U.S. cannabis shoppers face a market flush with illegal weed
FAIRFIELD, Calif. — On a crisp winter morning last month, Sgt. Erin McAtee watched as members of his team with the California Department of Cannabis Control executed a search warrant at a home in Fairfield, halfway between Sacramento and San Francisco.
They broke open the door of what looked on the outside like any other upscale suburban house on this street. Inside, the home had been gutted, transformed into a smelly mess of marijuana plants, grow lights, chemicals and pesticides.
“You can see the mold down on the tarp down there,” McAtee said. “Yup, that’s mold.” His team also identified chemicals and pesticides not approved in the U.S. for use with consumer products like legal cannabis.
A dozen years after states first started legalizing recreational marijuana, this is the complicated world of American cannabis.
On the one hand, weed is now as normal to many consumers as a glass of wine or a bottle of beer. A growing number of companies offer government tested, well-regulated products. But a huge amount of the cannabis being sold in the U.S. still comes from bootleg operations. California officials acknowledge illegal sales still far outpace transactions through licensed shops and vendors.
According to McAtee, it’s often difficult even for experienced agents to tell weed sourced through regulated channels from the criminal stuff.
“Our undercovers will buy cannabis from people who are outwardly pretending to be legit,” he told NPR. “They’ll tell you they have a license and that everything they’re doing is legit.”
If it’s hard for experienced cops to distinguish regulated weed from black market products, it can be nearly impossible for average consumers. Advocates of marijuana legalization say it’s disturbing that unregulated weed plays such a big role.
“We’re talking about a market that lacks transparency and accountability,” said Paul Armentano, head of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. He said any time a consumer product is being sold without proper regulation, it’s risky.
“Whether I was getting cannabis or alcohol or my broccoli from an entirely unregulated market, I’d be concerned about any number of issues,” Armentano said.
Black market weed thrives, raising questions for consumers
Advocates of cannabis decriminalization hoped legal weed companies would quickly move past this problem, eclipsing criminal growers and processors.
So far, the opposite has happened. Vanda Felbab-Brown, who studies criminal drug markets for the Brookings Institution, said regulated cannabis producers often compete with a growing network of criminal gangs often rooted in mainland China.
“They’re spreading from the West Coast all the way up to Maine,” she said.
According to Felbab-Brown, Chinese criminal organizations are drawn to the marijuana business because it’s a relatively low risk to gain a foothold in communities. There’s relatively little law enforcement pressure, unlike with harder drugs such as fentanyl and methamphetamines.
“These illegal cannabis cultivation plantations are used by the Chinese criminal groups for laundering money, but there is also increasingly an intertwining with human smuggling of Chinese people into the U.S. that go through some of those networks. They wind up in fact being enslaved at the plantations,” she said.
NPR emailed Chinese officials to ask about the role of China-based organized crime in the U.S. cannabis industry but haven’t heard back. In the past, Beijing has suggested the U.S. is pointing fingers at China to divert attention from America’s drug and crime problems.
Experts say criminal cannabis sellers wind up outcompeting licensed vendors. They don’t pay taxes or costly fees, which means their prices are often lower. They can also sell their product anywhere in the country, ignoring federal laws that prevent legal companies from shipping cannabis across state lines.
Black market weed then often winds up on store shelves, packaged in ways that can make it indistinguishable from legal regulated cannabis.
“There’s going to be mold and these banned pesticide and herbicides that are getting into the illegal product so that’s a grave concern,” said Bill Jones, head of enforcement for California’s Department of Cannabis Control. “I’m not sure all consumers are aware of that.”
What should consumers do?
With cannabis markets still difficult to navigate, experts interviewed by NPR said the most reliable way to find regulated cannabis is in licensed shops in states and communities where they’re allowed to operate. This often means paying a higher price, but the tradeoff in quality can be significant.
Many states where recreational cannabis is legal, including California and New Jersey and New York now have online advice to help people locate and buy legal marijuana. Double-check your brick-and-mortar shop to make sure it’s licensed and reputable.
Even when working through a reliable seller, cannabis experts said it’s a good idea to ask questions about sourcing and potency.
Everyone interviewed by NPR for this project said they expect it to get easier over time for people who choose to buy and use legal marijuana. Most pointed to the fact that America has gone through this kind of transition before with another popular consumer product: alcohol.
Alcohol prohibition was repealed in December 1933, but many states kept liquor bans on the books into the 1950s, creating the same kind of patchwork we now see with marijuana laws. Liquor bootleggers and smugglers continued to operate for years.
“When you move from prohibition to legalization, it takes time,” said Beau Kilmer an expert on marijuana markets and co-director of the Rand Drug Policy Research Center.
According to Kilmer, many states have mismanaged this transition, focusing too much on regulating legal weed companies without helping them compete with criminal organizations.
