Aaron Pelley Partner

Rather than continue wallowing in paranoia, I decided to pick up the phone and call cannabis law attorney Aaron Pelley with Seattle-based firm Cultivia Law. Aaron’s been getting real-deal cannabis outlaws out of trouble for years. If anyone was going to help stop the cops from crawling up my sphincter, it was him. His advice: If the postmaster calls, or if the cops show up at the office door, don’t say a word. As long as the sender or recipient doesn’t fess up, they have no case.

“They can’t do anything or prove anything if you don’t fucking talk,” Pelley told me. “So, all you have to do is shut up. It’s not a complicated situation because they can’t prove that you knew or should have known cannabis was coming to you. There’s been some situations where they’ve put cameras in the package so they can see the person open it. So fucking what? I don’t know where people get the idea that that would somehow implicate that you knew or should have known cannabis was being shipped. I suppose after you open it, if you say ‘awesome, they sent me the weed I asked for,’ but none of that ever actually happens. I’ve had people shipping basketball sized amounts of weed and getting it intercepted. And as long as everybody didn’t respond to anyone, including the senders, nothing ever happened. They can’t necessarily prove the sender sent it and they don’t want to go through the trouble of pulling video footage for prosecutors.”

Although sending and receiving weed through the mail is a federal offense, Pelley says Uncle Sam rarely gets involved. He’s only known one incident where they sent in the hounds, and it was for a four-foot-tall pallet of weed. As for the local cops looking to get a pot bust, “nobody is home,” Pelley asserts. “Local cops want headlines. But it’s a federal crime that has mandatory minimums. Prison time,” he continued. “That said, if people don’t respond to the communications (from the postmaster or the police), the burden of proof is quite heavy, and the interest is quite low.”

For the next two days, I still remained a little paranoid. Those bastards were going to show up any moment and at least try to give me that cannabis colonoscopy, I just knew it. It wasn’t until the following Sunday that I stumbled across a news article from one of my local television stations showing that $180,000 worth of marijuana (90 pounds) was found in my hometown. It had been shipped from California to Evansville, and a woman named Hua Hou was in custody. It was her, not me they were after. They got their headline. After being scared shitless for days, I found some semblance of relief knowing that someone else other than me was shacking up with blanket-thieving felons. But if what Pelley said was true, I began to ponder, and the interest is low, why was this woman arrested? “Ninety pounds is a lot of weed,” he said. “I suspect that she picked up the packages and got busted, and then she probably sung,” Pelley added, saying that she would have had a leg to stand on if she had just lawyered up and stayed quiet.

“Even if it’s true that you didn’t have any idea that weed was coming, you don’t have control of the narrative,” Pelley explained. “The cop can write down anything he wants. If the only thing a cop can write down is that they exercised their right to remain silent and asked for an attorney, they’ll have to figure out their evidence from there. As soon as you shut up, their job becomes infinitely harder to prove or say that you had something to do with it. But it gets a lot easier as soon as you start talking.”

As for me, I wasn’t saying shit!

Still, I felt I was deserving of restitution for pain and suffering. Perhaps the public relations firms owed me a stack of cash for nearly becoming the scapegoat for their dipshitery. The whole affair must have sawed five years off my life. I now have PTSD: Postal Traumatic Stress Disorder. I’ll have to ask Aaron about a lawsuit. So, please, for the last time, stop sending me pot through the mail (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). And if you do—again, don’t—make it a reasonable amount.

“They’re not looking for one ounce of weed,” Pelley demands.

Because of prohibition, cannabis and the law have been forever intertwined. Prohibition ensured that any cannabis entrepreneur, whether they were operating before legalization or not, should have a lawyer on their side — and West coast-based Cultiva Law has been on the side of activists since its founding. One of the firm’s original attorneys, Aaron Pelley, spoke with Ganjapreneur about where it all started and how they’ve grown into a completely self-managed, people-first practice.

When Aaron started his private practice, he focused on helping medical cannabis patients. “I knew that if I was going to start my own firm that I just wanted to defend people that were committing the same kind of crimes that I could imagine committing myself,” he said. “Being a medical marijuana patient, I could get behind that.

“Attorneys have been doing this for years: They’ve been doing comic books, they’ve been doing little videos, but they [the Pot Brothers at Law] turned it into essentially a viral PSA,” said Seattle-based attorney Aaron Pelley, who specializes in corporate marijuana matters at Cultiva Law. “Now they’ve got almost like a little media empire built on that very simple saying.”

“So many of my clients have exercised their rights properly and ended up in a room with no cameras and get ‘tuned up’ because they’re exercising their rights,” said Pelley, the Washington attorney. (By “tuned up,” Pelley means getting the shit kicked out of them.)

“The pot lawyer.” Not every legal professional would embrace this moniker, but Aaron Pelley knew he had found a niche back in the early aughts when his representation of a cannabis user who had crossed state lines made the national news.

Pelley has since formed his cannabis-focused firm, Cultiva Law, and built up a team of corporate lawyers with expertise in tax, compliance and trademarks to compliment his litigation background and offer a full-spectrum legal shop for all things pot. The firm, which currently serves California, Oregon and Washington, is quickly emerging as the gold standard for legal representation in the cannabis industry. Pelley plans to expand operations into new markets as more states legalize recreational marijuana and the budding industry finds its legs (stems?).

Leafly reached out to Seattle cannabis attorney Aaron Pelley to get a legal perspective on the question.

