viewers save or share content outside of its own platform, so I reached out to our tech-support folks and had them set up a backdoor on my computer where I was able to download all of his videos directly from his page onto my laptop.
Having evidently been unable to gain traction with any of the local authorities, the doctor then started posting photos of letters he had written to Governor Jerry Brown, Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, and Attorney General Kamala Harris. Sometimes he would re-create his letter into a post in proper letter format; other times he wrote in all capital letters. Although the subject of these letters was more of the same, his content was increasingly incoherent—like his post showing his diagram of where he thought all the missing tax money was going. It was difficult to read because many parts had been scribbled out or written over; other parts looked like they had been drawn using big colored markers.
After a few weeks, his posts started to veer away from me, focusing on other individuals and topics. He raved about his plan to start a new business, a strip club. He stated his intent to hold auditions in his medical clinic and set a date and a time for any prospective strippers to show up and try out. I had no idea if that was a joke, but it didn’t feel like it. He was still posting all this on his medical office Facebook page; it was all public.
As if the audition call to strippers weren’t enough, he posted a photo of what appeared to be his bare ass. The post caption read, “KISS MY TUSH . . .” and then listed city officials’ names. Another post showed a package of Starburst positioned in place of an anatomical appendage between his bare thighs, his face smiling down into the camera, the photo captioned with “Want a STARBURST SHASTA LAKE CITY COUNCIL, RESDING [sic] CITY COUNCIL AND SHASTA BORAD [sic] OF SUPERVISORS.”
Although I was grateful that his posts had pivoted away from me, I remained concerned about the continuing escalation and feared a worst-case scenario, particularly since there didn’t seem to be any end in sight. People like this don’t stop. They keep on, and they keep on until they get the attention they are seeking. That was what concerned me: Where was all of this going, and where would it end?
A few days later, when I logged on to Facebook and pulled up his business page, I saw a photo of him standing in front of the California capitol building. He was wearing a vibrantly colored tie-dyed T-shirt, and the hand that he was holding up to flip off the capitol sported chipped green nail polish. Also included in that post was a photo of the word “murder” and a photo of Adolf Hitler.
Later that afternoon, he posted a video of himself in what appeared to be the capitol cafeteria, calling on all escorts in the Sacramento area to show up to Jim’s office and give him lap dances; the post also made several unoriginal and suggestive comments around Jim’s last name.
The doctor even went into Jim’s office as well as a couple of other members’ offices. Jim’s staff recalls that he sat in their lobby for about an hour even after being told the assemblymember was unable to see him. Jim recalls that his office notified security as to the doctor’s presence in the building so that he could be on their radar. Ultimately the doctor departed the building without incident.
Then his obsession took a more menacing turn. He started posting pictures of bloody knives; he posted a text message meme about guns; the conversation seemed to imply both that he needed one and that he had one; he posted photos of the word “murder,” written in what looked like blood. Even more threatening was the post that said verbatim (including capitalizations), “DEATH PENALTY FOR CANNABIS DISPENSARY OWNERS WHO did not test CANNABIS sold to CONSUMERS.”
It seemed clear from many of his previous posts that the doctor saw himself as both judge and jury with regard to crimes he perceived were committed by me and the other two cannabis store owners. The terrifying question that arose from this new development was, Did he also see himself as executioner?
This was a whole new level, and it had to stop. Jim shared the threatening posts with the CHP, and I went to talk with Lieutenant Tom Campbell, who had taken over the Shasta Lake Sheriff substation upon Captain Bartell’s retirement. Campbell was aware of the situation and had, in fact, been a target of a couple of Smith’s posts himself. Campbell advised me to seek a restraining order, making him the second law-enforcement official to do so.
I filed for the restraining order—which doesn’t prevent a dangerous person from doing something horrible, but it does give law enforcement more power if the order is violated. But I went a step further and compiled all of the videos and screenshots I had taken, and lodged a complaint with the California Medical Board. The complaint was an inch thick and included a USB drive full of all the photos and videos I had saved.
I had also been advised by several law-enforcement officials, including my dear friend Forrest Bartell, to get a firearm. Unfortunately, my being a cannabis operator made it a little tricky to exercise my Second Amendment right, so I opted for Tasers. I bought three.
In 2019, around two years after Dr. Smith began targeting me, I learned that the Medical Board of California had revoked his license. However, the board put a stay on the revocation, provided that he followed a laundry list of conditions showing rehabilitation progress as well as placing limits on his practice. All of these documents and findings are public record on the California Medical Board website.
Am I glad that the doctor was ultimately relegated to radio silence on Facebook and that I apparently ceased to be his target? Absolutely.
Do I take any comfort or find vindication in the disciplinary action taken against Dr. Smith by the California Medical Board? Absolutely not.
While I wish he had taken a different course of action to vent his understandable frustration, at the end of my experience with him, I am left only with empathy. The poor man clearly needed help. I hope he ultimately received it.
I tell the story of the doctor because it completely blindsided me. The other challenges I had faced, while daunting, were not terribly unique.
But the incident with Dr. Smith came out of nowhere. It was bizarre; it was unexpected; it was something that I never could have planned for. Even so, I had to keep going. Stopping was never an option. I had to continue to focus on the task at hand. Even in the face of the ludicrous, the unanticipated, the malicious, I focused on my vision.