The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Marijuana Trafficking: Then Vs. Now

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

Johnny talks about getting his start in the marijuana business back in 2004 and his ascent through the ranks of the game until he finally made a million dollars before getting arrested and sent to prison in 2010.  He goes in depth about the industry and how things have changed since legalization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I was part of the last generation to take advantage of the illegal marijuana gold rush. I knew dudes that were tortured during the drought. They make us lift our shirts up, turn around, make sure we're not wearing any wires. You could just get killed and they'll feed your body to the fucking mountain lions. Staring death that close to the face and that's how real it got. I don't tell these stories to glorify it. This is just the truth. Hey, what's up you guys?

My name is Johnny Mitchell. I am a stand-up comedian, podcaster, and former drug trafficker, and you're watching The Connect. I started off selling dime bags of pot and eventually worked my way up to start transporting weight for the Mexican cartels all over the country. I made millions of dollars and ultimately wound up serving time in prison. I'm going to give you an insider's perspective on what the world of drugs is actually like, from small-time dealing to major trafficking to prison and the global economy that thrives off of all of it. In this episode, we're going to be talking about marijuana trafficking. It's history, how I got my start, and where the business is today.

Now, in order to understand my story, you have to understand the history of marijuana prohibition and the birth of the black market. So marijuana prohibition really goes back to the beginning of the 20th century. In 1914, there was a tax placed on it by Congress under pressure from competing industries, right? So you had the cotton industry, the nylon industry, the paper industry. They were all worried about the rise of hemp use, which of course comes from the cannabis plant. Hemp is a more durable product.

Some say you can make it cheaper and it lasts longer. So these were all threats to these competing industries. They put pressure on the politicians, 1914, that pass a big tax on cannabis cultivation. But it wasn't until 1937 that it actually gets outlawed as an illegal substance. And there's a few reasons for this. First, the racist undertones. We've all heard about the movie Reefer Madness. It's the propaganda film that shows a black man, smoking a reefer stick and then attacking a white woman.

It is too late. A lot of Mexican migrants used it. Day laborers would smoke the stuff to ease the pain of working under the sun all day. And then the continued influence of Big Pharma, who helped pass the Tax Act on it back in 1914. They wanted total control of the market to be able to push their medicines for all the ailments that cannabis cured. But it wasn't until the late 1960s that the rise of the black market and the business around illegal marijuana trafficking begins. So in the late 60s, there's the cultural revolution happening, the hippie movement, the anti-war movement, the free thinking movement, the college protest movement, and young people who want to experiment with marijuana. So unlike today, the majority of the pot consumed back then was imported.

Up until this point, there were three major players in the black market weed business. The first is the Colombians, and this is before Pablo Escobar and the violent cocaine cartels. They would grow it in the mountains of Columbia and transport it on the same line that the cocaine routes would eventually be established and bring it into Florida. And they were moving it by the barge load. Same with the Jamaicans. They brought it into Miami and there was so much of it that it was almost worthless. An ounce of pot back then. They didn't even call it an ounce.

It was a five-finger lid. So if you fit five fingers inside of a sandwich baggie, that was about an ounce. That sold for $10. Compare that to today when an ounce costs like $300. There was so much pot that you couldn't even sell most of it. There would be warehouses full of weed in Miami that just couldn't get sold and it would go bad. The third player was the Mexicans and they controlled the West Coast and again, moved a lot of their pot along the same routes that the drug cartels would later use to traffic

all of their other product. And they were the first ones to develop pot without seeds in it. It was called Acapulco Gold. Your parents probably remember smoking it. They figured out how to isolate the female pot plant during harvest, get rid of the male plant so it wouldn't cross-pollinate it, and hence create a bud that did not have seeds or cinsemia, right? And you got to remember, this is before highly organized drug cartels. This is just a loose organization of people in certain countries that had geographical ties to the U.S. that wanted to make money. It was a smuggling business. It wasn't a global trafficking business yet. So while all this is happening and a cultural revolution is going on in the United States, a fourth player emerges, this time in Northern California.

