The Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel, in San Diego County, has been one of the hard luck stories of Indian gaming. It has unsuccessfully tried gaming several times. The last thing it tried was to announce that it would be offering online bingo.
That caused the state of California and the federal government to take it to court. It backed down. Now the tribe is trying to figure out how to dig itself out of $50 million in debt.
Now the tribe plans to try growing marijuana—for profit. It has decided to operate high tech growing facilities to growing medical marijuana. It has so far begun cultivation in more than a dozen greenhouses.
It is the first tribe in the county to take advantage of an opinion by the Justice Department of the Obama administration that sovereign Indian nations could not be prosecuted for growing pot in states where it is already legal.
The state first opened its casino in 2007. It was one of the more remote tribal casinos in San Diego County, which has more Indian casinos than another other County in California, which means also in the United States.
The remote location meant that the casino was never able to be competitive.
Two years ago, the tribe created the Santa Ysabel Cannabis Regulatory Agency and Cannabis Commission. For a year and a half, the tribe has been shipping its crop to legal dispensaries. So far about 1,000 plants are under cultivation at any one time.
How long the operation will be left unmolested is, well, up in the air.
Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Blair Perez, one of the many assistant U.S. attorneys President Trump hasn’t yet replaced from the previous administration, released this statement to the San Diego Union Tribune: “Santa Ysabel was informed in September 2015 that a marijuana grow violated federal law. Since 2015, this office has enforced the federal drug laws in compliance with current Department of Justice guidance and will continue to do so.”
The new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, has been very public about his opinion that the federal pot laws should be vigorously enforced, even in state’s that have decriminalized it. Recently he declared, “Good people don’t smoke marijuana.” As a senator, he once said, “We need grown-ups in charge in Washington to say marijuana is not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized… that it is, in fact, a very real danger.”
The San Diego Sheriff’s Department told the U-T that it does not go onto the reservation to regulate or inspect marijuana cultivation. “The Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel is operating under tribal law and tribal authority in this case,” it said in a statement.
The tribe has hired a former officer with the California Justice Department, Dave Vialpando, to head up its cannabis agency and to enjoy that the operation keeps its nose clean.
He told the U-T, “We have a highly regulated operation. The tribe has no ownership interest in cannabis. It doesn’t cultivate it, doesn’t process it.”
Last November California’s voters approved Proposition 64, which legalized the recreational use and cultivation of marijuana. That law does not bind federal agents, of course, and given Sessions’ statements, many tribes remain very jumpy about getting into pot cultivation.
For that effort, the Iipay Nation is acting as the pioneer for the other tribes.
