Synthetic ‘Spice’ Kingpins Get Two-Decade Sentences in Las Vegas

Two film producers who the government said were two of the nation’s most prolific synthetic drug traffickers received two-decade prison sentences in Las Vegas, following their convictions last year for running a “continuing criminal enterprise,” under a statute colloquially known as the kingpin law.

The sentences imposed Wednesday mark the latest chapter in the legal saga of Charles Burton Ritchie and Benjamin Galecki, who in the early 2010s distributed synthetic cannabinoids—more commonly known as spice, K2, or synthetic marijuana—nationwide. Like natural cannabis, the substance binds on the body’s cannabinoid receptors, but more efficiently, producing a more extreme high.

Ritchie, 49, and Galecki, 46, will appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers federal cases from Nevada and nearby states, Ritchie’s lawyer J. Lloyd Snook said.

Judge Andrew Gordon noted that 20 years is the minimum under the kingpin law, which carries a potential life sentence. They received lower concurrent terms for other charges.

Ritchie and Galecki were indicted in three federal districts in 2015—Virginia, Alabama, and Nevada—years after their Vegas manufacturing facility was raided in 2012 as part of Operation Log Jam, a coordinated, first-of-its-kind, nationwide take down of spice dealers. Calls to poison control for synthetic substances had been going up, officials noted in announcing the raid.

A 2019 Bloomberg Law investigation that centered on Ritchie and Galecki’s case spotlighted internal dissension within the Drug Enforcement Administration over how the agency goes about supporting prosecutions of new synthetic substances that aren’t yet controlled, like the synthetic cannabinoid XLR-11 that Ritchie and Galecki were charged with dealing.

Under a 1986 federal law, substances that are “substantially similar” in structure and effect to controlled ones—"analogues,” they’re called—are treated as if they’re controlled. The scientific community outside of the government has largely criticized the process as unscientific and subjective, whereby lay jurors ultimately decide the complex chemical issue that can lead to stiff sentences.

Defense attorneys criticize the analogue law as violating due process, by not giving people sufficient notice of what’s illegal. The government, which doesn’t disclose its lists of what it considers analogues before bringing charges, says the analogue law is necessary to combat underground chemists and dealers who try to skirt traditional drug laws.

“A meth or coke dealer clearly knows he or she is selling an illegal substance,” Judge Gordon observed, while making clear he wasn’t condoning the defendants’ actions. “A seller of an analogue may not know he or she is breaking the law until the jury decides it is in fact an analogue. I am troubled by that.”

A former senior DEA chemist who was on the front lines of the government’s synthetic drug war, Arthur Berrier, disagreed with how his colleagues went about making analogue determinations. He dissented from several analogue determinations, but those dissents were not always readily shared with defendants facing charges. XLR-11 is among the substances Berrier didn’t consider an analogue.

Prosecutors kept Berrier off the stand in Ritchie and Galecki’s Virginia prosecution, leading to their convictions and three-decade sentences in that federal district being overturned for that reason.

Judge Gordon let Berrier testify in their Las Vegas trial last year. But by that point, the chemist had been convicted of an unrelated crime—related to his solicitation of a minor for sex over the internet. Ritchie and Galecki pleaded guilty on their Virginia and Alabama indictments to get all of their cases in front of Gordon for one sentencing. Wednesday’s sentencing covered those indictments as well.

In arguing that they shouldn’t have been prosecuted at all, the defendants cited their ongoing efforts to comply with the law and operate out in the open, actions that conflict with the notion of stereotypical drug dealers. They paid taxes and retained lawyers and chemists to ensure that their products—distributed in gram-quantity packets to retail establishments around the country like smoke shops—didn’t contain controlled substances.

Following the Log Jam raid, Ritchie called the DEA directly and invited an agent into their facility, telling him they would shut the business down that day if the agent said what they were doing was illegal. The agent didn’t, but they were prosecuted years later nonetheless.