Just after dawn on a recent spring morning, police dressed in tactical gear and armed with a search warrant pounded on the front door of an upscale home in a quiet suburban neighborhood an hour outside San Francisco. When no one answered, the officers with California’s Department of Cannabis Control, which polices the legal sale of marijuana in the state, took a battering ram to the steel-reinforced door.
They also skirt taxes and can thus undercut the prices of the legal market, which in California is struggling – in part because of the surplus flowing from the black market. All the while, the rogue entrepreneurs enjoy the protection of doing business in a state where a voter-approved legalization law has a clause that effectively eliminates felony prosecutions when it comes to marijuana.