What happens when you own a business your state considers legal but the federal government doesn’t? For 46-year-old Charles Lynch of Morro Bay, California, it meant a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) raid, house arrest for nine months, and a life transformed from small store owner to de facto leader of the medical marijuana movement.

In April 2006 Lynch opened Central Coast Compassionate Caregivers to sell doctor-prescribed marijuana to cancer, glaucoma, and pain patients. About a year later, the DEA swooped in, claiming he was a drug trafficker, though California had legalized marijuana for medical use a decade earlier. The Golden State’s 300-plus dispensaries—the most of any of the 13 U.S. states with legal medical marijuana—have become a target for raids (more than 50 to date) by federal agents who claim federal law, which deems marijuana use of any kind illegal, trumps state law.

At Lynch’s August 2008 trial he was found guilty of drug distribution, due in part to the fact that the jury couldn’t be told that medical marijuana stores are legal in California. But then the DEA’s case went sideways: President Obama believes medical marijuana is a states’ rights issue, and in March, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the raids on marijuana dispensaries would end. This past June, though, a federal judge sentenced Lynch to one year in prison. “Charlie Lynch took the hit for the medical marijuana movement,” says Lynch’s lawyer Reuven Cohen, who hopes Lynch will be “the last person prosecuted who was complying with state law.”  - Sue Rochman