“After [states] pass legalization, they’ll spend a couple of years coming up with the licensing regime and figuring out what the regulations are going to be and issuing licenses, but there hasn’t been a lot of focus on what to do about the illegal market. And in a lot of places, enforcement just hasn’t been a priority.”
This is changing in some places. In part to help legal operators compete, New York City has been cracking down on unlicensed marijuana retail stores. California officials say they seized nearly $200 million worth of illegally grown cannabis last year.
Despite these efforts, black market weed is expected to remain “pervasive” for years to come, according to state officials and drug policy experts.
In Fairfield, Sgt. McAtee watched as a truck backed up to another illegal grow house, preparing to haul away a big crop of seized cannabis. He said this crop might have wound up on shelves anywhere in the U.S.
“A lot of the places we hit, they’re shipping their cannabis out of state, where they can make ten-fold [the profit] you’d make in California,” he said.
Transcript:
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Marijuana is now legal for recreational or medical use in 40 states, but it is still illegal federally. So every state has its own safety standards. And Colorado Public Radio’s Ben Markus reports that there’s growing concern about molds and pesticides in marijuana.
BEN MARKUS, BYLINE: Few people have consumed more types of marijuana than Thomas Mitchell. He reviewed strains for a weekly publication in Denver, everything from edibles to vapes, but he still prefers to smoke the green buds.
THOMAS MITCHELL: I definitely don’t turn my nose away to any option out there. It’s more about where it came from than what it is, but I’m still a flower guy. Nothing beats the after-work bong hit (laughter).
MARKUS: Mitchell has also written about safety recalls of cannabis. Colorado authorities have issued nearly a hundred health and safety warnings since 2016. Last year, Missouri recalled more than 100,000 products over faulty lab testing. And California recalled boxer Mike Tyson’s branded products for mold.
MITCHELL: People assume it’s safe because of guardrails that are in place by state enforcement. But when you actually look at the end result, I think that’s up for debate, definitely.
MARKUS: In Colorado, health and safety warnings are confusing. Recalls can come months or years after marijuana is sold. That feels unfair to companies that prioritize cleanliness, like this one. Workers in hairnets and white coats sanitize a machine that makes marijuana gummies.
What’s that smell? It smells good.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Watermelon.
JUSTIN SINGER: Watermelon.
MARKUS: Justin Singer, the founder of this operation, says he went years without a state inspection. What kind of guy wants an inspection?
SINGER: The kind of guy who wants an honest playing field – like, I swear to God, professional sports would not be fun if there were no referees and one team was allowed to cheat while one team tried to follow the rules.
MARKUS: So he launched his own secret shopper study. He bought 15 different cannabis products from stores around Denver. He sent them to a lab. They found that half had molds and yeasts present. Four of them had more than triple the state limit. Molds like aspergillus have been linked in rare cases to serious lung problems in cannabis users.
SINGER: I consider Colorado weed today to be on par with New York street weed in 2008. In fact, I think the cartels probably cared more about their consumers than a lot of people here.
MARKUS: Colorado officials didn’t comment on Singer’s claims. They say there are robust requirements for marijuana companies to test product through state-licensed labs. But those testing systems can be gamed by growers, says Shaun Opie with E4 Bioscience in Michigan. He’s an expert in marijuana toxins. He says there’s a lot at stake for large growers.
SHAUN OPIE: The desire to have a $250,000 harvest pass is very high.
MARKUS: Opie says it’s a good idea for states to have a secret shopper surveillance program to randomly test the product that users are actually using. But he empathizes, too, with these cash-strapped states who are essentially on their own. Marijuana is federally illegal, so the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t provide oversight.
OPIE: I think, without any doubt, having a national oversight would be very helpful because the patchwork of regulations leads to a variety of differences.
MARKUS: No two states are testing for exactly the same toxins. But marijuana growers in Colorado say, sure, the system isn’t perfect, but it’s better than buying weed anywhere else.
ETHAN SHAW: I think, at this point, in Colorado, you’re dealing with the safest weed you can have in the United States.
MARKUS: Ethan Shaw runs a grow facility in Boulder County. There are a variety of marijuana products, he says, that fall into legal loopholes outside of state-regulated markets.
SHAW: That is really where you need to be worried about heavy metals, mold, mildew, filth, all of these other things.
MARKUS: That’s not enough for careful consumers like Thomas Mitchell, the Denver journalist. He lives close enough to walk to one of the city’s 200 marijuana stores, but he drives to a place he trusts.
MITCHELL: You’re not going to keel over if you buy some cheap suspect weed. But 10 years down the road, maybe you develop a lung problem that someone who was smoking cleaner weed won’t.
MARKUS: And unless it becomes fully legal and there are uniform safety standards and testing, it’s buyer beware. For NPR News, I’m Ben Markus in Denver.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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