The black market of cannabis is booming in plain sight, luring customers away from aboveboard retailers. Vito Ceccia, an LAPD detective supervisor, said police work alone won’t be enough to ensure legal dispensaries survive.
The reality of legal weed in California: Huge illegal grows, violence, worker exploitation and deaths
We realize this is not a law-enforcement-specific issue anymore. We’re not going to arrest our way out of unlicensed cannabis sales.The security guard, who declined to give his name, said he had worked at a Marshalls department store before getting the job at the dispensary. He said he didn’t know who owns the shop, the source of the cannabis it sells or how much money it makes. He and other employees were “just trying to make our bread,” he said.
This space on Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles was once an illegal marijuana dispensary until the owner was shot and killed outside the shop on Aug. 11, 2021. The raids have not made him consider shutting down, he said. “Why am I going to close shop? People are crying for this stuff, crying for weed.”
Lt. Howard Fuchs of the Sheriff’s Department’s Narcotics Bureau disputed this. “The district attorney will not file these cases whatsoever,” he said. “Even if it’s near a school, they’ve told us they will not file these cases.” An illegal dispensary can cost just a few thousand dollars to open, investigators say: rent, product, some display cases, a surveillance system, wages for a few employees.More than 30,000 Californians are stuck with felonies, misdemeanors and other convictions on their records that should have been wiped ‘automatically.’
All of this contributes to the price that consumers pay, Menjivar said. Certification that the product has been tested for toxins, excise taxes on wholesale purchases, sales taxes levied by state and local authorities — “it costs more to do it the right way,” he said.
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