When Connecticut legalized leisure marijuana in 2021, the state’s lieutenant governor, Susan Bysiewicz, boasted that the brand new regulation was “crafted to restore the injuries left by the Warfare on Medication.” The transfer adopted the identical rationale that had motivated legalization in 18 different states: fewer sources exhausted on policing a drug that legalization advocates view as largely unharmful, fewer lives derailed by what they argue to be extreme lockups. In a way, the plan labored: Possession arrests have fallen precipitously within the years since. However as Connecticut’s variety of authorized neighborhood weed retailers has grown, so too has an issue that the state, like others which have eased marijuana legal guidelines, was seemingly ill-prepared to cope with: the rise of unlawful marijuana retailers.
Such retailers are largely indistinguishable from state-sanctioned ones. They give the impression of being the identical and function in the identical neighborhoods, however they’ve by no means gone via the required licensing course of to develop into a vendor. (Past asking for paperwork, you’d be unlikely to know in the event you have been purchasing in an unlawful retailer.) And so they have develop into a headache for native law-enforcement businesses that wish to crack down. “That is an epidemic throughout the state of Connecticut,” Ryan Evarts, a sergeant on the Norwalk Police Division, informed me. The issue has develop into so pronounced that some states, together with Connecticut, have not too long ago handed legal guidelines giving regulation enforcement larger powers to police these retailers.
The consequence has been a wierd new inversion: states with among the loosest marijuana restrictions within the nation arresting and charging sellers of a drug that was made authorized not less than partly to maneuver away from such expenses. For the reason that starting of final 12 months, Connecticut has arrested dozens for promoting pot out of unlawful retailers. From April to June 2025, California, supposedly a bastion of leisure hashish, arrested 93 folks for illegally promoting, rising, and distributing weed, in line with the state’s Division of Hashish Management—the biggest variety of weed arrests in a three-month interval because the state legalized the drug. Comparable arrests have additionally been made throughout the previous 12 months in Illinois; Arizona; New Jersey; New York; Ohio; Washington, D.C.; and Washington State. It’s not simply the homeowners of smoke retailers who’ve been focused—so have rank-and-file staff, in line with information studies.
There’s a justifiable public-health rationale for going after these retailers. In most states, authorized weed have to be independently examined for contaminants, comparable to lead and cadmium. Unlawful merchandise could not endure such testing, in flip placing customers at elevated threat of long-term well being problems, comparable to most cancers. A few of these shops are additionally permitting hashish to land within the palms of kids, which is especially regarding given analysis displaying that hashish can hurt the creating mind. A number of smoke retailers in Connecticut that have been raided had been caught promoting merchandise to minors.
Unlawful gross sales of hashish are unhealthy for the states financially, too. Officers have invested money and time into establishing authorized hashish applications; by levying taxes on authorized marijuana gross sales, states have turned leisure hashish right into a windfall. California expects to herald greater than $700 million in tax income from marijuana this 12 months alone. States have a transparent cause to crack down: Unlawful weed gross sales may go untaxed. And if companies can proceed promoting hashish beneath the desk, it dilutes the inducement for outlets to undergo the usually lengthy and arduous means of getting a cannabis-retailer license.
Law enforcement officials have additionally warned that some unlawful hashish retailers are concerned in and doubtlessly funding different, extra prison enterprises. Police discovered weapons and different medication—together with hallucinogenic mushrooms, fentanyl, and crack cocaine—throughout a number of current arrests in Connecticut, in line with press studies. In California, the place the governor has created a process pressure on unlawful hashish, current busts are half of a bigger effort to disrupt prison teams, together with “Chinese language organized crime,” Kevin McInerney, a commander on the Division of Hashish Management, informed me. McInerney didn’t cite any examples of operations explicitly tied to Chinese language organized crime, however final 12 months, ProPublica reported that America’s unlawful hashish market is dominated by “Chinese language mobsters who roam from state to state, harvesting medication and money and overwhelming regulation enforcement with their sources and elusiveness.”
However not everyone seems to be obsessed with utilizing police to manage the hashish black market. “You may’t arrest your manner out of issues like illicit markets,” Daniel Nagin, a criminology knowledgeable at Carnegie Mellon College, informed me. “Focused arrest methods are efficient solely in a restricted set of circumstances, like going after identified high-rate offenders.”
Drug-policy advocates I spoke with emphasised that some operators of unlawful weed retailers could not have the sources to safe a coveted place within the authorized market. A license to function a hashish store in Connecticut can run as much as $25,000, not together with further charges. House owners additionally will need to have measures in place to make sure that hashish isn’t stolen or diverted, together with applications to trace each bit of hashish that enters and leaves their retailer, in addition to extra conventional safety techniques, comparable to video-surveillance techniques and a silent alarm.
If the issue is merely too few authorized hashish retailers, the answer could appear easy, not less than amongst those that argue that leisure marijuana ought to be authorized: a loosening of the foundations round hashish licensing. “The answer isn’t to crack down more durable, however to create extra inclusive pathways into the authorized market and to decriminalize hashish in any respect ranges,” Adrian Rocha, the director of coverage for the Final Prisoner Mission, a criminal-justice-reform group targeted on drug coverage, informed me. For individuals who nonetheless break the regulation, different enforcement measures—comparable to fines—ought to remedy the issue, Maritza Perez Medina, the director of federal affairs on the Drug Coverage Alliance, informed me.
However such arguments for the right way to cope with the issue of unlawful weed fall flat. Los Angeles nonetheless has an issue with unlawful dispensaries, despite the fact that town has greater than 3 times the variety of authorized dispensaries serving about the identical inhabitants as Connecticut. And fines and different regulatory instruments have again and again proved ineffective in stopping unlawful conduct. Some retailers in Connecticut, for instance, have been busted greater than as soon as for promoting unlawful hashish merchandise. Even shutting down dispensaries doesn’t at all times repair these issues: When New York Metropolis closed an unlawful smoke store within the Bronx, it merely reopened subsequent door.
No matter who’s promoting black-market weed and what their motivations are, if unlawful gross sales proceed to develop, they’ve the potential to place the legalization motion in jeopardy. Even in states which have already enacted regulation adjustments, one might think about residents—and politicians—getting so sick of listening to about lawless hashish retailers, together with these with weapons and who’re promoting to children, that they query the deserves of legalization extra usually. Throwing folks in jail is probably not supreme. However up to now, nobody has fairly discovered a greater plan.