Marijuana regulators in New Mexico on Tuesday revoked the licenses of two cultivation operations in a rural county for violations and fined each company $1 million.
One of the businesses — Native American Agricultural Development Co. — is connected to a Navajo businessman whose cannabis farming operations in northwestern New Mexico were raided by federal authorities in 2020. The Navajo Department of Justice also sued Dineh Benally, leading to a court order halting those operations.
A Chinese immigrant organization sued Benally and his affiliates, claiming they were lured to northern New Mexico and forced to work long hours illegally to cut marijuana on the Navajo Nation, where cultivation of the plant is illegal.
In the report released Tuesday by the New Mexico Division of Cannabis Control, Native American Agriculture Development accused it of exceeding the state’s plant counts, failing to track and trace its inventory and creating unsafe conditions.
An email seeking comment on the allegations was backed up not without delay through Benally. David Jordan, an attorney who represented him in the earlier case, did not return a phone message Tuesday.
The other company whose license was revoked is Bliss Farm, also located in rural Torrance County, just a few miles from Benally’s operation. State officials said the two companies, located east of Albuquerque, were not related in any way.
The state ordered both to immediately stop all commercial cannabis activity.
“The illicit activities at those two farms undermine the smart paints that are being made through many hashish corporations across the state,” Clay Bailey, acting superintendent of the New Mexico Department of Regulation and Licensing, said in a statement. Illegal hashish plants and other serious violations demonstrate blatant respect for public health and safety, as well as the law. “
State regulators cited Bliss Farm for 17 violations. Regulators said evidence of a recent harvest record in the state’s track-and-trace formula led the department to conclude the plants had been illegally transferred or sold.
Adam Oakey, an Albuquerque attorney representing the investor organization that owns the deal, told The Associated Press in an interview that the company expected the state to first address some issues before revoking the license.
“We tried our best to comply, but we didn’t meet the requirements,” he said, adding that he feared the state’s action would discourage others in the sector from coming to New Mexico.
The company has already invested tens of millions of dollars in the operation and will likely have to go to court to reopen the farm, Oakey said.
As for Native American Agricultural Development, regulators said there were about 20,000 mature plants on the site, 4 times more than the number allowed under its license. Inspectors also discovered 20,000 immature plants.
Other violations included insufficient security measures, lack of chain-of-custody procedures, and poorly maintained grounds filled with trash and pests. Compliance officials also saw evidence of a recent harvest, but no plants had been recorded in the state’s tracking and guidance system.
The violations were first reported last fall through Searchlight New Mexico, an independent news organization. At the time, Navajo Attorney General Ethel Branch told the nonprofit that the tribe and the Shiprock domain still deserved justice for past damage caused by the cultivation operation. who had settled in northwestern New Mexico years earlier.
Federal prosecutors may not comment, but the New Mexico attorney general’s office said Tuesday that it “continues to investigate, along with our federal partners, possible criminal activity within the hashish industry in New Mexico. “