It has been seven nerve-wracking years since Donny Barnes' home. Businesses were raided by OAKNET - the Oakland County Narcotics Enforcement Team.
In Waterford, officers with guns drawn burst into Barnes’ antique resale shop, his spyware security shop, and the nearby Metro Detroit Compassion Club, where police said they’d often seen Barnes’ car parked, and where people seeking medical marijuana could buy it - sometimes skirting state law, police said.
In a storefront next to the club, police kicked in the door where Barnes published a magazine about medical marijuana. They seized his vehicles, office equipment and bank accounts. They also ransacked his split-level house in Orion Township, even carting off Christmas presents while his young daughter and her mom watched, begging the masked officers not to shoot their dog. They didn’t.
And Barnes has been fighting in court ever since. A year after the raids, authorities charged him with a four-year felony: possession with intent to distribute marijuana. Barnes' lawyers have battled from Oakland County Circuit Court to the state Court of Appeals, winning sometimes, losing others.
But on July 1, the scales of justice moved sharply Barnes' way. The Oakland County prosecutor requested dropping the charge, citing “the interests of justice.” A judge dismissed Barnes’ criminal case the same day.
What a difference a few years make. Yes, Barnes had crackerjack lawyers. But he also had help from something else: a rapidly changing legal climate for marijuana - in the nation, in Michigan and in Oakland County. Here's an overview of how that changing legal climate has flipped the script on decades of law enforcement tactics used against people like Barnes:
Nationwide, public opinion shifted dramatically in the very years that Barnes was in the crosshairs of authorities. In 2014, when he was raided, Americans were about evenly split about whether to legalize marijuana, according to the Pew Research Center. By April of this year, however, an overwhelming share, 91%, were telling Pew's pollsters that marijuana should be legal, either for medical as well as recreational use, 60%, or just for medical use, 31%.
Trend watchers expect the shift to continue. That means the question of whether to legalize recreational marijuana across the United States - as Canada and Mexico have done - is now merely a matter of when, not if, said Paul Armentano, deputy director of the nonprofit National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, better known as NORML.
“Nearly half of all U.S. residents live in a jurisdiction where the adult use of cannabis is legal, and access to medical cannabis is permitted in the majority of states,” Armentano said.
For defendants like Barnes, the national shift trickles down to affect views about marijuana held by judges, juries, state lawmakers and even adverse witnesses. In many states, including Michigan, "Clean Slate" laws are letting people with criminal convictions involving marijuana get their records expunged. Seeing this, prosecutors nationwide are dropping marijuana cases that they either can't win or don't want to pursue in the more lenient climate of laws and attitudes.
In Los Angeles County, the nation's largest prosecutor's office announced Sept. 28 it started the process of dismissing 60,000 marijuana convictions. The Oakland County Sheriff's Office has made no such announcement. But after decades of aggressively investigating marijuana cases, it, too, has changed. Since the start of 2021, sheriff's department investigators have not brought forward a single marijuana case to be prosecuted, according to the Oakland County Prosecutor's Office.
In Michigan, Barnes was arrested when the state outlawed dispensaries, the term for shops that sell marijuana, marijuana derivatives and edibles, including for medical purposes. Such shops had quietly been proliferating, despite insistence from conservative lawmakers and then-state Attorney General Bill Schuette that they should not be allowed. In February 2013, the Michigan Supreme Court vindicated Schuette by ruling that medical marijuana dispensaries could be shut down as public nuisances. Some local authorities - most notably in Wayne, Washtenaw and Genesee counties - ignored the controversial ruling and turned a blind eye to the shops. But drug enforcers in Oakland and other counties with a law-and-order ethos continued their aggressive raids. Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said at the time that he was simply "following the law."
In response, some distributors of medical marijuana began forming nonprofit "members only" clubs, in an effort to skirt the strict enforcement. Barnes became the "registered agent" of the nonprofit Metro Detroit Compassion Club, whose employees supposedly provided legal medical marijuana to users who joined the club. But those members needed to take more steps than just joining the club to obtain the drug legally.