The hippie movement, which we've all heard about, which started the free love movement, began to migrate out of the city into the northern counties of California, like Mendocino and Humbold. And this is called the Back to Earth movement. So it was a bunch of hippies who were tired and disillusioned with the city life who wanted to move to these isolated communities in the forest and start their own society. Now, to fund all of this, they began, you guessed it, to grow and transport marijuana. This was the beginning of the domestic cultivation of marijuana in the United States. It was their children in the 90s and the 2000s who really took it and made it a multi-billion dollar a year business. And they eventually ended up putting the Mexican cartels out of business because they knew they had the most optimal environment, lots of rain, lots of sun, and thousands and thousands of acres of thick, federally protected forest in which to grow the best marijuana.

And those were the people who supplied me with my weed. I was part of the last generation to take advantage of the illegal marijuana gold rush. Now it's 2004. I'm 18 years old. I'm living in Portland, Oregon with my parents. I'm just graduating high school. I don't have any ambitions. I'm a pothead. I never dream that I would grow up to be a drug trafficker. Certainly not. I'm from a good family. My father is a lawyer. And I get into the drug business the way anybody gets into it. At the very bottom, I went in on an ounce with a friend of We paid $250 to some guy. It wasn't of any quality.

We got totally ripped off. We were pretty much just selling weed the way potheads used to do it so we could smoke for free. I'm not going to lie. I love the rush of it, though. I've always loved drug dealing. I never really cared about weed in that sense, but I loved being bad. I loved doing dirt, as we said. We would get an ounce, 28 grams.

We'd bag it up into 10 and 20 bags. And we were lucky if we could turn 250 into like, 320. If we made $80 at the end of the week, it was like having a paper route, that was good enough for us. We were total bums with it, right? But I knew there was something more to the game because we would see these guys who blew up or went big time, as we called it, and they would basically pay their living by selling pot. And we thought that was like the craziest shit ever. We couldn't believe that people could actually make a living selling weed. We thought it was just a drug cartel thing. We just thought that, you know, Scarface and the wire, we thought it was just these street

people, real gangsters that could actually blow up and make real money from drugs. So I said, there's got to be something deeper to this. Like, how do we figure this out? And at the time, the weed game is as competitive as it is now, the difference is it was controlled by gangs. And So you've got Hells Angels and different biker gangs bringing shit in from Canada, South. We called it B.C. Bud. You had the Mexican cartels, of course, which had these huge grow operations outdoor on federal land in southern Oregon and northern California. The rednecks, the hippies that I spoke about, they, of course, had their share of the market.

And then you had Mexican bud. Mexicans still imported a lot of the weed that people smoked. But even by 2004, nobody on the West Coast was smoking it or dealing it. That was brickweed. That was shit to us. That was what Bums in the Midwest and the South had to smoke because they didn't have the good shit that we had in Oregon and Northern California. So nobody ever touched the Mexican weed.

There's also indoor weed by this time. Hydroponic, gangs from China and Vietnam, they had a huge stake in the indoor weed business. They would buy houses in the suburbs. Sometimes they would buy multiple houses next to each other on the same street, and they would gut them completely and turn them into factories for weed. And these guys made hundreds of millions of dollars. So where do we fit in all this? We're just two white boys trying to get a foothold into this game that we have no idea really how to navigate.

We just, we know we don't want to work a job, and we know that we're want to be gangsters. were wann-be businessman. My strategy back then is I wanted to give the best product at the lowest price. I've never been interested in being a hippie. I was never interested in having different cool strains of weed that did different things to you. I just wanted the shit that would get you the most fucked up and get you the most of it for the cheapest price because then I knew you would come back. So pretty soon my cell phone was ringing all day, every day, but I still couldn't turn a profit off of it because I didn't have a good source, a good supplier. I didn't know where to get wholesale weed at a good price so then I can turn a real profit off of it. It was years before we made any money.

Back then, the weed game was structured like a pyramid. So at the very bottom, you had the street dealers. And those were guys like me and my partner buying ounces at a time, bagging them up and selling them directly to smokers. Then just above us, you had retailers. People, who would buy quarter, half pound, sometimes full pounds of pot and sell them out to street dealers. And those guys were buying pounds of weed anywhere from at that time, I would say, $2,800 to $3,200, paying about $200 an ounce, and they would turn around and sell those ounces to street guys like me for $250 bucks. So their margins were razor thin, too. And just above those guys, you had weed wholesalers. You'd had guys that were going straight to the source or the growers,

right? Those guys, whether they were cartel members, rednecks, or Asian gangs who were growing pot indoors, these wholesalers were going to them to pick up their supply. And they would pick up anywhere from 10 to 100 pounds at a time and then bring them back and give them out to retailers five to 10 pounds at a time. And then, of course, at the very top of the pyramid are the kingpins, and those are the growers. Those are the people that control the supply because they are the manufacturers.

