In July, New York City Mayor Eric Adams proudly summoned police officers and the media announcement The city has made great strides in its much-publicized crackdown on illegal marijuana shops.
Unlicensed shops sprung up with empty retail storefronts after New York State legalized marijuana in 2021. , pipes, vapes, and brightly lit smoke shops packed with THC-laced hot cheese curls as far as the eye can see. They have become so ubiquitous and so popular among the city’s marijuana users and tourists that officials have been playing a fruitless game with them for three years.
So Adams’ lavish crackdown, dubbed “Operation Padlock to Protect,” appears to have been a success, with the city closing more than 700 stores and seizing millions of dollars worth of weed and THC-containing products. There’s just one problem: there is Thousands more The store is still operating.
In many ways, it’s symbolic of how marijuana legalization has gotten out of control in states, more than two dozen of which have now legalized recreational use. Efforts by states to create and then tightly regulate legal markets for pot have, ironically, made the weed black market bigger than ever.
In California, which legalized recreational marijuana in 2016 and oversees its sale in retail outlets since 2018, that market has unfolded. Countless illegal suburban growth operations – Alleged to be associated with many for organized crime. They’re growing more weed than state residents even want to buy and funnel it (in violation of federal law) to buyers across the country.
Oregon, which was legalized in 2014 Looks very similar. In Washington, DC, where the sale of recreational weed has never been legalized, there is a hypothesis 100 illegal weed shops10 times the number of licensed medical dispensaries, according to his city officials. and midwestern Michigan, where Legal sales have been surprisingly outpace Even in California, illegal growers are growing, and courts and prosecutors are reluctant Cancel them – even if they could.
The intense battles against an unstoppable black market come just as the country nears major federal changes that could open the door to nationwide legalization. Drug Enforcement Agency under the direction of President Joe Biden Consider whether to reclassify marijuana A drug equivalent to heroin is recognized as having a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence, such as ketamine or steroids. The change would keep the drug still highly regulated but loosen restrictions on access.
What’s happening in states that already allow recreational marijuana offers a startling glimpse of what it might actually look like to fully legalize the drug across the United States. Which is messy to say the least.
Mostly, it reminds us that drugs — and the people who grow them, sell them, and use them — have a way of being immune to policymakers’ machinations. This was true at the height of the war on drugs and remains true now, even when policies are significantly friendlier.
The rise of the black market has, in many ways, blindsided the state.
States that hoped to generate tax dollars from marijuana legalization are instead seeing their legal markets soften. Take Colorado, a national model of how a state can legalize weed and profit massively from it. This is a guess $1 billion in tax revenue In 2014 it pledged to spend the money on education, in the first five years after legalizing retail sales. Now, that revenue is declining, down just 11 percent over the past year. A state prediction.
The truth is, most shoppers don’t really care if the store selling their THC-laced spicy cheese snacks is licensed, but they are fully aware when they have to pay extra. $20 in tax.
“There is more public acceptance and interest in the plant and so on [illegal] The situation is definitely going to improve – especially if the regulated market is essentially over-regulated … and there are price differences,” said Jason OrtizFounder and former president of the Minority Cannabis Business Association and director of strategic initiatives for the Last Prisoner Project, which calls for an overhaul of the nation’s drug laws.
Yet, since the laws of supply and demand also apply to cannabis, the price of even licensed goods has fallen sharply the state after the stateDriven in part by black market products.
That has angered licensed shops and growers, and cut into their potential income that in California, for example, the number of legal marijuana growers and brands has dropped by 70 percent — and many shuttered companies owe the state millions in taxes. As reported by SFGate. And if there is a black market, many people’s dreams are destroyed Weed entrepreneurThis leads to another surprising turn of events.
The rise of unscrupulous, unlicensed marijuana dealers is a relatively new phenomenon, perhaps driven in part by Public acceptance of marijuana is growing And relatively easy access to pot grown for legal sale in dozens of states. There is something strangely familiar about their attempts to abolish it.
The last time most of us saw law enforcement posing on the local news with seized drugs and bragging about successful drug busts, it was the height of the War on Drugs.
But for advocates in one state after another, and across the country, by design, marijuana legalization was supposed to undo the injustices of the era. was supposed to reduce criminalization, Release of convicts Even for non-violent drug offenses under the strict, antiquated laws Issuance of business license They helped create a market future for formerly imprisoned people to participate in.
But experts Vox questioned whether the licensing infrastructure established by states ever encouraged illegal sellers to obtain licenses. In some ways, it was short-sighted legalization policies and nearly-impossible-to-meet regulations that created the perfect storm that states find themselves in today. New York, for example, took more than a year to license a single vendor, sending many weed-seekers to unlicensed vendors.
“We have a limited, controlled access model, and it hasn’t allowed all the people who currently sell weed to be legal,” said Ortiz, who has worked Legalization of Connecticut Effort, as he now calls it Nothing less of a defeat. “When you do that, you’re virtually guaranteeing that there will be a lot of people out there in the illegal market.”
States like Connecticut and Massachusetts have also legalized the cultivation of marijuana, despite not having a strong agricultural base; Illegal sellers have filled the gap by bringing better weed from other states.
Advocates like Ortiz say the only solution now is not to try to crack down on trafficking or illegal shops, but full federal legalization and more licenses.
Instead, states are taking back control of the market through campaigns like New York’s, and DCand California, and oregon, And – well, you get the picture.
“States and cities are trying to create a market that is unusual. We’ve always had a cannabis market; It’s grown on the West Coast, it’s brought to the East Coast and other parts of the country, and that market has worked,” said Rafi Alia Crockett, who until 2022 was appointed to the Alcoholic Beverages and Cannabis Board in Washington, DC. Now, the state is trying to close that market to ensure licensees are rewarded, he says, “by knocking out their competition.”
Crockett frustrated the regulatory board with enforcement. “This is drug war 2.0,” he says. “And we decide who’s going to win and who’s going to lose.”
In 2019, a rash of vaping-related illnesses swept across the United States, killing dozens of people.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most patients reported smoking not only e-cigarettes, but especially THC vapes, before becoming ill. At the time, Vox’s Julia Belluz wrote: “The agency wasn’t tracking whether people were using legal or black market sources to vape, but the data we have from states suggests it’s widely illegal.”
The deaths were a reminder that although shoppers may not be able to distinguish between black market goods sold in licensed shops and controlled goods, the difference between them can be stark. For example, D.C.’s Alcoholic Beverage and Cannabis Administration began testing drugs seized from unlicensed sellers and recently reported that it was Methamphetamine was found in marijuana flowers.
Events like this — and several illegal shops locked up by police in local news — are likely to alarm Americans who are just beginning to support the idea of legalization and fuel those who oppose it.
And they come as a growing number of respected sources in medicine, and the scientific community raises concerns about it Increasingly powerful products sicken users. There is almost no doubt that at least some products are illegal and unregulated. As a report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recently noted, Patchwork laws from state to state have contributed to the risk.
Thus, the black market could backfire against the very legalization movement that allowed it to emerge from the shadows.
There is one truth about the cannabis black market that we should acknowledge.
The legal marijuana market is not even 15 years old. But the illegal market, about 100, went underground after the United States officially decriminalized marijuana in the 1930s. It’s agile.
Perhaps it was naive to ever believe that a legal market would stamp it out for good. It was hard to predict the booming black market in the shadow of that legalization. Now, in the war for consumers, it can only win.