Under a state law that's still in effect, Michigan requires each medical marijuana user to pay a fee and be registered in a state computer. Then, to obtain medical marijuana legally, the user needs to request that he or she be linked with a state-registered “caregiver,” the term given to those allowed to grow limited amounts of marijuana and sell it to assigned users. The catch? A caregiver can be linked to no more than five registered users.
So, in November 2014, when an undercover informant working for the Oakland County Sheriff's Narcotics Enforcement Team entered the Metro Detroit Compassion Club in Waterford, flashed a state medical marijuana card and bought the drug, he was not purchasing from a caregiver to whom he was linked in the state’s system. Although the site was a registered nonprofit, police and prosecutors at the time characterized it as an illegal dispensary masquerading as a club. Therefore, they decided, the purchase was illegal.
Fast forward to 2021. Michigan law now fully allows dispensaries that sell medical marijuana, although the state's statute calls them "provisioning centers" because some lawmakers objected to calling them dispensaries. Inside such shops, anyone with a state medical marijuana card can legally buy the drug, including doctor-approved pediatric patients. Moreover, state law also allows the drug to be sold to anyone 21 or older for recreational use.
Thus, the legal basis for busting Barnes has been swept away.
Barnes could not be arrested today on the allegations cited for his arrest, Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said. He could still be tried today for what police found in 2014. But McDonald's request for dismissal of the criminal charge on July 1 acknowledged that, because of dramatic changes in Michiganders' laws and attitudes, going after Barnes for allegedly violating an antiquated statute would be a poor use of taxpayer dollars, "particularly when we are facing an opioid crisis, and we want our prosecutors to focus on that, on the pills, and on heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine and fentanyl," she said.
In 2020, Michigan had more than 2,700 drug overdose deaths, according to a report in July from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The majority of those deaths were from opioids, which include prescription pain pills, heroin and fentanyl. Marijuana is incapable of causing death by lethal overdose, according to numerous medical authorities. McDonald said her department's scrutiny of Barnes' case spurred a key change in tactics.
"In the Barnes case, I sat down with the assistant prosecutors who had been in my predecessor's drug unit, and they wanted to change the focus of their job. They wanted to focus on serious drug violations and not on marijuana," she said.
"Of course, if we have a marijuana case that has other charges, we will pursue those other charges and dismiss the marijuana part of it," she said, adding: "I don't want anybody to think I have a sweeping policy to not charge anything involving marijuana. If there is a marijuana case that violates the scope (of state laws on marijuana), "we will absolutely prosecute it."
As for the county sheriff's changing role in drug arrests, McDonald said that "OAKNET is still busy, but based on what we see, they aren't focusing on marijuana. So we're on the same page."
Although Barnes’ attorneys vehemently contested his arrest, contending that he had no ownership share in the club or any profits it might generate, and that he was merely the registered agent for a nonprofit organization, none of that matters anymore.
Barnes' lawyers argued that police lied under oath to obtain their search warrants. They denied that. An Oakland County Circuit judge ruled that police failed to establish probable cause for raiding Barnes' house, office and shops. A state Court of Appeals opinion, in a 2-1 decision, backed the investigators and reversed the circuit judge's ruling. So, until recently, Barnes seemed headed for trial. Yet, all of that became moot after his criminal charge evaporated on July 1.
After years of escalating outcry, Michigan in 2019 revised its laws to curtail abusive seizures, which had been raking in everything from musical instruments and watercraft to power tools and business equipment, motorcycles and luxury cars - and sometimes entire houses and farms. Macomb County Prosecutor Peter Lucido, as a state representative from 2015-18 and a state senator from 2018-20, said he brought to Lansing memories of 30 years as a defense attorney. That led Lucido to push for passage of laws to limit what police can confiscate.
“There’s no reason that people who aren’t even charged with a crime should have their property taken away in a police raid. My bills stopped a lot of those abuses,” Lucido said.
