Today, Explained - Legal weed’s half-baked promise

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

Pro-pot Californians said legalizing marijuana would end the state’s black market for reefer. Instead, says LA Times investigative reporter Paige St. John, the illegal market is bigger than ever. This episode was produced by Victoria Dominguez, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Marijuana is being decriminalized all up and down these United States. The president's rethinking marijuana crimes at the federal level. The federal government currently classifies marijuana as a schedule one substance. The same as heroin and LSD and more serious than fentanyl. It makes no sense. States are legalizing and creating hugely profitable markets. Marijuana is already legal in about 20 states across the United States. And polling data suggests that the American people are increasingly

okay with it. 71% of Democrats, 61% of independents say that marijuana should be legalized across the United States. And it's not just the Liberals, a lot of Republicans are on board. 47% are in favor of legalization across the United States and 41% in opposition. But all this legal marijuana was supposed to replace illegal markets. That was the promise of legalization, and it's not going according to plan. That's ahead on Today Explained. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever.

Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs? And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca.

Today, I explain Sean Ramos from here with Paige St. John. She's an investigative reporter at the mighty Los Angeles Times, where she's been in the field for a year covering marijuana in California, the illegal and legal operations. And what she's discovered is that the two are totally intertwined. So we found that the illegal market had used legalization as a springboard, kind of a cover, to come out of hiding from the forests and national parks into the valleys, into small communities even in California, leasing land, buying land, and taking advantage of the reduced criminal penalties for cultivation to very brazenly set up large, large operations. We're talking 100 greenhouses, you know, on a single operation kind of size.

California's experience feels relevant in light of the big marijuana news from President Biden a few weeks ago, and considering five more states, Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, and both of the Dakotas, are weighing whether to legalize recreational marijuana in the midterm elections next month. California legalized years ago, but the illegal market is still thriving. And you would never know that if you just, you know, went to your local pot shop to buy some herb. You'd have to go straight to the source. And that's what Paige did. I used satellite mapping to try to get my hands on how much of this was going on around the state. Did samples of 3,000 square miles in just six counties,

found enough illegal cannabis there to provide for the entire legal market and barely scraped the surface as to what's going on. Since legalizations come in, we see many of the folks who want to comply getting on board with the legal framework and going through the proper licensing. There's a whole bunch of folks who are not. And come along with it, crime, violence, guns, shootings, murders. Deputies responded to the assault with a deadly weapon call on Highway 371. Inside, they found carnage and more than 1,000 pounds of marijuana. It's a runaway illegal market.

And we can see why that happened in hindsight pretty clearly. But the belief that California had subscribed to, that Governor Newsom, who's a big supporter of cannabis, and his administration had bought into, and I heard it from the market analysts in cannabis themselves, is that the legal market would squeeze out illegal growers that would out-compete. And the opposite is true. The illegal market is making it almost impossible for small legal growers to survive.

Let's take a little bit of a step back for all those listeners who aren't in California and aren't familiar with the history. When did this journey to decriminalize or legalize marijuana begin? California's history with cannabis goes back decades. This is marijuana. Some call it pot or grass or Mary Jane. The nicknames are unimportant. This is where the strains were developed that have become popular. This is where we had the California mystique of cannabis. Humboldt, Trinity, and Mendocino counties formed the Emerald Triangle and really provided high-quality cannabis to the rest of the nation and much of the world.

Through these very small, back-to-the-land movement grows. And California then struggled with, should that be legal, should it not? Chris Thiel, Humboldt County Sheriff's Department, searching for marijuana gardens. It's early October. The harvest has just begun. Thiel's photographs and tips from informers

support search warrants. When timber moved out, this was the only economy in these communities. And despite one part of the state raiding these operations with very militaristic helicopters and the notorious camp raids of the 70s and 80s. The government has declared war. The battleground national forest land, the soldiers, special federal agents, and the enemy,

marijuana growers who use the national forests to cultivate their plants. The rest of the state said, hey, this isn't a bad drug. This is relatively harmless. These people are just owner growers and peaceful people. Why do you smoke marijuana? It's really very simple. It helps to make me happy. California was the first in the nation to legalize medical marijuana and open its doors to medical dispensaries.