“To be quite honest,” Pelley responded, “I’m confused as to why they’re separating because it’s been longer than 10 years since her conviction.”

Pelley further explained, “The rule is 10 years. When you’re applying [to enter the cannabis industry], you have to report any past convictions. A felony conviction is worth 12 points, a misdemeanor is worth three points, and anything over eight points gets you automatically disqualified.”

A conviction, felony or misdemeanor, is not necessarily an automatic disqualification. “I have clients with multiple felonies and misdemeanors who have licenses, but [their crimes] happened in the 70s and 80s,” Pelley said.

Pelley informed Leafly that while past drug offenses may be vacated under certain circumstances, a sexual offense is a different story. “For someone who committed a sexual offense, it’s more difficult–actually, in Washington state, it’s impossible to vacate the conviction.”

Aaron Pelley, a Seattle attorney specializing in the cannabis industry who briefly handled a lawsuit against SMRB, said he expects to see more investor litigation involving the state’s cannabis industry. Although intense competition and high taxes have made cannabis a low-margin business for many players, Pelley said, it continues to attract entrepreneurs and investors, many of whom will be disappointed in the results of even honestly run operations.

“It’s still really sexy and cool to think you can own or be part of the ownership interest in a cannabis company and I don’t think the messaging has really gotten out that farming is hard work and retail is limited,” Pelley said. The industry is still “so nascent and so many more companies are failing than succeeding.”

As an advocate for the cannabis industry, Pelley has been credited with helping build the foundation for legal protections in medical cannabis law. He has spoken at legal education seminars and cannabis conferences throughout the United States and repeatedly has been named a Rising Star by Super Lawyers magazine and a Top 100 Trial Lawyer by the National Trial Lawyers Association.

The hidden-ownership rules are well-intended but misguided, said Aaron Pelley, a lawyer who has represented companies with violations.

“I don’t think cartels would invest or ever have invested because they don’t want to be in a highly regulated and taxed industry,” Pelley said.

Aaron Pelley, owner of the Seattle-based cannabis litigation team Pelley Law, warns that investigators are not always your friends. Neither are they always your enemies, of course, but you need to be wary.

“No one’s business plan is to sink $800,000 or so into their growing business, operate for six months, make a few mistakes and lose it all,” Pelley says. “That’s not a business plan, but that can easily happen.”

Many conscientious Liquor Control Board (LCB) investigators (or those from the marijuana governing body in your state) are true advocates, and take the education part of their job seriously and want to see well-run businesses succeed. The problem, Pelley says, is that many prefer to focus on enforcement over education and even are encouraged to find ways to write up multiple violations for the same activity.

“Then you have growers who are doing everything they can to get it right, who go from operating with a desire for compliance to operating in absolute terror and fear of getting one more violation and losing their license,” Pelley says. “I’ve never met anyone who can function well in a company where they are operating from a place of fear.”

Aaron Pelley, a Seattle lawyer who specializes in DUID cases, sees it differently. “Although there were others,” he says, “that singular issue was driving the medical cannabis community to react to I-502. It had nothing to do with entrepreneurs or people who wanted to make money, or wanted to protect their [financial] interests. We’re talking about people who had cancer, AIDS, hepatitis C, who would wake up at five nanograms.”

The standard for a warrant, however, is the same as the standard for an arrest: probable cause. Although Trooper Roberts thought he had probable cause to believe Payton was driving while impaired by marijuana, Payton was acquitted, which would have been impossible had the blood test been admitted. “Probable cause is a very low threshold,” says Aaron Pelley. Police commonly cite evidence such as wide pupils, bloodshot eyes, and the odor of marijuana, none of which necessarily indicates a driver is impaired. Police may even claim a driver had a “green tongue,” says Pelley, which is “how I know a cop is lying and padding his facts.” As in Payton’s case, poor performance on sobriety tests may be due to physical limitations, which are especially common among medical marijuana patients. In practice, Pelley says, the fact that a driver has a medical marijuana recommendation may be all it takes to start down a path that leads to probable cause, which in turn justifies a blood test that may result in an automatic conviction.

Aaron Pelley, a Seattle criminal defense attorney, told Newsweek he has definitely noticed an increase in so-called “Green DUIs,” as the caseload at his firm has more than doubled in the past year. To Pelley, the explanation is pretty obvious: “Without question, [police and prosecutors] have taken a new militant stance towards using cannabis and driving.”

So far, he has been unsuccessful arguing that people who admit that they’re medical marijuana users aren’t giving officers immediate probable cause for a blood draw, but he’s much more successful in getting the results of those blood draws tossed, as police have taken to using a driver’s refusal to submit to a test as probable cause to demand it – unconstitutionally. This year Pelley expects police to shift tactics and make it increasingly hard to defend his clients.

Seattle lawyer Aaron Pelley says Lynnwood police seized the marijuana, as well as lights and other growing equipment, during a May 2012raid. He says the patients were following the state’s medical marijuana law, and no criminal charges were filed.

Pelley and two other attorneys wrote a letter to city officials, demanding they return the items or pay nearly $1 million, the estimated value of the property. The mayor signed off on the return of the pot, and Pelley picked it up Tuesday.

Pelley says the pot is no longer good for smoking but might be used to make cannabis oil or marijuana-infused products.

Aaron Pelley, a Seattle lawyer who has been representing ticketed horn-honkers pro bono in support of the Occupy effort, said that even though the court case did not specifically involve the protests, the police there had largely backed down in issuing summons since the ruling.