Now, it wasn't until I went to college at the University of Oregon in Eugene that I decided I wanted to move up in this pyramid. But it was a solid two years of nickel and diming before I ended up moving up to the retail level. And again, I'm probably paying $190 to $2.10 per ounce and retailing them to street dealers for 240, 250 bucks. And I maybe had like six or eight guys at a time on the street moving packs, as we called them, or bundles.

And back then there were two different markets for weed. One was the high-end market, which was indoor weed. That was the hydroponic, gets you super fucked up, most expensive kind of weed. That was like the champagne crystal of weed. And then there was the commercial market. that was the outdoor weed. That was the bud that you would buy from the cartels or the rednecks. Still very good weed, but less THC, less potency than the high-end weed. That was the sweet spot for me. That was weed that was very good, but that I could actually turn a profit off of, and I didn't have to

invest so much money in. So now things are going along. It's my second or third year in Eugene. I'm starting to make money. I'm moving a pound, maybe two pounds a week out to my street dealers. I'm paying my rent, covering part of my tuition. I don't have to work a job, which was the most important thing to me and still is. And I'm thinking life can't get any better than this. But of course, there's always a downside. And especially back then when weed was fully illegal, there were a lot of risks. The first one was just the drought that happened.

Now, it's unimaginable in 2022 to think that there could actually be a shortage of marijuana. But especially with outdoor weed, back then there was. So the growers would harvest their weed in late October, early November every year. That was harvest time. That's when the streets were flooded and the prices were low. But what would happen was is the year went on and the growers sold out of their supply. By the end of summer, August, September, sometimes they would be completely sold out of their product. And as a drug dealer, you would have no supply and you would just be burning a hole in your pocket.

These were the worst times. We called this the drought. I remember the drought of 2009. We would drive down to Northern California, 10-hour drive sometimes, all the way down to these tiny little towns. We would go to one supplier. He would be cleaned out. We would get on the phone with another guy. He would say, yeah, yeah, hurry up because somebody else, I got 10 pounds left.

Somebody else wants it. How quick can you get down here? We would drive another two hours into the forest. By the time we got there, he was all sold out. It was a nightmare. And the drought carried with it a lot of dangers, too. A lot of robberies happened during this time. So drug dealers who didn't have any product to sell would see another guy who's sitting

on some product. You might go kick in his door and take what he's got just to survive. This was also the time when we turned to selling cocaine. We would go to our Coke supplier, a Mexican guy, who would eventually get us tied in with the Sina Lowens and the cartel members who had the big grow-ops in Northern California, we would go to him and say, look, we're starving here. And he would give us eight, nine, sometimes as much as half a key, 16 ounces of Coke. And we would start turning that over just to keep us afloat while we were waiting for

the harvest and our weed to come in. You know, a few times I came home from political science class or whatever to find my own apartment door kicked in, my entire stash cleaned out. I knew dudes that were tortured during the drought. They would have guys in ski masks kicked their door in, tie them up, and beat them until they showed them where their supply was. I've been on the other side of that, too. I've committed robberies. It's not something I'm proud of, but it was just part of the game. We knew this kid who was sitting on wait. And it was funny, too, because back then it was always the dorks. It was always the guys that were the most unassuming that could sometimes be the biggest ballers.

Now, we knew this guy. He was known to have five, ten, sometimes 15 pounds on him at a time. And a buddy of mine gave me the tip. And he said, this kid, you know, he just keeps it in his apartment. He lets anybody in there. And he's got cash on him too. And I said, all right, well, do you have a gun? And he said, no, no, no, no, this is like a little five foot two Asian kid. We don't need a gun. And we didn't. We just put ski masks on. We kicked down his door. We beat him up and we cleaned him out of his stash. Now look, I don't tell these stories to glorify it. This is just the truth. I'm not proud of that. And I think my karma has come back to bite me multiple times over since then. I like to think we put the kid out of business and he went and he found a better way of life. But that was just what happened during that time. This was a black market. This was a criminal. business and you know it is what it is I remember one time I was living in a house just a few blocks off campus with a couple of buddies and it's like noon we're waiting to go off to class and we're sitting around in our living room we hear a knock at the door somebody had forgot to lock it we hear the

