Tampa smoke shop raided; business owner says he sells only legal, licensed products
Smokey Jones on Hillsborough Avenue sells THC and CBD-based products, but an attorney for the business owner said it's a licensed facility that complies with all state law and should never have been raided.
Hernando High teacher charged with giving student Kratom
'They took over $200,000 worth of product, not only THC Hemp, not only THC Hemp Flower that they tested, but a bunch of other things that they just assumed may have been illegal products, including CBD dog treats,' said attorney Michael Minardi.
The attorney said the raid is highly unusual for a licensed marijuana business in Florida.
'This is the first instance where they went in and they took product and they took money,' Minardi said.
Business owner Dannie Jones said the raid has been devastating for his business and the employees who were handcuffed during the raid.
'I haven't did anything wrong and to be accused of something like that, I think it's ridiculous,' Jones said.
The state contends there were illegal products seized.
On Monday, a Hillsborough County judge set bond in the case and Jones was taken into custody.
The defense said they will fight the charges.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Richard Lee, Oaksterdam University founder who paved the way for legal weed, dies at 62
When it opened in 2007 as a cannabis-focused trade school, Oaksterdam University in uptown Oakland had all the attractions of a major college campus. There were two coffeehouses in funky little storefronts, a gift shop offering logoed sweat shirts, a student union, a university museum, a bike rental and glass-blowing shop — and a founding president, Richard Lee, who was as eager as an incoming freshman. Lee, who had used a wheelchair since suffering a spinal cord injury during his prior occupation as a roadie for Aerosmith, was the perfect ambassador for medical marijuana, which he required to ease chronic pain. He also had the right combination of erudition, determination, a self-effacing sense of humor, and the boyish good looks — complete with bangs — to be the face of the nationwide drive to legalize marijuana. 'The university is a political institution. Its mission is to legitimize the business and work to change the law to make cannabis legal,' he told the Chronicle in 2008, in an interview for an innovators column called 'Bright Ideas.' Lee's mission is still not fully accomplished, but Oaksterdam is still at the forefront. He retired in 2012 after four federal agencies raided both his apartment on Lake Merritt and his office at Oaksterdam, confiscating everything but the furniture. He was never charged, and the university quickly reopened, but Lee said he had become a target for law enforcement and felt that both he and the university would be continuously harassed. Eventually he moved home to care for his aging mother in Houston. He died July 27 at a hospital there, according to Oaksterdam Chancellor Dale Sky Jones. Cause of death was metastasized cancer that had gone undetected and spread throughout his abdomen, Jones said. Lee was 62. 'Richard's courage to fight when it wasn't easy, when it wasn't safe, and when few others dared, led to a domino effect of change that we are still witnessing today,' said Jones. 'He didn't wait for the system to catch up. He worked relentlessly to make it right.' Lee was already an Oakland operator, with two coffee houses that served as marijuana dispensaries and a pot growing business on the side, when he hit on the idea to open a school that taught aspirants what he'd learned on the ground. The light-bulb moment came from a sign that read 'Cannabis College,' which he had seen at the Hash, Marihuana and Hemp Museum in Amsterdam. 'I'd seen in California that there were not enough good people who want to work in the cannabis industry in a professional way, who want to pay taxes and obey regulations and help improve their community,' he later told the Chronicle. 'I came back from Amsterdam and the idea just popped into the back of my head and I had to think back later to where I saw it.' He had the idea but not the name, which he cribbed from the nickname for the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative, for which he was a cannabis supplier. Oaksterdam U. offered its first classes on Nov. 10, 2007, with 22 students. Soon enough classes were selling out, with students coming from as far away as California and New York to pay $150 in tuition to study the politics, history, civics, legality and science of the marijuana industry. You had to pass those before you could even learn how to grow it. 'We taught you what you needed to know before we taught you what you wanted to know,' said Jones. The school was behind on rent and behind on its enrollment goals when the federal raid happened and Lee stepped down. Since then it has turned around. As of 2025, more than 100,000 students from 116 countries have earned Oaksterdam certification in specific programs dedicated to the business of cannabis, the horticulture of cannabis, extraction, manufacturing. Oaksterdam has trained officials with the California Tax and Fee Administration, and multiple state, local and county regulators of the cannabis industry, a $57 billion business nationwide. 'If you enjoy any level of legal cannabis, Richard and Oaksterdam have touched your life, whether you know it or not,' Jones said. 