A<\/span>s California\u2019s attorney general from 1999 to 2007, Bill Lockyer was the last word in law enforcement during a crucial period in the marijuana legalization movement\u2019s transition into a booming cannabis industry.<\/p>\n In that time, the first storefront dispensaries became legal, and medical marijuana morphed from a hippie curio into a viable, taxpaying business sphere. In that time,\u00a0state law enforcement authorities answering to Lockyer also participated in raids<\/a>\u00a0that shut down dispensaries and sent doctors to prison for recommending marijuana to sick people.<\/p>\n That was all a long time ago, well before marijuana legalization became a nationwide phenomenon supported by a majority of Americans \u2014 and before legal cannabis became a hot topic, and worth perhaps $7 billion in California alone.<\/p>\n Today, Lockyer\u00a0\u2014 who is now 76 and retired from a political career that included two terms as state treasurer and stints in the state legislature \u2014 is in the weed industry.<\/p>\n And other former law-enforcement officials and officers in Canada, California and other places are following suit.<\/p>\n Examples are abundant<\/a>, and go to the very top:\u00a0former DEA agent Patrick Moen recently became the managing director of Privateer Holdings, <\/a>the parent company of Tilray, Marley Natural, and Leafly.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n But what should the cannabis industry think about this? Answers will vary, but cops in cannabis is now absolutely a phenomenon, and not everyone is happy about it, especially because in some cases, cops are cashing in now that the \u201ccriminals\u201d they spent a career busting are prohibited from participating.<\/p>\n As the LA Times reported,<\/a>\u00a0Lockyer is the co-founder of a state-licensed cannabis distribution firm called C4 Distro. C4 Distro has a warehouse in Los Angeles and plans to distribute cannabis to the roughly 700 dispensaries in the greater LA area. Lockyer and his co-founder Eric Spitz, the former owner of the Orange County Register, hold the official approval.<\/p>\n So what\u2019s in weed for Lockyer? He\u2019s relatively straightforward about it. He\u2019s in it for the money: He needs a source of income to pay for his kids\u2019 college tuition, he told the LA Times, and believe in supporting a new industry transitioning from a black market.<\/p>\n \u201cFor me as somebody who was on the law enforcement side for so many years, I saw the inadequacies of the effort to regulate something just by calling it illegal,\u201d Lockyer told the newspaper. \u201cI think legalizing will help stabilize and help legitimize this industry and result in better consumer protection and other public benefits.\u201d<\/p>\n And while no one in the cannabis industry nowadays would argue that keeping marijuana illegal is a viable venture that\u2019s helping anybody, police and their official groups have often taken that exact stance on the anti-side of legalization. This is where the conflict arises. \u201cIt\u2019s a mix of hypocrisy and pure profiteering,\u201d Toronto marijuana entrepreneur\u00a0Jodie Emery told the Guardian in December<\/a>. Emery, with her husband Marc, have run numerous marijuana businesses, including an illegal dispensary in Toronto \u2014 and have the busts, court dates and jail terms<\/a> to show for it.<\/p>\n Emery has reason to fume. She\u2019s watching former Toronto police chief Julian Fantino \u2014 a fellow who once compared marijuana legalization to legalizing murder<\/a>, and opposed legal cannabis less than two years ago \u2014 cruise into Canada\u2019s enormous marijuana market in the months before that country legalizes cannabis, while she and her husband are barred from participating thanks to a recent bust.<\/p>\n A former Conservative MP, Fantino is one of the founders of a company called Aleafia<\/a>. In addressing his for-profit about-face, Fantino breezily dismissed his very recent past<\/a>, referring to his time as a legislator pushing harsh criminal penalties on marijuana as \u201cdays gone by\u201d and a \u201ccertain perception of things.\u201d<\/p>\n Fantino is an extreme example \u2014 possibly the\u00a0most<\/em>\u00a0extreme of examples \u2014 which makes him very difficult to ignore. Emery in particular can\u2019t ignore him, since she and Marc Emery, owners of the Cannabis Culture magazine and brand, were arrested last March<\/a> on drug-trafficking charges. At one point, the pair operated a dozen storefront dispensaries across Canada. All of them were illegal, but it\u2019s accepted that such brazen acts of civil disobedience are what compelled Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to cave and promise to legalize marijuana in the first place.<\/p>\n There\u2019s the rub. In some cases such as the one concerning Fantino and the Emerys in Torontot, it does appear that police are rushing in to the industry precisely because the people they busted are prohibited.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong> what do you think about former police officers entering the cannabis industry?<\/p>\n The post Former Cops Are Profiting Off Legal Marijuana<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Cannabis activists and businesspeople may instinctively worry about the sight of former police officers working in an industry that other cops worked to dismantle. But some of marijuana legalization\u2019s biggest friends and supporters are police officers. What to do? It\u2019s complicated. As California\u2019s attorney general from 1999 to 2007, BillContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,80,848,230,81],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23342"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23342"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23343,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23342\/revisions\/23343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\nRead More: Former Cops Are Profiting Off Legal Marijuana<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"