healthmedicinet

He brought graduate-level business skills to a universe decidedly handling in a shadows. He hired accountants, correspondence lawyers, managers, a staff of 75 and a payroll firm. He paid California sales taxation and filed for state and inner business permits.

But in a box that highlights a flourishing strife between a sovereign supervision and those states that have ratified pot for medical or recreational use, a United States Justice Department indicted Mr. Davies 6 months ago on charges of cultivating marijuana, after raiding dual dispensaries and a room filled with scarcely 2,000 pot plants.

The United States profession for a Eastern District of California, Benjamin B. Wagner, a 2009 Obama appointee, wants Mr. Davies to determine to a defence that includes a imperative smallest of 5 years in prison, job a box a candid charge of “one of a many poignant blurb pot traffickers to be prosecuted in this district.”

At a core of this federal-state collision is a round-faced 34-year-old father of dual immature girls. Displaying a sheaf of authorised documents, Mr. Davies, who has no rapist record, insisted in an talk that he had meticulously followed California law in environment adult a business in 2009 that generated $8 million in annual revenues. By all appearances, Mr. Davies’ dispensaries operated as plainly as a inner Krispy Kreme, despite on decidedly some-more fluttering authorised ground.

“To be looking during 15 years of a life, we couldn’t compensate me adequate to give that up,” Mr. Davies pronounced during a dining room list in his two-story home along a San Joaquin River Delta, referring to a volume of time he could potentially offer in prison. “If we had believed for a notation this would happen, we would never have gotten into this.

“We thought, this is an attention in a infancy, it’s a complicated money business, it’s fundamentally being used by people who use it to disguise bootleg activity. Nobody was doing it a right way. We suspicion we could make a indication of how this should be done.”

His lawyers appealed this month to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to hindrance what they suggested was a charge during contingency with Justice Department policies to equivocate prosecutions of medical pot users and with President Obama’s matter that a supervision has “bigger fish to fry” than recreational pot users.

“Does this meant that a sovereign supervision will be prosecuting people via California, Washington, Colorado and elsewhere who approve with state law needing pot use, or is a Davies box merely a brute prosecutor out of step with administration and dialect policy?” asked Elliot R. Peters, one of his lawyers.

“This is not a box of an unlawful drug ring underneath a guise of medical marijuana,” Mr. Peters wrote. “Here, pot was supposing to competent adult patients with a medical recommendation from a protected physician. Records were kept, deduction were tracked, payroll and sales taxes were duly paid.”

Mr. Holder’s aides declined to comment, referring a contributor to a minute from Mr. Wagner to Mr. Davies’s lawyers in that he doubtful a depiction of a suspect as anything other than a major-league drug trafficker.

“Mr. Davies was not a severely ill user of pot nor was he a medical caregiver — he was a vital actor in a really poignant blurb operation that sought to make vast increase from a cultivation and sale of marijuana,” a minute said. Mr. Wagner pronounced that prosecuting such people “remains a core priority of a department.”

The box illustrates a onslaught states and a sovereign supervision are now confronting as they find to understanding with a changing contours of pot laws and open attitudes toward a drug. Colorado and Washington ratified pot for recreational use final year, and are among a 18 states, and a District of Columbia, that now allow a medical use.

Two of Mr. Davies’s co-defendants are pleading guilty, similar to five-year smallest terms, to equivocate stiffer sentences. Mr. Davies, while observant he did not “want to be a martyr,” motionless to plea a complaint with a multiple of authorised and public-relations measures, environment adult a Web site clinging to his case and employing Chris Lehane, a hard-hitting domestic consultant and former comparison help in Bill Clinton’s White House.

Among Mr. Davies’s advocates here in California are Paul I. Bonell, who was a boss of a Premier Credit Union for 21 years before Mr. Davies hired him in early 2011 to manage his businesses’ mercantile controls. After a businesses were raided in Oct that year, Mr. Bonell took a position as a conduct of a Lodi Boys and Girls Club.

“I had some reservations going in,” he pronounced of Mr. Davies’s enterprise. “But a attention was exploding. Matt wanted to have inner controls in place. And we thought: This was a legitimate business. If a State of California deems it legitimate, we wish to be a best during it.”

Mr. Davies’s accountant, David M. Silva, pronounced he set adult spreadsheets to keep lane of inventories, revenues and expenses. “I’ve been a C.P.A. for 30 years,” Mr. Silva said. “What we saw was a man who was perplexing to run an operation in an up-and-up way.”