'The most dangerous thing about smoking weed was always getting caught with it, and that's mostly over, thanks largely to Richard.' Richard Feib Lee was born Oct. 7, 1962, in Houston, where he grew up. He was the fourth of five brothers born to Ann and Robert Lee, a legal textbook salesman who ultimately opened a membership library for accountants and lawyers. Lee attended St. Thomas More Parochial School and St. Thomas High School in Houston, where he was a member of the class of 1981. Richard was part of the drama crowd, and though he got small parts he was drawn to the production side. He was interested in attending clown school and joining a circus, and went so far as to teach himself to ride a unicycle and put on a clown outfit to ride in the downtown parade on Thanksgiving Day. He also considered becoming a commercial pilot, but instead he enrolled at the University of Houston, where he majored in communication but did not graduate. Instead he got a job at LD Systems to install lighting systems for concerts. 'He was a lighting technician and he loved it,' said his brother Don. 'He used to say he was a 'truss monkey' climbing up on the scaffolding above the stage.' While in rehearsal, before a 1990 Aerosmith tour of Europe, Lee fell on his back and 'smashed his spine,' Don said. 'He became a paraplegic with ongoing pain issues.' He was 28 and was prescribed medication to control the spastic movements in his legs. The prescribed medicine made him sick. 'That's when he really focused on marijuana as a medicine,' said Don, a retired lobbyist in Austin. He became the owner of Legal Marijuana - The Hemp Store in inner city Houston. A formative movement came one night when he and a friend went to get takeout food and he was the subject of a carjacking. He'd left his wheelchair at home planning to order at the takeout window, and the carjackers left him on the asphalt, where Houston police found him. 'I'm sitting there on the pavement for 45 minutes, and when I asked them for a ride home, they said, 'What do we look like, a taxi company?'' he told the Chronicle. 'That's what really made me mad. I blame the laws against cannabis for the lack of police protection. They're looking for people like me smoking a joint instead of the violent predators and sociopaths out there.' After that, Lee expanded his outlaw growing operation and developed a steady customer at the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative. Rather than take the risk of moving the product across state lines, he moved himself to Oakland in 1997, to join in the growing number of marijuana-related businesses that formed Oaksterdam. In 1999, he opened Bulldog Coffee Shop, which operated on the Amsterdam model of selling coffee in front and cannabis in back. He also started an illicit growing operation, which he called Richard Lee Farms, in a warehouse with hydroponics and grow lights. 'What he was doing was forming a community and an industry,' said his brother. 'He didn't want to be in the shadows, in a black market. He wanted to grow it out in the open, fully engaged in society.' In 2003, Lee opened a second coffee house/dispensary called Coffeeshop Blue Sky. With its proceeds he funded the Oakland Civil Liberties Alliance, a PAC he formed to lobby for passage of Measure Z, an Oakland proposition that made enforcement of marijuana laws the lowest priority for law enforcement. It was approved by voters in 2004. Lee also became publisher of Oaksterdam News, a newsletter that came out quarterly from 2005 to 2007. All of these operations were small compared to Oaksterdam U, a for-profit institution that grew to occupy 40,000 square feet at 1600 Broadway. Lee entered statewide politics as the main industry proponent of California Proposition 19, the first attempt in the U.S. to legalize marijuana for adults, in 2010. It failed but led to the passage of state Senate Bill 1449, which reduced possession of up to an ounce of non-medical marijuana from a criminal misdemeanor to an infraction. Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed it into law effective Jan. 1, 2011. Lee later said his activism at the forefront of the drive to decriminalize marijuana is what led to the raid on his home and his business by a combined force representing the Internal Revenue Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Marshals Service, on April 2, 2012. School computers, laptops and student records amounting to 85 boxes were confiscated and not returned until a year later. Lee's personal and business bank accounts were seized. 'They broke him, at that point,' said Jones, who replaced him as the head of Oaksterdam. 'They separated him from his business and purpose. The feds did what they wanted to do, they shut him up and they shut him down.' Bulldog Coffee Shop closed before the raid and Coffeeshop Blue Sky closed immediately after. The university was wobbly, too, and ended up moving to a smaller campus on Telegraph Avenue and made a comeback without Lee, as a not for profit educational and training institution, with an online component. His last major act was to enlist his parents, conservative Christians, who co-founded Republicans Against Marijuana Prohibition (RAMP) as a lobbying group intent on reducing or eliminating marijuana laws nationwide. There are also more than 100,000 Oaksterdam graduates carrying on the mission of legalizing marijuana in the U.S. and freeing 40,000 people who are in jails and prisons under marijuana convictions. Some 200,000 people were arrested for marijuana possession in 2023, according to data released by the FBI and cited by the Last Prisoner Project. "While the war isn't over," he said, on the day he retired, in 2012 "we have an army to fight it with."
