Colorado's high-potency weed is getting so famous, criminals from all over the world are moving to Denver to exploit it.
In 2012, 32 people flew skydiving planes full of Colorado pot to Minnesota, where they allegedly sold it for millions. In another case, a Denver man was caught sending over 100 weed-laden FedEx packages to New York, where drug dealers divvied up the stuff and sold it to what we assume were faux-intellectual hipsters with panache in Brooklyn. Colorado weed has even made its way down to Retiree Golf Sweatbath, also known as Florida, where it's worth more than twice its price than in a legal Denver shop.
Colorado weed, it seems, has developed somewhat of a cult following.
Desperate acts like these to get Colorado weed to not-Colorado places have skyrocketed as of late, as news of our ultra high-potency brand of marijuana has spread everywhere from the east coast to Mexico. With that, there is now unprecedented demand for our premium pot, especially from out-of-staters who live in places where pot is still sinfully illegal. This is great news for in-state marijuana companies who profit from tourism, but it's also caught the attention of cartels and illegal marijuana traffickers. Lured by the siren song of cheaply grown, thermonuclear-strength cannabis, these black market dealers are moving to Colorado in droves to grow and illegally ship our product all around the country.
"It's brand name now," says Denver DEA special agent Barbra Roach of the Colorado weed cartels are moving here to exploit. At this point, simply the name "Colorado" has imbued marijuana with a presumed sense of quality that makes it invaluable across state lines.
According to the AP, drug traffickers see Colorado's legal weed marketplace as a safe haven where they can cultivate cannabis among the state's sanctioned grows. Hiding in plain sight amongst the hundreds of legal marijuana operations, they're able to covertly ship it out of state and pocket millions of dollars from the un-taxed sales.
Most of the illegal growers move to town from elsewhere, never get a growing license, and "don't even attempt to adhere to the law," Roach tells the AP.
All this is great, America. We're really flattered you like our stuff so much. The only problem is that the more you like it, the more fucked we become.
This increase in over-the-border weed trafficking only confirms marijuana opponent's argument that Colorado's legal weed experiment invites more illegal drug trafficking to other states where hitting the bong is still illegal.
This is exactly the argument our asshole neighbors, Nebraska and Oklahoma, make in their infamously bitchy lawsuit. In 2014, they attempted to sue the state of Colorado on the grounds that legal weed was unconstitutional, arguing our atmosphere of hazy dank freedom would waft over to their side of the pond.
… They were right. It did.
And although the Obama administration urged the Supreme Court to throw the suit out because the weed leakage "wasn't Colorado's fault," this new drug cartel trafficking thing is only proving Nebraskahoma right.
It's not just our litigious neighbors we've pissed off. The federal government is also worried about Colorado's trafficking trend. After all, they only approved Colorado's recreational pot program on the condition that the legal weed stay within state borders and out of the hands of criminal cartels. And so, by doing a flaccid job tracking the continued black market marijuana trade, we've bitten the hand that feeds us.
Shit. How did all this happen? Well, the problem is exacerbated because, well, no one really knows how much illegal weed is being grown and flung around the country by enterprising underground dealers.
Although Colorado has several measures in place to track marijuana, like the "seed-to-sale" system, it's almost impossible to say exactly how much weed leaves Colorado. When shipments are seized, they often contain marijuana from multiple sources, both legal and illegal, so tracing its origin becomes a seriously tall task … especially when you consider the sheer volume of weed that gets moved to our marijuana-starved neighbors.
As the AP reports: "Police agencies seized nearly 2 tons of Colorado weed from drivers who had intended to take it to 36 other states in 2014, the year legal pot shops opened, according to the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a federally funded drug task force. By comparison, they seized less than a ton in 2009.
U.S. postal inspectors seized about 470 pounds of Colorado pot from the mail in 2014, up from 57 pounds in 2010, according to the task force, whose findings are based on voluntary submissions from law enforcement agencies and are largely anecdotal."
This trend is also occurring in other states with legal weed like Washington, but to a much lesser extent. A vast report of illegal trafficking reports come from Colorado. After all, our state is currently home to the nation's juiciest, most successful commercial marijuana market.
Well, as proud as we are that our homegrown product is so famously desirable, we can't argue that it wouldn't hurt to focus a little more on curbing the black market problem, if only to appease the feds so they don't take away our right to grow and consume marijuana legally. Although … those low, low black market prices are looking pretty sexy right now, but …we digress.
If you want to read about what it's like for underground weed dealers in this day and age of orgiastic marijuana liberty, read our interview with a black market dealer here. According to what he told us, legal weed is just about the best thing that ever happened to the black market.
… But for now, let's leave that criminal weed game to him. In the meantime, let's talk about you. Stop FedExing weed brownies to your grandma in New Jersey, or you might not have any brownies to FedEx anywhere soon.
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