door creak open and we hear hey is a h'm and we just thought it was a friend because we always had people stopping by and party in with us and whatnot so we said yeah come on in we look up from the TV, it's two dudes with shotguns leveled about a foot from our face. We're like, ho, ho, slow down there, cowboy, you know, and I guess they heard that we were bawling, and they ransacked the house. By this time, we knew well enough to not keep the product where we slept, so they didn't find anything, maybe a few ounces, a couple hundred bucks in cash, and they ran out. But, you know, staring death that close to the face, and that's how real it got. One person got ripped off, then the other person went and ripped somebody else off.

It was all about, it was like a jungle, right? You robbed somebody who you thought wouldn't retaliate back. We knew guys who didn't even go to school who would come up from Oakland and all the way down from Seattle, usually gang members, and their entire business was built around robbing drug dealers. The other big risk, of course, was the law, the cops. Now, to be honest with you, back then, we were way more worried about getting robbed than we were of getting our house rated. You can call it white privilege. You can call it being naive. Whatever it was,

we were just not that worried about the cops back then. It wasn't until we leveled up in the game, and we started going down and buying our product wholesale from the growers and transporting it north back up to Eugene and Portland and across state lines. Did we really worry about law enforcement? But we'll get into that in a different video. It was an outlaw business, plain and simple, and quite frankly, that's what I loved about it. Any drug dealer or any criminal will tell you, there is no greater thrill than the rush that you get from making illegal money. We loved every minute of it. And I wouldn't have done it if it didn't involve those risks. That's why I don't sell drugs now, partly because I don't want to go back to prison, but also because the risks and the

rush just aren't there now that weed is basically legal. So it's 2007, 2008. We're going through drama. We're making money. But we know we need to level up in the game. We know we need to become the wholesaler. To make any money in any business, but especially the drug business, you need to be buying your product at the lowest price possible. And back then, every weed dealer wanted to meet a grower. You had to get to the grower. But it's not like today where you can Google search somebody who grows weed. You had to have the inn. And these growers in Southern Oregon, in Northern California, the cartels especially, would not deal with almost anybody. And you had to have a big bankroll. I mean, you couldn't talk to one of these guys without at least 40 grand to

spend. So the wholesalers, those were the ones who were buying product directly from the source. And there were a few guys in Eugene at the time, maybe three or four guys who were driving down to the forests of Southern Oregon and Northern California. They would go down there every week and they would pick up 20, 30, sometimes 50 pounds at a time. And they had a couple of guys like me and I, who they would give five pounds to at a time, and we would then break it down into half pounds, quarter pounds, whatever our retailers desired. And one of those guys, his name was B. He was a buddy of ours. He actually got pinched, bringing back weed. He also had a couple of ounces of meth on him. And he got jammed up. The cops pulled him over. They arrested him.

He bailed out. But this guy was getting ready to go do some time. He came to us and asked if we would like to meet his supplier. We had to pay him five grand just for the introduction. That's how valuable we knew this was going to be for us. So we pay him five grand. We get in his car. We make the 10-hour drive south to this tiny little town called Garberville in Mendocino County. Now that little town has become famous because it is the gateway to Mendocino County. Now once we get to Garberville, we drive, I'm not exaggerating, almost five hours into the mountain. And it looks like deliverance. These are the sticks. I'm talking about it's big rig trucks and do not trespass signs. There's like bullet holes in the stop signs as you're going through. Guard dogs in

front of every gate. It is the Wild West up there. A lot of people go missing every year. A lot of homicides get traced back to that region because you could just get killed and they'll feed your body to the fucking mountain lions. There is no way. law up there. It was sketchy as fuck, but we're excited because we're going to meet the connect. Now we get to the top of this bluff and there's this huge gate that starts opening up and this was like redneck Miami Vice. There's a couple of guys with shotguns and pit bulls as the gate opens. We fucking rolled down this bumpy ass hill and we get to this tiny little house and next to it is this gigantic greenhouse and we know exactly what's inside. So the two owners of the operation,