In Oakland County, agents who raided the Metro Detroit Compassion Club said in court documents that they'd seized 40 pounds of marijuana. An assistant prosecutor in 2017 told the Free Press that Barnes probably had “significant involvement, if not outright ownership,” in the club, and that it was an illegal dispensary masquerading as a nonprofit organization. That assistant prosecutor worked under a former Oakland County prosecutor, Jessica Cooper, who was outspoken about her strong opposition to legalizing marijuana.
On July 1, with a different prosecutor in charge of Oakland County, Barnes’ criminal case simply went away. Oakland County’s current prosecutor, McDonald, said she's still fighting the war on drugs, but not a war on marijuana. Elected in November after defeating the incumbent Cooper in last August's Democratic primary, McDonald acted quickly to undo her predecessor’s harsh approach to marijuana offenders. One way was that McDonald transformed the county narcotics unit into a trafficking unit, shifting resources into prosecuting crimes with obvious, vulnerable victims.
"We charge crimes for both drug trafficking and human trafficking, and sometimes they're both" in the same case, McDonald said.
"I believe the people want me to focus on what is a very concerning issue, and that is the opioid epidemic - the tragic, tragic cases where young people are taking these pills - and on heroin."
To be sure, Barnes' case was not that of a typical operator in medical marijuana. He came from a family of successful Oakland County entrepreneurs. He had the resources to hire several lawyers, and to fight back when others in his shoes might have signed off on forfeiting all that was seized, including several vehicles and bank accounts, to avoid prosecution.
Now, with his criminal case gone, Barnes says he is mulling his legal options while trying to put his life back together. That includes resuming his role as a father.
“Once they said I was a big-time drug dealer, my daughter’s school started trying to keep me from going to her school activities,” he said.
Neighbors stopped waving as the family drove past them in their woodsy subdivision, said Jaimie Grochulski, the mother of Barnes’ daughter.
Standing in their kitchen in July, the couple recalled the shock of the raids and how their lives had been disrupted. Barnes said he'd spent about $200,000 on legal fees. Eyeing stacks of legal documents on a counter, Barnes said: “This has been my life for the past seven years. They devastated us. Our family wealth is gone.”
Yet, he and his lawyers are still fighting for the return of his property. During the raid in late 2014, county drug agents seized his 2010 Mercedes and 2011 Ford pickup. After three months of negotiating, Barnes said he bought them back from Oakland County in 2015 for $1,500 because "they said that was the only way I could get them back."
But the county continued to hold other property. Over several years, an Oakland Circuit judge repeatedly ordered the Oakland County Sheriff's Office to return it. In 2017, the judge imposed a rare $2,800 sanction on the sheriff's office to compensate Barnes for the extra attorney fees he'd paid in seeking to regain his property. This year, in June, sheriff's deputies invited Barnes to pick up his property. But, to his and his lawyers' surprise, they handed over just a few electronic devices.
After Barnes' criminal charge was dismissed, the Free Press began emailing a county sheriff's spokesman about his property. In August, the spokesman said that the department had been trying to reach Barnes to get his remaining property back to him. The two sides set a date of Sept. 22. On that day, Barnes arrived with a large van at the sheriff's headquarters in Pontiac. A lobby guard let Barnes' lawyer, David Moffitt, accompany him to the department's storage area, although he told a Free Press reporter to stay in the lobby.
Barnes wheeled out cartloads of equipment, cases of files and some large fans that he said the compassion club's caregivers had used to grow marijuana. He filled a large van with boxes. Still, some items were missing and Barnes should be compensated for them in cash, Moffitt said.
"These matters remain to be resolved in a separate lawsuit," he said. Despite the new climate of marijuana laws, Moffitt said he expects to face a worthwhile challenge in returning to court against the Oakland County Sheriff.
“I have to hold them directly responsible, and the previous prosecutor as well, for what happened to Mr. Barnes,” he said.
Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect that the Oakland County Sheriff's Office made its first marijuana arrest this year on Oct. 1, after the Free Press' reporting for the story had ended. The story originally said that no arrests had been brought to the county prosecutor so far this year.
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