This is a so-called buyer's club in San Francisco, where hundreds of people a day gather to purchase and smoke marijuana as a treatment for various medical conditions. It became so easy to get a recommendation for cannabis that we actually then had sham recommendations and sham dispensaries and the medical marijuana market without state regulation, and it became a cover for illegal cannabis. That continued to flow across the borders into other states.

That's never been legal. Then 2016, Prop 64 came along. By voting yes on Prop 64, adults 21 and over could only purchase marijuana at licensed marijuana businesses. To create a regulated market, a taxed market, there were promises of huge tax windfalls from sale of illegal cannabis to any community that would allow it, open its doors. Prop 64 generates a billion in new tax revenue for California to fund after-school programs

and job training and placement initiatives. Who is behind Prop 64? Prop 64 was pushed by Weedmaps, people who don't grow cannabis. They make their money advertising and, you know, a forum for cannabis, as well as other growers. They formed a consortium, had great support from Gavin Newsom, who had brought in a lot of people from San Francisco and his administration. And there is only one statewide Democrat that has come out in support of that ballot initiative and is working to lead the charge.

That might be that guy. The consortium included the ACLU, which was on board for the decriminalization part of this to roll back the criminal penalties that, you know, had really preyed upon people in the black and brown communities, and to end the war on drugs, essentially. War on drugs is an abject failure. It's been a war on poor, war on people of poverty, war on people of color, and it's time to move in a new direction. Interestingly enough, on the opposite side, we had law enforcement,

which was expected and said that this would be opening the doors to criminal endeavors. Fatalities doubled in marijuana-related car crashes after legalization in Washington state. Yet in California, Proposition 64 doesn't even include a DUI standard. But we also had the small growers in California who are heavily opposed to Prop 64, who said this is just going to blow up on them and push them out of business. They foresaw the industry being taken over by large commercial operations. We want to turn to the historic night here in California. What affects you the most? Yeah, voters legalize the recreational use of marijuana. How long after legalization is it that people start to realize there are some flaws in the legislation? I saw the first rumblings like that in 2017, just a year after passage, because there was what we now call the Green Rush. And at the time, these were outdoor gardens. These were 99 plants, because 100 plants will get you a mandatory federal five-year sentence. So outdoor gardens of 99 plants each that just swooped into counties and places that had no provision for commercial cannabis.

And people in the industry and the market said, oh, that'll be short-lived. As soon as the legal market gets up and running, these people will be out of business. And the opposite proved true. All these outdoor gardens began adding hoop houses and greenhouses. And instead of one crop a year, they're now doing three to five crops a year. And tents, we call them sea of green harvests, where beneath the canopy, it's not individual plants and pots. It's the sea of green. It's a thousand plants.

And it's only gotten worse. One county that I'm talking about, Siskiyou County, immediately back then passed a declaration of a local emergency that law enforcement just completely could not keep up. And there were murders in the grows, people dying. The legal cannabis industry didn't join the clamor until last year. When the market crashed, they said, we can't compete anymore and we're going out of business. They are facing an extinction-level event right now due to the plummeting wholesale prices and over-ta wholesale prices and over taxation

and over regulation. I think they totally failed to recognize that they were opening the door to sophisticated criminal enterprises that are very opportunistic and move very quickly. And so they failed to enable law enforcement to give people the tools from the get-go at the very start to try to keep a handle on that. It's too late now. I mean, at this point, you've got counties with 5,000 to 10,000 illegal operations and a sheriff's department with maybe one and a half, two people on their marijuana enforcement task force. So there's no way you can go in and raid them all at this point. They failed to understand how thirsty cannabis is. And these illegal operations are really sucking water out of aquifers.