come out and meet us. They make us lift our shirts up, turn around, make sure we're not wearing any wires. And so I say, show me something. They take us back into this little garage area. And it's just a hut, really. They pull up a false floor. These guys like drilled out the earth and then made it a little trap door. They pull the floor up and there's got to be no less than like 500 pounds of weed harvested, bagged up, ready to go that I'm staring at. Most people, would be terrified, I'm jumping for joy. We finally found the connect. So we picked up 20 pounds right there. 40 grand, $2,000 a pound. Now we're in the game. Now we're the supplier. We're the wholesaler. Now we can start selling in bulk to other retailers. So we've just moved up to the second

highest rung in the marijuana business, the middleman. And I never moved up another rung after that. Quite frankly, I didn't want to. I knew a lot of middlemen who made tons of money and then opened up their own grow operations. I didn't have any desire for that. Growing weed is tricky. It takes a lot of resources. It takes a lot of investment capital. It's fucking farming at the end of the day. It's just not something that I was passionate about. There's obviously big risks involved. A lot of our suppliers, our connects, lost their entire crops, sometimes to the cops, sometimes to the bandits. And some Sometimes to weather, sometimes they would just have a bad harvest and they would barely make any of their money back. If there was a drought, not a drought on weed, but a drought on rain, they wouldn't crop what they were hoping for and they would go bust. So it was just not something that appealed to me. Middle manning was perfect because we never had to break down a pound into a QP, a half p, an ounce. We never had to get our hands dirty ever again. After that point, after meeting the connect, I never opened. up another bag of weed unless it was to ship it or mail it across the country. I never had to weigh out anything. All I had to do was take the product, transport it, and give it to my dealer.

And that's all Middle Manning was. It was transport. It was getting the product from A to B and charging a markup. That was the most profitable place to be in the business besides a grower. It was also the riskiest. Okay, so now it's the end of 2008. I'm living back. in Portland. I graduated college. I'm going down to meet the Connect every week or two, picking up anywhere from 30 to 40 pounds, bringing it back and dishing it off to anywhere from three to four dudes. The way I operated is I always wanted to have the pieces or the units each pound. I wanted to have them sold before I even went and picked it up. I would pick up a pound from anywhere for 2,000 to 2,200 and I would resell it to my guys on the other end for 27 to 29

depending on the quality, the freshness, and the time of year. Okay, so let's say about $500 profit per pound, and we're moving about 20 a week. That's $10,000 a week split between me and my partner. Spring weekends are all about family, sunshine, and evenings on the patio. Before everyone arrives, I stop by my local total wine and more to grab a great bottle to share. With such a wide selection and the lowest prices, it's easy to find something amazing for everyone to enjoy. If you're not sure what to pick, their friendly guides can help. Find what you love and love what you find only at Total Wine and More.

Shop total wine and more in store or online. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. B-21. You know, as a 22-year-old kid making five grand a week, I thought, dude, I've hit the fucking lottery. There's no way this can get better. I can do anything I want.

I'm completely free. I never have to work a job again. It was just the best time on my life. I was going to Mexico, Canada, flying to New York City, Columbia, whenever I wanted, staying in the best hotels, and just living the life of a baller. And at this point, we had dealers from different regions driving into Portland to meet us to pick up

and take the product back to their home states. We had guys from Washington, Nevada. We had a guy as far as Montana driving one time, and I think he picked up like 10 pounds from us. As we're talking, as we're counting up money, getting to know each other, I said, just out of curiosity, how much are you, you know, flipping these four back home? And he goes, oh, we like this? I could sell it for four grand apiece easily.

I kind of just took a step back, like, oh, shit. Now, I'm selling pounds to this guy for 2,700. He's turning around and flipping them wholesale back in Montana for four grand. So this guy is making, like, almost triple what I'm making. So I'm running some quick math in my head. And as soon as this guy leaves, I turned to and I said, do you know by us not getting this product to these states ourselves, we're leaving an extra $1.5 million a year on the table? And he was like, yeah, but how do we make that happen? And I had no idea. But if we're going to survive, we need to figure out how, because legalization

is coming. This is almost 2009. So we heard states like Colorado who are getting ready to put marijuana legalization on the ballot. And once that happened, if that happened, we knew that California and Oregon were next and our business would not be long for this world. The biggest money was flipping product out of state. As soon as those pounds started moving east, the price just moved up and up and up and up. And that's, of course, because they had less supply of good West Coast shit and the state laws were much more strict. So if the laws are more strict, the prices are going to be higher. The ones who were getting rich were the ones who were moving product out of state and in bulk. But we didn't have any connections. We didn't know any buyers.