San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Defamation case against Fox News highlights role of its hosts in promoting 2020 election falsehoods
NEW YORK (AP) — Court papers in a voting technology company's $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News point to Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro as leaders in spreading false stories about election fraud in the weeks after Democrat Joe Biden's victory over President Donald Trump in 2020. Arguments for summary judgment by Smartmatic were filed in lightly redacted form this week at the New York Supreme Court. It's like a bad rerun for Fox: Similar revelations about its conduct following the 2020 election came in a lawsuit by another company falsely accused of doctoring votes, Dominion Voting Systems. Fox agreed to pay Dominion $787 million in a 2023 settlement after the judge found it was 'CRYSTAL CLEAR' that none of the claims against the voting system company were true. In short: Fox let Trump aides spread conspiracy theories despite knowing they were false because it was what their viewers wanted to hear. Fox was trying to hold on to viewers who were angry at the network for saying Biden had won the election. Fox said it was covering a newsworthy story. It accuses the London-based company, which had only Los Angeles County as a client for the 2020 election, of exaggerating its claims of damages in the hope of receiving a financial windfall. Pirro now working in the second Trump administration The focus on Pirro is noteworthy because the former Fox personality now serves in Trump's second administration as U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. Smartmatic, relying on emails and text messages revealed as part of the case, said Pirro was using her position as a Fox host in 2020 to help Trump and persuade him to pardon her ex-husband, Albert Pirro, who was convicted of conspiracy and tax evasion. Trump pardoned him before leaving office in 2021. In a text to then-Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel in September 2020, Pirro said, 'I'm the No. 1 watched show on news cable all weekend. I work so hard for the President and the party,' Smartmatic said in court papers. One of her own producers, Jerry Andrews, called Pirro a 'reckless maniac,' Smartmatic said. He texted after one of her shows in November that it was 'rife (with) conspiracy theories and bs and is yet another example of why this woman should never be on live television." The court papers said Pirro also suggested 'evidence' of supposed fraud to Trump lawyer Sidney Powell that she could use on a television appearance — material that also was spread by Bartiromo. Bartiromo still works at Fox, and in 2020 had shows on both the news channel and Fox Business Network. The court papers uncovered messages showing her desire to help Trump: 'I am very worried. Please please please overturn this. Bring the evidence, I know you can,' she texted to Powell. Dobbs, whose business show was canceled by Fox in February 2021, texted to Powell four days after the election, saying 'I'm going to do what I can to help stop what is now a coup d'etat in (its) final days — perhaps moments," a reference to Biden's victory. Dobbs died in 2024. A central figure in Fox's 'pivot' Smartmatic portrayed Pirro as a central figure in Fox's 'pivot' to deemphasize Biden's victory because it angered Trump fans. Instead, the network found that ratings jumped whenever claims of election fraud were discussed, it said. As in the Dominion case, the discovery process helped Smartmatic find messages and statements that seem embarrassing in retrospect. For example, in early December, Fox's Jesse Watters texted colleague Greg Gutfeld that 'Think of how incredible our ratings would be if Fox went ALL in on STOP THE STEAL.' Fox, in a response to the newly-revealed court papers, pointed to an ongoing corruption case involving Smartmatic and its executives, including a claim by federal prosecutors that it used money from the sale of voting machines to set up a 'slush fund' for bribing foreign officials. 'The evidence shows that Smartmatic's business and reputation were badly suffering long before any claims by President Trump's lawyers on Fox News and that Smartmatic grossly inflated its damage claims to generate headlines and chill free speech,' Fox said. 'Now, in the aftermath of Smartmatic's executives getting indicted for bribery charges, we are eager and ready to continue defending our press freedoms.' ___
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Man accused of pulling gun on newspaper carrier in Lake County
Lake County deputies have arrested a man after he allegedly pulled a gun on a newspaper delivery person. According to an arrest report, Ronald Jones, 42, was following the delivery person in his car in the area of Grays Airport Road. The victim said he exited the vehicle and threatened her with a firearm. The woman said she got away unharmed. Jones was subsequently charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. The motive was not released. Click here to download our free news, weather and smart TV apps. And click here to stream Channel 9 Eyewitness News live. Solve the daily Crossword
