A Ziplock Bag in a Car Trunk: How California's Fraud Case Against BelCosta Labs Fell Apart

On the morning of April 10, 2025, a letter from Sacramento landed in the inboxes of Myron Ronay and Matthew Dechter, the co-owners of BelCosta Labs at 1131 South Street East in Long Beach. It was signed by Evelyn Schaeffer, a deputy director at California's Department of Cannabis Control, and it did not ask for a meeting. It said the lab had "engaged in activity that poses harm to public health, safety, or welfare," listed seven violations, and directed BelCosta to immediately stop testing, transporting or transferring cannabis. The provisional license the lab had held since 2018 was suspended, effective that day. (S2, S14)

Ronay, a licensed but non-practicing lawyer who had built the lab over eight years into one of the busiest in the state, went in front of a camera that same day. He and Nate Winokur, BelCosta's vice president of strategy and operations, recorded what they called an emergency podcast and uploaded it to YouTube. "We really don't believe this is right, what's happening to us," Ronay said, promising the lab would be back. Two weeks later he told MJBizDaily the shutdown was costing the company $40,000 a day. (S2, S3, S8)

Fifteen months later, an administrative law judge agreed with much of what Ronay said that day. In a proposed decision dated July 24, 2026, Judge Cindy F. Forman of the California Office of Administrative Hearings found the DCC had produced insufficient evidence that BelCosta reported unreliable potency or Aspergillus results, no evidence the lab passed a pesticide-laced sample, no evidence of fraud, and no evidence of harm to any consumer. She called the department's decision to deny the lab a license "unduly punitive" and ordered it restored on three years of probation. (S1, S6, S7)

The ruling is a legal vindication that arrives too late to matter commercially. BelCosta's instruments were sold long ago, its 70-plus employees scattered, and Ronay told MJBizDaily the lab will likely never reopen even if the DCC adopts Forman's order. It also lands on a regulator that has spent two years trying to prove it can police California's testing labs after a decade of allegations that those labs inflate THC numbers and wave through moldy or pesticide-tainted flower. The DCC has 100 days from July 24 to adopt, modify or reject the decision. Its spokesperson, Jordan Traverso, declined to comment, citing pending litigation. (S1, S7)

The stakes reach past one Long Beach lab. California's licensed retailers sold $956.7 million of cannabis in the first quarter of 2026, down from $976.5 million a year earlier after three straight years of annual declines, and every gram of it passed through a testing lab whose certificate of analysis is the legal market's central promise to consumers. If one of the state's highest-profile lab enforcement actions cannot survive a hearing, both the labs that cheat and the labs that don't have reason to wonder what the DCC can actually prove. (S1, S15)

The department's case, laid out in Schaeffer's April 2025 notice, rested on samples. On June 20, 2024, DCC staff pulled products from licensed retailers that BelCosta had cleared for sale weeks earlier, and six days later collected the lab's matching reserve samples. The state's reference laboratory reported measurable pathogenic Aspergillus in four of them, and the department ordered mandatory recalls of those batches between July 24 and August 16, 2024. A separate July 31, 2024 pull found a flower batch BelCosta had reported at 245.5 milligrams of total THC per gram; the reference lab measured 174 in the distributor's sample and 147 in the lab's own reserve, differences the DCC calculated at 29.12% and 40.12%, against a state tolerance of 10%. (S14, S2)

The rest of the seven counts were procedural: a chlordane failure uploaded to the track-and-trace system 19 days late instead of within one business day, chain-of-custody forms missing departure times and signatures, a receptionist logging samples into Metrc under Ronay's credentials while he was in Florida, samplers who skipped the lab's own eight-section randomization procedure, and one analyst who lacked the required degree or experience. The DCC denied BelCosta's pending annual license on April 29, 2025, nineteen days after the suspension and, according to the proposed decision, on the same day it issued a notice inviting the lab to request a review meeting. (S14, S7)

What Forman found when the case reached a four-day hearing in March 2026 was a chain of custody the department would never have accepted from a licensee. A DCC employee, she wrote, took the BelCosta samples, placed them in a non-sterile Ziplock bag inside a personal backpack, put the backpack in the trunk of his car, and drove 30 samples to a police station where they sat in an evidence locker for 25 days before reaching the reference lab. Neither the trunk nor the locker was temperature-controlled. The department then waited months before testing the samples for mold. Lab scientists told MJBizDaily that heat and oxygen degrade THC and that unsterile handling over that stretch can introduce the very Aspergillus the state said it found. (S1)

The department did prove five things: the late Metrc uploads, the incomplete chain-of-custody records, the shared login, the sampling shortcuts and the unqualified employee. Forman classified those as Tier 1 and Tier 2 violations under the DCC's own disciplinary framework, categories that support fines or suspensions, not the Tier 3 category reserved for knowing or willful conduct and fraud. She noted BelCosta had drawn a single citation in roughly seven years of operation, had earned ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation in 2018 and passed subsequent audits, and had already corrected the practices at issue, in part with help from accreditation consultant Dr. Susan Audino. Roughly 20 mostly anonymous complaints from people claiming to be current or former BelCosta employees, the decision said, went unsubstantiated at hearing. (S1, S7, S19)

