LA case study: Could legalizing marijuana escalate crime?
Image in Public Domain
Arizona Republic cautions that Los Angeles' black market and drug-related crime have only risen since legalizing marijuana. Meanwhile, Gilroy CMs Hilton and Armendariz have high-fived the idea of authorizing pot business ops in the Garlic Capital, just like they're recognized in SJ and Mountain View—though others on Gilroy's City Council remain dubious.
Legal marijuana has boosted the black market
A stunning special report in the Los Angeles Times this week shows that legalization in that state has given rise to a massive black market, California’s largest ever, that is undercutting new legal markets, stoking violent criminal behavior and putting rural communities at risk.
Pop-up greenhouses or “hoop houses” are rising in the remote forests and deserts of California by the tens of thousands to grow illegal, unregulated pot. There are so many it is impossible to police.
“It’s like taking on a gargantuan army with a pocket knife,” Mendocino County (Calif.) Sheriff Matt Kendall told The Times...
California legalized pot thinking it would cut crime
Los Angeles Times reporter Paige St. John has done extraordinary reporting that is going to change the way we talk about marijuana in the future.
In 2016, California voters passed Proposition 64 believing a legal market for marijuana would undercut the drug’s black market and thus reduce its parallel criminal violence and environmental destruction.
Instead, they opened “the door to a global pool of organized criminals and opportunists.”
In rural communities across the state, residents describe “living in fear next to heavily armed camps,” St. John reports.
“Criminal enterprises operate with near impunity, leasing private land and rapidly building out complexes of as many as 100 greenhouses. Police are overwhelmed, able to raid only a fraction of the farms, and even those are often back in business in days.”
Examining satellite imagery of thousands of square miles across the state, The Times found there has been a “dramatic expansion in cannabis cultivation where land is cheap and law enforcement spread thin.”
“Although no hard data exist on the size of the illegal market, it is indisputably many times larger than the licensed community. The Times’ analysis of satellite images shows that unlicensed operations in many of California’s biggest cultivation areas, such as parts of Trinity and Mendocino counties, outnumbered licensed farms by as much as 10 to 1.”
This article originally appeared in the Arizona Republic. Read the whole thing here.
Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity
Opp Now enthusiastically welcomes smart, thoughtful, fair-minded, well-written comments from our readers. But be advised: we have zero interest in posting rants, ad hominems, poorly-argued screeds, transparently partisan yack, or the hateful name-calling often seen on other local websites. So if you've got a great idea that will add to the conversation, please send it in. If you're trolling or shilling for a candidate or initiative, forget it.