In 2014, Charlo Greene made national headlines when she said “Fuck it, I quit” as a TV news reporter for KTVA while announcing her plans to push for marijuana legalization in Alaska. Now, as the owner of the Alaska Cannabis Club, she faces 54 years in prison, according to a report by Newser.
Greene, whose legal name is Charlene Egbe, created the club a full six months before Alaska legalized cannabis for recreational use and began receiving “donations” for cannabis through club “memberships;” the club was raided twice by police and undercover detectives made several cannabis purchases. And, although Greene was not directly involved in any of the purchases, as the club owner, she was charged with 14 total offenses which, if convicted, could see the 28-year-old spend more than a half-century in prison.
In August 2015, when she was first arrested, authorities charged her with 10 felonies and four misdemeanors amounting to a possible 24 years in jail. Since then, another six offenses have been added which raised the total of incarceration time possible — all related to “misconduct involving a controlled substance.”
“Each time, the officers acted outside the scope of the warrant, conducting unlawful body searches on patients, threatening all patients and Club volunteers with arrest if they didn’t consent to taking mugshot-like photos on the scene, destroying cameras, seizing vehicles not included in the warrant and not leaving the lawfully required notice behind,” Greene wrote in a blog post last August which appeared on the Weed Blog.
Subsequently, Greene said the prosecutor “blatantly lied” to the grand jury, saying that because the club was a sole proprietorship there was no corporate liability protection.
Greene says that since her arrest she feels abandoned by those that supported her when she walked out of the TV studio two years ago, and that the prosecution feels like “a modern-day lynching.”
“It feels like I’m in this alone and it shouldn’t,” Greene said in an interview with Complex. “I’m supposed to be part of this huge community and it doesn’t feel like it.”
Her trial is scheduled to begin in January.
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