Local wells are going dry. There's no control over the pesticides and herbicides that they're using on these farms. They failed also to recognize the effects on the communities where growing would take place, what it's like to live next door to this kind of an operation. I think there's been a great focus on making cannabis available to consumers, but little regard to the costs of how that cannabis is grown and where it's grown and the resources that are needed from the local people. The workers who are traditionally brought in

are often from the undocumented and immigrant communities. That's often used against them to control them and exploit them. Wage theft is rampant in the grows in these operations, as well as workers I mentioned who have been dying because if the generators are used in these greenhouses and it's not properly vented, those become death traps with carbon monoxide. Do you think rank-and-file Californians, everyday Californians who are engaging with the legal market and dropping thousands upon thousands of dollars a year on what is now legal weed have any conception of the

amount of issues there are around the legislation that got them to that store? Oh, I think very, very few. There's a huge disconnect here. There is no connection to what I've seen in the field with the plants and how it's grown. There are legal organic growers who are struggling to get recognized because they want to show, hey, we have a product. It's safe. It's the people who help pick it are paid fairly and treated well. And even given housing, as a consumer, you're wasting your ability to control how your product is made and what it is you're consuming. It's not easy being green.

Having to spend each day the color. More with Paige in a minute on Today Explained. When I think it might be nicer being red or yellow. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame.

When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the order frame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com

to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com, promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas.

That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk and authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only.

Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hey, Joey. I got some stuff you just gotta try. What is it? Pot.

You know, marijuana. Today Explained, in the first half of the show, you heard about the broken promise of California's pot legalization. Prop 64 was going to introduce legal markets that would replace illegal ones, but that hasn't been the case. Well, this summer, Governor Gavin Newsom said he had had enough. He announced a new task force to crack down on illegal grow operations. Just this month, that task force started cracking down on illegal sites, raiding $15 million worth of pot from a rural grow site. But this hasn't changed the master plan, which is to

have legal markets naturally evolve the state away from illegal ones. At the moment, California's staying the course. It's continued to subscribe to the belief that if it can get the legal market up and running, that will eventually, you know, destroy and overcome the illegal market. And the state is trying to prepare for national market. You know, it's begun to pass laws that would allow interstate shipping of cannabis, even though that's against federal law. You know, the state's trying to create structure. The governor's cannabis czar, Nicole Elliott, in an interview told me that her first priority is to get that legal market up and running, that unless she can create the integrity of that market, there'll be no chance of dealing

with the illicit market, but that it will take years, it will take a lot of time. So the question, I guess, is how long until things might change in California? The governor's office has also signed legislation that penalizes counties that do not allow commercial cannabis and gives grants and benefits to those that do allow it or are willing to open up dispensaries. So it's continuing to try to grow that legal market and telling places that don't want cannabis, you don't get a seat at the table at the task force that meets to decide state policy. You don't get state grants to deal with enforcement of illegal cannabis. It's kind of a carrot and a stick approach. There have been proposals briefly floated in the legislature to recriminalize cannabis, and it's branded that by those who are opposed to it, but actually to allow law enforcement to pursue felony charges against these massive operations. They are also advocating for support, for funding,

so they can investigate, spend less time cutting down plants, because everyone agrees that doesn't really work. That's been decades, the approach to cannabis is just cut down the plants and round up the poor guys who are growing it in the field, and the bosses that people are actually profiting, you know, remain in the shadows. So without money and resources to do investigations to track the money trail to china to mexico russia bulgaria to get an understanding of who has come into california to take advantage of the situation i think that's one of the other things. But the third is the thing we've already talked about, and that's consumer education. I think Prop 64 happened in large part because consumers were ready for it and wanted access to something that they were already buying, you know, in the gray medical market. And I think if consumers care more about how their cannabis has grown and more

