U.S. cannabis shoppers face 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.

Independent producer Tilda Wilson contributed reporting for this story from California.