One of the weirdest outcomes of cannabis legalization is that the cops, who for decades were intent on busting people for weed on behalf of the state and its laws, now bust people largely on behalf of the legal pot industry.
This isn’t wrong, necessarily. It’s just weird. Often, after a raid on an illicit grow operation or an unlicensed dispensary, spokespeople for the P.D. or prosecutor’s office emphasize the impact that illicit weed has on legitimate pot businesses. But otherwise, the busts seem much the same as they did before legalization, with “dope on the table” and all the rest of it. The same phenomenon plays out in legal states across the country.
Of course, before legalization, such busts had little impact on either the supply of or demand for weed. The same is true now of illicit weed. The so-called “black market” continues apace, especially in California, fueled by bad state and local policies and high taxes that send people into the arms of their local pot dealer.
That doesn’t mean that cops shouldn’t enforce the laws, of course. If they didn’t, the situation might be even worse (though precisely how much worse is hard to know).
In many cases, police seem as zealous as they ever did, and some of the busts they pull off, or attempt to pull off, are outright amusing.
Last week we learned that, nearly a year ago, the Los Angeles Police Department raided what it thought was an illegal cannabis operation. It turned out to be a medical imaging center. The owners of NoHo Diagnostic Center have filed a lawsuit against the department, claiming that their civil rights were violated. The lawsuit, first reported by Law 360, did not specify damages.
Somehow, the cops got the idea that the MRI center, in the Van Nuys neighborhood, was an illegal grow operation, and that the MRI business was just a front. Part of what led them to believe this was that the site’s electricity use was found to be higher than average, which should give pause to any business or private citizen that uses a lot of electricity. (One wonders: will they ever raid a crypto data center?) The cops also claimed they smelled weed.
The raid occurred on Oct. 18 of last year. One employee was on the site at the time, and was detained while the cops walked around wondering why it looked like a medical-imaging center and not like a pot farm. According to the lawsuit, the raid was “nothing short of a disorganized circus, with no apparent rules, procedures, or even a hint of coordination.” The cops found no weed on the site.
This is all really funny stuff (though not for the victims, of course) but the hilarity doesn’t end there. According to the lawsuit, one of the cops walked past a sign outside an MRI room warning that metal was prohibited in the room. He was carrying a rifle that, the lawsuit alleges, was sucked out of his hand and was attached to the magnetized machine. Yeah, bitch! Magnets!
This particular cop hit the machine’s emergency “off” switch, which the lawsuit alleges damaged the machine. He also allegedly left a magazine of ammunition behind in the room. The LAPD hasn’t commented on any of this.
While much of the enforcement of current pot laws might be silly, unjust or dangerous, much of it is not. Last month, state authorities raided a bunch of storefronts in Los Angeles where the operators were selling cannabis products clearly meant to appeal to children (or people with the minds of children) with packages depicting cartoon characters or designed to look like candy. The labels also fraudulently bore the symbol required on cannabis products to show that they are legal. The Unified Cannabis Enforcement Taskforce hit 11 storefronts and seized $2.2 million of products.
While enforcement of laws is necessary (else why have those laws on the books?) a better approach for the state and cities might be to lower pot taxes and implement other reforms that would provide incentives for consumers to get their cannabis from professionally run, licensed pot dispensaries. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen any time soon.
