Vice Feature Article Argues State by State Legalization Is Building Rather Than Destroying The Black Market

Here’s a taste of what the article says.

“I’m trying to stay as legal as I possibly can,” said Mark. “There’s nothing but gray areas in the cannabis industry.” Which is why Mark plans to leave the industry entirely by moving to a fertile Midwestern state and starting a hemp farm—weed’s less legally risky sibling.

As legalization has come to the US state by state (with a patchwork of local regulations) it has driven some growers like Mark out of the industry completely. Others, struggling with basement retail prices and an oversaturation of the market, have returned to the shadows. So as prohibition slips further into the rearview mirror of pioneering legalization states such as Washington, Colorado, and Oregon, the shape and scope of their illegal markets have begun to change. While experts say legal weed has taken a big bite out of states’ internal illegal markets, legalization has in many ways contributed to a surge in interstate cannabis trafficking.

“[We] have become a source state, a theater of operation for sophisticated international drug trafficking and money laundering organizations from Cuba, China, Mexico, and elsewhere,” wrote Bob Troyer, the US attorney for the district of Colorado, in a September Denver Post op-ed arguing that the state’s “commercialization” of cannabis should be “paused.”

Troyer criticized the state’s “permissive regulatory structure” for allowing an onslaught of negative consequences, from public safety and environmental concerns to creating a “booming black market.” In 2017, the state’s regulated industry produced 6.4 metric tons of “unaccounted-for marijuana,” he wrote, and more than 80,000 “black market plants” had been recovered on federal land in the state.

Read the full article at  https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3p5m5/its-a-really-good-time-to-be-a-weed-smuggler

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