aware of what's happening, then they might demand change. But we're talking consumers in Chicago and in New York, because that's where this California weed's showing up. And let's talk about the rest of the country. I mean, the reason we're interested in this story, of course, is because the nation is trending towards legalization and decriminalization. I believe something like 20 states have legalized recreational use at this point. Another 18 or so have legalized medical marijuana or just decriminalized. Have these states seen similar problems to California? Do you know? They have, actually. Oklahoma is overrun with a land rush for people who are taking out the licenses to grow cannabis. Very easy to get, very cheap, and then moving that product, smuggling it out of the state. In fact,

there's a thought that Oklahoma may replace California as the source for illegal weed for you know, for the nation, the rest of the world, because of its central location, just interstate shipping in general. Oregon, it's a mess. They had a special session of the legislature, even moratorium on new licenses. There are many counties there that have declared local states of emergency because of the illegal cannabis. What the legal states are doing behind the scenes is talking to one another about how to get interstate shipping, because a patchwork of legal states is a scenario where each state is requiring that it grow its own and supply its own, and that's not the way cannabis works. That's not the way cannabis works.

That's not the way any product works with the national market. So they're trying to create some kind of federal framework, also banking, so that you don't have to deal with cash, so that you're not attracting street gangs to do armed heists and rob growers and hold people hostage and kidnapped. So there are things that are expected to help stabilize and create a national market. And even some of the large, large licensed growers are starting to speculate on that national market. They're building capacity, huge greenhouses

that are currently growing lettuce, but they're ready at the snap of a finger to put cannabis in those. Because it's a low-risk drug and a great way for them to make a lot of money. Do you know of any of these states who have legalized or decriminalized successfully? Or are all of these operations so interconnected that there's no real way to do it without buying into all these problems we've been talking about? I've heard good things about Colorado, but only about its legal, the legal side of its market.

Number one, it's a small state, and it's not a state where it's really hospitable to growing a lot of weed. So you can kind of control the situation on the legal market, but that doesn't speak at all to how much black market weed is being trafficked through or into or out of Colorado. And it took 10 years because that was the first state to open its doors to recreational cannabis. Is all of this an argument for or against federal legalization? Could the federal government solve a lot of these problems by stepping in and saying, this is a mess, here's how we're going to do it, and here's how we're going to police it, and here's how we're going to ensure that you're not, you know, killing aquifers, or would the

federal government only exacerbate the situation? You know, that's a really good question, because it takes political will, not just to say yes to cannabis, and that's a really good question because it takes political will, not just to say yes to cannabis. And that's probably easy, especially with the campaign donations that come in to lawmakers and both political parties to get behind cannabis, because there's a huge investment community that wants a seat at the table. The hedge funds and the financial industries want to play the game. But the challenging question is then how do you deal with the illegal players? If the DEA and the FBI and the U.S. DOJ have little support for cannabis investigations, if they think it's a low priority drug, and if they can't follow the money trail across international lines, then you're starting out handcuffed and you'll just have another California situation on a much larger scale.

A lot of people will read your LA Times investigation, listen to this show and go, I knew it, you know, all of this effort to legalize marijuana, it's a bad idea. But do you think that's the takeaway here? Oh, absolutely not. Because it's not about the plant. It's not about the drug or the use of it or the people who use it as a plant and as a drug. It's a relatively minor substance. And has purported a lot of medicinal uses and therapeutic uses. It's all the stuff that comes with

cannabis. The violence and the crime and the environmental destruction, the labor exploitation. That mayhem is what needs to be addressed. Page St. John, you can read and support her work over at thelatimes.com. The article that inspired today's episode is titled, The Reality of Legal Weed in California, Huge Illegal Grows, Violence, Worker Exploitation, and Deaths. Our show today was made by Victoria Dominguez, who was Vox's audio fellow for a good while.

She spent a number of months at Today Explained, but her fellowship is coming to an end. She's already off to do great things, and we can't wait to see her journey unfold. Congratulations, Tori. My choice is what I choose to do And if I'm causing no harm, it shouldn't bother you Your choice is who you choose to be.

And if you're causing no harm, then you're all right with me. If you don't like my fire, then don't come around. Because I'm going to burn one down. Yes, I'm going gonna burn one down