BelCosta's collapse was not the department's first courtroom setback on testing. In April 2026, WeedWeek reported that DCC experts testifying at the March hearing under questioning from Ronay himself acknowledged gaps in agency practices that could affect contaminant results. Four months earlier, on December 9, 2025, an Orange County Superior Court judge ruled in HNHPC v. Department of Cannabis Control that the state's track-and-trace system failed to automatically flag irregularities as the law requires. And in September 2024, Tanisha Bogans, the department's former deputy director of laboratory services, sued in Los Angeles County alleging she was fired in January 2024 after pressing then-Director Nicole Elliott and other superiors about lab fraud reports that had been arriving since June 2023. The DCC said at the time it does not comment on litigation or personnel matters. (S8, S10, S12, S9)

The irony is that the pressure to act came from inside the lab industry. Zachary Eisenberg, chief operating officer of San Francisco's Anresco Laboratories and chair of the Cannabis Science Section of the American Council of Independent Laboratories, helped run a 2022 study with Infinite Chemical Analysis Labs that found roughly 87% of 150 California flower samples carried at least 10% less THC than labeled. Anresco and Infinite later sued 13 competing labs over alleged result manipulation, a case that was dismissed, and were among at least three labs that alerted Elliott directly. When California revoked its fourth lab license in September 2024, Eisenberg told MJBizDaily the revocations were "certainly a step in the right direction," adding that honest labs had already gone under waiting for it. (S5, S11, S17)

BelCosta sat on the other side of that fight. Its April 2025 petition to Sacramento County Superior Court accused Anresco and Infinite of colluding to manipulate the media and the DCC to put competitors out of business. Back in 2022, when a WeedWeek shelf test found a Glass House pre-roll labeled at 46% THC on a BelCosta certificate that Anresco and Infinite measured at 26% and 30%, Ronay had told the outlet his lab had reviewed the data and stood by its results. That superior-court petition, case number 25WM000064, was denied on May 23, 2025; the July 2026 win came in the separate administrative proceeding. (S3, S17, S7)

“There was no evidence of actual harm to the public or any consumer.”

— Cindy F. Forman, Administrative Law Judge, California Office of Administrative Hearings, in the July 24, 2026 proposed decision

Eisenberg's position, that a market which lets THC numbers drift 20 or 40 points above reality is a market that cannot ask consumers to pay a legal premium, has not changed because one case failed. In his December 2024 interview with MJBizMagazine he argued that the deterrent value of enforcement depends on labs and growers believing the DCC is surveilling shelves, and he credited the department with becoming more proactive on sampling and recalls after the Los Angeles Times' 2024 pesticide reporting. That is precisely the credibility a botched chain of custody spends. (S11)

Operators who read Forman's decision were less charitable. One prominent California licensee, speaking to MJBizDaily on condition of anonymity out of fear of DCC retribution, called the department's handling "amateur hour" and compared it to the New York Office of Cannabis Management's inversion case against processor Omnium Health, which the agency withdrew in December 2025 as Gov. Kathy Hochul forced out acting director Felicia Reid. Both regulators, the operator argued, had well-worn investigative playbooks available and used neither. (S1, S21)

The comparison that should worry the DCC more came 3,000 miles east the same week. On August 13, 2026, the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission published results of a shelf audit begun in May: of 63 flower products pulled from 62 producers and retested at the state's independent labs, 13 fell outside the state's tolerance of 75% to 125% of labeled THC and were placed on sales holds. Chair Chris Harding called label accuracy a matter of patient dosing and consumer protection; Executive Director Travis Ahern said the program will move toward random contaminant testing next. Jeff Rawson, chair of the Institute of Cannabis Science and a frequent critic of lab results, told MJBizDaily many lab operators had expected the 25% band to be too generous to fail anything, and that a 20% failure rate will force brands to adjust quickly. Massachusetts, in other words, built a repeatable audit and let the numbers do the enforcing. California built a case around one lab and a backpack. (S4, S20)

Clint Kellum, who took over as DCC director in January 2026, told MJBizDaily in February that his four priorities start with safe and trusted products and end with easing restrictions on legal operators "in a way that doesn't compromise that trust and safety in our products." The BelCosta file tests both halves of that sentence at once. Adopt Forman's order and the department concedes its highest-profile lab shutdown rested on evidence it could not defend. Reject it and the agency invites the next round of litigation from a lab that no longer has anything left to lose. The compliance-action table on the DCC's website already lists another lab, 2 River Labs, whose July 2025 annual-license denial is marked as on appeal. (S16, S13, S1)

Ronay, meanwhile, is waiting on a clock he does not control. He told MJBizDaily the department had not acted on Forman's order as of early August, that investors are unlikely to fund a restart in a state where legal sales keep shrinking, and that the ruling carries no remedy beyond the license itself. "Normally when you win a lawsuit, you win damages," he said. In this case, he added, "They put me out of business." (S1)

Sixteen months after the emergency podcast, the man who promised his lab would come back better than ever has a judge's finding that it never should have been shut the way it was, a Long Beach address with no instruments in it, and roughly 85,000 compliance tests on a record that California's regulator, in the end, could not impeach. What the DCC does before its 100 days run out in early November will say less about BelCosta than about whether the state's next lab case is built to survive a hearing. (S1, S7)

Correction (September 8, 2026): A link to earlier coverage incorrectly described Maine’s Northwoods incident as a third failed laboratory. The flower had not been tested before sale. The roughly 19,000 recalled samples concerned Greenleaf Labs in Oklahoma.

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