Bizarro by Jordan S. Rubin

Author:Jordan S. Rubin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520387959
Publisher: University of California Press

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While the organic-chemistry PhD unraveled, Jim Felman fought his latest battle in the analogue war. Upping the ante in a Texas case, the Florida lawyer alleged the government was engaged in “ongoing, nationwide, pervasive, and egregious” constitutional violations and deception.

After the 2012 Fedida case that exposed DEA dissension in the wake of Operation Log Jam, Felman became a go-to lawyer in the unusual world of analogue prosecutions. He lectured on how to fight them. That made him an easy choice as counsel for a popular head-shop chain facing financial ruin and life-in-prison for its proprietors.

The Gas Pipe found itself in a thirty-two-defendant spice indictment in 2015. Dallas federal prosecutors alleged a “massive synthetic drug distribution conspiracy,” painting a picture similar to Zencense and other industry players. (The Gas Pipe was one of the head shops Zencense distributed to.) “To perpetuate an illusion of legality surrounding their ‘spice’ distribution,” prosecutors alleged, the business “marketed and sold these products to the general public throughout Texas and New Mexico as ‘herbal incense,’ ‘potpourri,’ or aroma therapy products, claiming these products were ‘not for human consumption.’ ”17

Felman knew the government had tried, unsuccessfully, to stop Berrier’s UR-144 dissent from emerging in Fedida, and that other information trickled out from the DEA in the meantime, however begrudgingly. He thought there was more to expose. Ahead of trial in 2018, he moved to force the government to disclose more information about its analogue-review process.

His motion captured the synthetic state-of-play, at least from the defense vantage. Felman argued that the case “presents this Court with a chapter in an ongoing, nationwide, pervasive, and egregious Brady violation.” He wrote that Diversion Control chemists seek to “imprison defendants for that which is not unlawful while concealing voluminous evidence” that Forensic Sciences disagrees with Diversion Control. Felman compiled affidavits from defense lawyers around the country who sought discovery in analogue cases but were kept in the dark. That included the Kansas case where Berrier helped secure the analogue acquittal. Some defendants on that Kansas indictment had pleaded guilty to counts that referenced JWH-250, one of the substances Berrier didn’t think was an analogue. But the lawyers for those defendants didn’t learn about the dissent until afterward. The Kansas US Attorney’s Office wrote them a letter apologizing but maintained that it didn’t change the outcome.18

Felman’s latest quest caused the government to give up yet more analogue information, again begrudgingly. The 2018 hearing in Texas let the Florida lawyer question several DEA chemists about their review process. Among the witnesses was Diversion Control’s Terrence Boos, who by then was chief of the Drug and Chemical Evaluation Section, the group responsible for analogue decisions within the DEA. Felman took Boos back to their first meeting, at the 2012 Fedida hearing in Orlando, pushing the witness once more on what the lawyer saw as a tension in his prior testimony.

“And in that hearing, you expressed to me that everyone in your shop agreed with you about UR-144 and XLR-11?” Felman asked.

“Yeah, collectively, within the Office

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