Photo: illegal grow site
August 16, 2021 – Ventura County, Ca.
Marijuana—illegal to possess, consume, grow or sell within recent memory—is today big business at the corporate level, generating millions of dollars in tax revenues to help support the State of California’s never-shrinking payroll. With that unquenchable governmental thirst for funding, those who seek to circumvent legislated guidelines designed to control the
business end of marijuana are, by definition, criminals subject to prosecution, fines, and imprisonment.
That reality became painfully apparent to 51-year-old Kristian Stucky and 68-year-old Dean Tucker, both residents of Santa Rosa Valley in the southeasternmost reaches of Ventura County, on the morning of August 13 th . According to Ventura County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Sgt. Odilon Malagon, the Narcotics Street Team “received information” that Tucker was busily growing marijuana on his property.
Pursuant to that “information” (no doubt inspired by the fact that marijuana cultivation can be a foul-smelling operation that often has neighbors picking up the phone to call the cops), detectives showed up at Tucker’s property with search warrants in hand. It didn’t take them long to look in the back yard and discover “two separate greenhouses equipped with an irrigation system” supporting more than 500 growing marijuana plants being tended by Stucky.
Both Stucky and Tucker were taken into custody, with their growing plants and 200 additional plants in stages of pre-processing drying seized along with an assault rifle and “several thousand dollars in suspected drug proceeds.” Both men were transported to Ventura County Jail where they were booked on charges of conspiracy to cultivate and distribute marijuana.
Photo: Courtesy Ventura County Sheriff’s Narcotics Street Team
