In June, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) released its annual marijuana-war report card which revealed a troubling irony: During President Biden\u2019s first two years in office, as more and more states legalized adult-use marijuana, law-enforcement officers across the country reported more and more cannabis arrests and more and more seizure of plants.<\/p>\n
In 2021, the Domestic Cannabis Eradication\/Suppression Program reported destroying or seizing 5.53 million cultivated cannabis plants, 743,920 pounds of \u201cbulk processed marijuana\u201d and arresting 6,606 people. Compare that to 2020, the last year of President Trump\u2019s term, when police reported destroying 4.5 million plants, seizing 265,196 pounds of cannabis and arresting 4,992 people.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As NORML pointed out,<\/a>\u00a0that\u2019s 20% more plants seized, 25% more cannabis arrests\u2014and almost three times as much cannabis taken away, the biggest increases in nearly a decade, back when Biden was President Obama\u2019s vice president. With numbers like these, you could argue that the drug war\u2019s getting worse,\u00a0as some<\/a> <\/a>have<\/a>.<\/p>\n If you did, you\u2019d be wrong, drug-policy experts told Cannabis Now. An increase in marijuana-related arrests is marijuana legalization working as intended, in this analysis. There\u2019s no legal cannabis without illegal cannabis being illegal. In other words, big busts are exactly what you voted for.<\/p>\n \u201cIt can be interpreted as good news for the legalization endeavor,\u201d said\u00a0Jonathan Caulkins<\/a>, a drug-policy expert and professor at Carnegie Mellon\u2019s Heniz College and author of\u00a0Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe legal industry should welcome law enforcement making life difficult for illegal producers,\u201d he said. \u201cThe illegal market won\u2019t just disappear on its own after legalization.\u201d<\/p>\n First, it\u2019s good to be familiar with the data, which experts such as Caulkins admit isn\u2019t comprehensive or exact but is probably the best data there is to indicate the state of the country\u2019s weed war.\u00a0<\/p>\n The tallies include cannabis arrests made by local, state and federal law enforcement\u2014but don\u2019t exactly indicate who\u2019s busting whom. Further muddying the waters are numbers released by the states themselves.<\/p>\n In California, for example, the notorious Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) reported seizing 1.2 million marijuana plants and more than 180,000 pounds of illicit pot in 2021, state Attorney General Rob Bonta\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0in October of last year. But then, in February, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW)\u00a0released its own numbers<\/a>: 2.6 million plants eradicated and 478,270 pounds of pot seized.<\/p>\n To what extent were these included or in addition to the DEA\u2019s numbers, which indicated 3.9 million plants and 647,035 pounds busted\u2014or pretty close to what CAMP and CDFW reported? Did that also include the 370,000 plants and 33,480 pounds that Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0busting last July?<\/p>\n That\u2019s not entirely clear: In an-email, a spokesperson for the state Justice Department said that CAMP, a \u201cunique participant\u201d in the DEA\u2019s weed war, \u201cisn\u2019t required to report data directly\u201d to the DEA, but that local law enforcement \u201cagencies report eradication numbers directly\u201d to the feds. A spokeswoman for CDFW said that the agency was \u201cworking on\u201d a response at press time.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ambiguity aside, the state-level focus, in the state with by far the most reported busts and seizures, is a good reminder that the DEA\u2019s numbers aren\u2019t necessarily a reflection of any sea change at the DEA or new direction from the White House. What this is, actually, is\u00a0state<\/em>\u00a0law enforcement doing its thing in states that have legalized cannabis for adults 21 and over.<\/p>\n But if you\u2019re all about the plant and all about weed freedom, should you be celebrating more cannabis arrests\u2014or at least accepting that this is part of the legalization contract? Regardless of your personal feelings on the matter, you should be aware that police in helicopters chasing down illicit cannabis producers is exactly what the legal cannabis industry needs and wants.<\/p>\n Last December, with the illicit market up to three times as large as the legal market, and legal operators drowning in a sea of unpaid taxes and high regulatory burdens, a group of California cannabis businesses begged Gov. Gavin Newsom for immediate tax relief. Instead, Newsom\u00a0promised<\/a>\u00a0more enforcement, claiming\u2014accurately\u2014that a tax cut was the Legislature\u2019s job.<\/p>\n But whether they admitted it, legal companies benefited in some way from the cannabis arrests.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cLegal cannabis businesses in California have been begging for greater enforcement against illegal producers and sellers who are encroaching and unfairly competing in their market,\u201d\u00a0said Rosalie Pacula<\/a>, a professor of health policy at the University of Southern California and an expert in cannabis policy.<\/p>\n Legalization has encouraged more cannabis production and consumption across the board\u2014illicit and legal. To encourage the latter and discourage the former, some enforcement mechanism is required. Anarchists and libertarians will bristle, but a legal and regulated market just won\u2019t work without some muscle in some form.<\/p>\n \u201cThis sort of enforcement is necessary to discourage illegal producers,\u201d said Pacula, who added that in some circumstances, cannabis arrests should be expected to continue if not increase: in states that legalized marijuana markets but didn\u2019t fully decriminalize youth possession; in states that are trying to crack down on unlicensed cannabis dispensaries or seshes, or in states that are enforcing probation and parole requirements that forbid the person on parole or probation from smoking weed.<\/p>\n \u201cThe rise in enforcement numbers alone can\u2019t tell us whether this enforcement is good or bad for the legal market, but it\u2019s not surprising either way,\u201d Pacula said. \u201cNone of us expected the illicit market to just disappear because of legal cannabis.\u201d<\/p>\n And it\u2019s also important to remember not all enforcement numbers increased. In 2020, under Trump, the DEA reported seizing more than 1 million ounces of \u201cTHC wax\/oil\u201d and 971,104 ounces of THC edibles. In 2021, under Biden, seizures of edibles and concentrates plummeted\u2014to 413,377 ounces of wax and oil and 343,390 ounces of edibles.<\/p>\n It remains a factual matter that underground cannabis is cheaper than legal cannabis and is thus attractive to the consumer for that reason. That\u2019s what dodging taxes and regulation does. But if the marijuana legalization experiment is expected to work, cannabis arrests and seizures for those choosing to ignore legalization\u2019s rules will remain a fact of life.<\/p>\n The post Why More Cannabis Arrests Are Good for Legalization<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
In June, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) released its annual marijuana-war report card which revealed a troubling irony: During President Biden\u2019s first two years in office, as more and more states legalized adult-use marijuana, law-enforcement officers across the country reported more and more cannabis arrests and more and more seizureContinue 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":[15645,50,213,62,16319,16272,848,624,7560,9799,90,65,14846],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55708"}],"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=55708"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55709,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55708\/revisions\/55709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Behind the Numbers<\/strong><\/h4>\n
This Is What \u201cSaving Legal Cannabis\u201d Looks Like<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Why More Cannabis Arrests Are Good for Legalization<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"