We were stuck. Flash forward six, eight months. This is the summer of 2009. This summer was hell. This was the hardest summer we had had since getting into the drug game. One of our suppliers, a Mexican, part of the Sinoa cartel had had his pot farm rated and he was getting deported. so that supplier, that connect was done. Our other supplier, our original connect, taken out of Garberville, had just had a terrible crop. There was apparently a problem

with how they had planted shit earlier in the last year. For whatever reason, they got way less product that expected. So by I think July or August of 2009, they were completely dry, no pot whatsoever. So Rik and I, we had about two and a half, three months where we had no product. And we weren't moving coke at this time because we didn't have a good connection on that. So we were going broke. We had basically

been reduced to street level dealers because we were forced to pay higher prices to indoor growers and people we didn't know had bad product, didn't have a lot of product. We were in a bad spot. Just on a chance, I had taken a trip to the East Coast to meet up with a friend of mine from college. He was living in New York City. He was a Wall Street broker. He was doing really well. We went out one night partying in the meatpacking district down to where all the nightclubs are, and we were, you know, treating our nose a little bit, drinking, having a great time. He introduces me to a friend of his who he worked with and a couple of his friends. Now, these were not working people I could see immediately that these were guys of my ilk, right? A couple of these real Guinea dudes, these East Coast Italian guys who told me that they were out of

Jersey, the Philadelphia area. And these guys were as East Coast, Philly, Italian as it got, Joey and Sal will call them, right? Because to this day, they have not been caught or arrested, and I don't plan on being the one that gets them arrested. We're drinking, we're getting drunk. You know, I'm a pretty open guy. I told them, yeah, this is what I do. They saw me throwing money around. I told them, I'm a pot guy. This is my business. And their eyes lit up. Because back then, every East Coast pot dealer was looking for a West Coast supplier, was looking for a connect on the West Coast because that's where they were getting the best shit at the best price. So I'm talking to these guys and they're telling me, you know, we're connected with the Philadelphia mob down there.

I think like the Scarpo family or something. You know, we're into a few things, a couple of rackets. You know, we're into pills. We're into Mali, a little bit of cocaine. We also sell weed. We're looking for a West Coast supplier. And I said, okay, well, let's just say, say in theory, I could get you what you're looking for. I could get you pounds of high grade outdoor bud. How much would you pay? How much would you pay per piece? And they said, I don't know, maybe like 35, 3,800. And I did the math. And I said, okay, well, I think that would work for us. Now, if I can get pounds for 2,200 apiece, just depending on the time of year, and I can flip it to them for 3,500 a pound, you can see how the dollars add up very quickly. So I go home

a couple of days later and I talked to and I said, if we're going to get rich, I'm not talking about a quarter million dollars a year. I'm talking about if we're going to make millions before legalization puts us out of business, this is our shot. Now, the means and the methods of moving bulk marijuana across the country are varied and it's not something I'm going to talk about in this video. Just know that over the next year, and a half, we successfully moved over a thousand pounds of West Coast weed to the East Coast. We made a couple million bucks, and of course, this led to our demise. I was eventually arrested and sent to prison. But I had lived the drug dealer's dream. I'd made a million bucks. It was

an incredible time to be alive. Now fast forward, 10, 12 years later, it's 2022, and basically everything we predicted about legalization and how that would affect drug dealers like us came true. It was Colorado, Oregon, California, Washington. Now, so many other states have made weed legal. It is probably less than a generation away from becoming federally legal. And dealers like me, outlaws, guys, hustlers, guys who were in it to make money, have basically been wiped out. They've either been wiped out or they've had to move into the legal marijuana space.

Now, there are still cartels growing a lot of pot, especially in California. There's big cartel grows up in the forest, out in the desert. You know, their cartels are setting up these big warehouses, these giant greenhouses, 20 times as big as the ones I saw that turn out tens and tens and tens and thousands of pounds a year. And they're shipping them to the East Coast, the states where it is still illegal or half illegal. But their profit margins have just been destroyed.

Back in our day, we were making a minimum. $1,000 profit per pound off of every single pound that we ship to the East Coast, at minimum. Today, that's been reduced by about 90%. The most you can expect to make is about $100, maybe $200 profit per pound. That means if you want to make any kind of real money, you've got to be involved in one of these gigantic, large-scale cartel operations. And quite frankly, the cartels ain't letting you in. They don't need you anymore.

