Chris Williams, a medical marijuana grower from Montana, faces at least five years in federal prison after being caught up in a March 2011 federal raid on 26 dispensaries throughout the state.
A few weeks from today, Montana medical marijuana provider Chris Williams will be sentenced on four counts of "using firearms in furtherance of a drug crime," due to the presence of guns at Montana Cannabis, the dispensary where Williams worked, and which the DEA shut down in 2011.
Code of the West is a revealing look at the battle for medical marijuana in Montana. The rural red state threw open its doors to medical marijuana for a few years before slamming them shut again in 2011. Caught in middle were patients and growers, some of whom got eighty years in federal prison for growing pot.
Chris Williams is sitting in a private federal prison on the Montana prairie these days awaiting sentencing. If the federal government has its way, he won't be a free man again for three-quarters of a century, an effective life sentence for a middle-aged man like Williams.
A jury on Thursday convicted a medical marijuana provider of drug trafficking and firearms charges, upholding the U.S. government's raids of state-regulated pot dispensaries in its first test at trial.
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