They have got a stranglehold on what remains of the kind of transnational interstate trafficking operation when it comes to marijuana. The other guys who are making money are the guys who own dispensaries. Now, there are a lot of guys still making money in the illegal space. California still, I think 80% of the market is still black market weed, but it's guys who also operate with one foot in the legal game. These are usually the trap shop owners, guys who own dispensaries. but they kind of sell weed out the back door. You know what I mean? Or people who grow weed but only have a license to grow a certain amount and they grow a big amount.

That's another way to make money is to be vertically integrated. So guys who own the means of production and the means of retail distribution. So A to B, you've got the whole thing Amazoned out, right? By and large, the legal marijuana industry today is controlled by the same forces who pushed to make it illegal. all those years ago. It's corporatized. It is dominated very much so by Wall Street firms, private equity companies, investment capital that wants to monopolize the market and push black market dealers like myself to the margins or to put us under completely. It's ironic because the laws that originally made it illegal in the first place were the laws that allowed guys like me to get rich.

And now it's the laws that make it legal that put guys like me under. So, it's completely been flipped on its head. But at the end of the day, it's more efficient this way. It's much more consumer-friendly. A lot of people benefit from marijuana. Its original use was medicinal. So now people like my mother can go buy CBD oil and put it all over their body for aches and pains. It's people don't have to go to a sketchy guy in an alleyway to get marijuana to smoke, to help cure the pain they have from chemotherapy if they're cancer patients or whatever. So it's just the evolution of the business dealing in a product that appeals to so many people. And it's just a stones throw away now from becoming completely legal federally. I don't know why to this day we're still holding on to it.

I don't know if it's the vestiges of the Bible Belt or the conservatives in Congress. Nobody seems to care anymore. There's no taboo around smoking weed. So I really don't know what the holdup is. I just know those dealers that are still hanging on in the black market. are scrambling to get that money while it's good. And even when it becomes legal, I'm sure they'll figure out a way to make money out of it.

I've heard cartels in Colombia, drug cartels, cocaine cartels, are now figuring out how to grow and ship weed legally to international markets to countries where it is legal. So drug dealers will always find a space, will always find a way, life finds a way, and so too do drugs. And there's no excitement in it anymore.

The laws have changed to where even, if you get raided, the most you're going to get is a ticket. You know, the sheriff's office out in Palm Springs will raid a cartel grow that will have 20,000 plants and nobody will go to jail. They'll simply write a ticket to be summoned in court because they don't want to take you to jail anymore. They want your money. They want to fine you, which is what this whole thing has been about from the beginning. It's been about taking your money. Even the war on drugs and taking you to jail is about making money. They make money from prison. They make money off the contracts. in prison. And that's a whole other discussion. But it's really a different business. It's not something

that I ever really wanted to be involved in. I don't love, no offense, I don't love pot culture. I just, I think it's kind of dumb. I mean, at the end of the day, you're getting high. It's drugs. And I think it's probably, even though it's good for medicinal purposes, and it is good that people that need it can access it now, easier than in the days when it was illegal. I just, it's not something that I'm passionate about, right? My whole goal was to make millions and get out and take those millions and invest it in legitimate businesses, in real estate,

in other money making operations. So I would then never really have to worry about money again, right? That's the whole dream of the criminal. It's not just to make his millions, but it's to make his millions and get out. And we'll talk about that in future videos. But I will tell you that a lot of guys ended up making, a lot of money and they did end up getting out. Even guys who made millions and went to prison,

they stashed those millions away, right? Guys like being middlemen making two, four, $8 million a year trafficking marijuana eventually got caught. Everybody does when you're trafficking at that high of a level, but they managed to save it and stash it away. And if the law didn't find it, man, when you got out, the world was your oyster. So, We'll talk about that, but I wanted to relay my story to you. I wanted to let you know where I'm from and how my experience in the drug game made me see a whole different element not only of society, but of how the war on drugs works and how the politics of it work.

Well, that's it for this week. Thank you so much for tuning in. Make sure to subscribe to the channel and turn on your notifications. We have a lot of content coming at you because I promise. What I've said today barely scratches the surface of the drug business and what I know about the game. My name's Johnny Mitchell. Thank you for watching The Connect.