Big Weed

by Christian Hageseth

  The danger of being robbed aside, there’s another reason legitimate businesses don’t traffic in cash: It’s a pain in the ass.

  Think about it: At most businesses of our size, the chief executive and shareholders don’t meet to discuss paying bills. All that stuff is managed by the company’s accountants. You authorize a check, the checks get cut, and someone in middle management signs them before they’re shipped out. Case closed. You don’t call a board meeting to figure out a plan to pay your electrician, no matter how much he’s charging you. Doing so is an amateurish way to run a company.

  So many of our pop culture references associate copious quantities of cash with illegal activities. Who can forget those scenes in Brian De Palma’s Scarface where Tony Montana’s crew pulls up in front of a bank and whisks duffel bags of illegal drug money inside to be laundered? At first, the corrupt bank manager is happy to have their business, but as time goes on, he’s increasingly unnerved by the ceaseless stream.

  The chemistry teacher–turned–meth kingpin Walter White in the Breaking Bad cable TV series goes through a similar process of cash fatigue. First, he gets by laundering cash through his lawyer’s office. Then he buys a legitimate business—a car wash—to be able to launder it all. His wife, Skyler, becomes increasingly frustrated with him, because no matter how creatively she cooks the books, it’s not enough to hide the flow of cash. By the end of the series, Walter’s world unravels and he is reduced to desperately burying millions in the desert.

  These stories are meant to be entertainment with a little bit of morality tossed in for good measure. The cash Montana and White earn become symbols for their criminal obsessions gone wrong, gone awry, gone out of whack. Their stories are actually not far from the truth. In 2011, Mexican authorities raided a Tijuana home of an illegal drug kingpin and found more than $15 million in cash. That’s a lot of green, but it pales in comparison to the largest drug cash seizure in history: $206 million, which was lying around the home of an influential player in Mexico’s meth industry.

  The legal cannabis movement is all about making things right again. This plant was maligned by the federal government for nearly a hundred years. Now the cash raised by legal marijuana enterprises is supporting the budgets of at least twenty U.S. states, with more on the way. It’s paying for schools, it’s helping our neediest citizens, and it’s helping to balance state budgets at a time in the nation’s history when states need it most.

  The U.S. Treasury, via the Internal Revenue Service, happily sticks our money in its hip pocket but refuses to give us the one thing we need to be recognized as capitalists and full-fledged partners in American productivity.

  I am not Tony Montana.

  I am not Walter White.

  Yet every day I commit two federal crimes. I grow and sell marijuana, and I “launder” the money I earn from those crimes by passing that cash on to my employees, contractors, and landlords. Being the nice, law-abiding drug dealer that I am, I also pay my state and federal taxes with the money I earn from those enterprises. It’s downright Orwellian.

  We are not criminals, but the law is forcing us to behave like them.

  6

  The Haze of Paranoia

  I had just parked in the lot of a Denver Safeway. When the other car drove up, I waved hi and popped my trunk.

  Money changed hands.

  I slipped the cash in my pocket and helped my new friend stash the product in the trunk of his car. The product consisted of fifty or so tiny sprouts peeking out of containers of damp soil.

  Just as we were about to go our separate ways, we heard the woop, woop, woop of a police cruiser’s siren as the vehicle pulled into the lot beside us.

  A woman police officer got out, her hands lightly grazing the grip of her holstered pistol.

  “Is something wrong, Officer?”

  “I got a call that people were trading . . . plants in the parking lot,” she said. “Do you mind telling me what you’re doing?”

  It was early autumn 2009 and I had been in the business just a few months. I had done everything by the book. I had followed all the state regs, even ones that the state’s marijuana regulators were still hazy on. Our industry was so new, so five minutes old, that the authorities were interpreting the law on the fly.

  This was not the first police encounter I’d ever had in my life, but it was the first since I’d started growing marijuana.

  “Do you mind telling me what’s going on here?” she said again.

  “Not at all, ma’am,” I said. “This gentleman and I are both in the legal marijuana business. I just sold him my extra plants. You’ll find fifty clones in the trunk of his car, and the money’s in my pocket.”

  “Okay . . .” she said, her voice trailing. The look in her eyes was already anxious and judgmental. I had said the magic word. The word that set many people in law enforcement on edge: marijuana.

  “Give me your identification, and you wait right here.”

  At the time, Colorado had not yet rolled out its medical marijuana dealer badges. We used our red cards as part of our state documentation. So I passed her my red card and driver’s license, and so did my new friend. And she retreated to her police cruiser.

  I was sweating bullets. I had never been in a situation like this. You’ll recall that the state of Colorado had a rule that said that for every medical patient I enrolled, I could grow six plants. That meant that our grow facility always had the maximum number of plants we could legally have at any one time. The minute our clones—small plants that had been clipped from a mother plant and rooted in soil—took us over the legal limit, we were obliged to destroy them or sell them to someone else who could legally use them. That’s all I was doing. I just didn’t anticipate that someone would call the cops on us.

  My mind was racing.

  I was terrified. I forced myself to think logically, rationally. What should I do? If she arrested me right now, they would probably impound my vehicle. If so, any valuables on my person would probably be checked into the police station.

  Planning for what then felt inevitable, I started removing my watch, my wallet, my wedding band, anything I thought was too valuable to be hanging around a police station evidence locker.

  As I finished stashing this stuff in my glove compartment, the police officer stepped out of her vehicle and was waiting to resume our conversation.

  As I stepped over to her, her hand came up, my documentation held lightly between her index and middle fingers.

  “Here you go,” she said.

  And then she stopped, my ID dangling from her fingers.

  “You know you’re playing with fire, don’t you?” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  And off she went, launching into an angry, two-minute lecture.

  We were ruining ourselves.

  We were ruining the city.

  We were ruining children.

  How could she protect us?

  We had to be careful.

  People killed over this stuff.

  Marijuana was wrong. It would always be wrong.

  But then, as she was talking, there was this moment when I could sense that she was running out of steam. The fire in her eyes was dying, just as it became clear that we were off the hook.

  She wasn’t going to bust us.

  She knew that we weren’t the same as the criminals and drug dealers she and her fellow cops saw every day.

  We were licensed; the law was on our side.

  The law was on our side!

  The police officer’s rant was really more about her frustrations. The newfound complexities of her job. The world she knew was changing, and from this day forward, she would have to delineate in her mind between legal marijuana dealers and illegal marijuana dealers.

  “I know it’s
legal,” she said, “but no one’s telling us how to handle this stuff.”

  If people could now buy and sell marijuana like geraniums in the parking lot of a Safeway, what was her role? Was she supposed to stand by and watch? Check it out? Ignore her dispatcher’s call? Laugh it off? What?

  Her supervisors hadn’t briefed her on any of this stuff, which only made her feel . . . edgy, uncomfortable, and isolated.

  She handed back my documents. “You’re free to go.”

  Marijuana is most closely associated with feelings of euphoria. But if you don’t watch what you’re doing, you can have dysphoric effects from the drug, too. One of the most common is a sense of paranoia—a feeling that you’re about to be busted when the reality is just the opposite.

  From my earliest days in the business, I noticed that a bizarre paranoia surrounded the industry. The funny thing about it was that it was coming from people who weren’t smoking marijuana.

  I call this paranoia marijuana legalization denial syndrome. Citizens in the grip of MLDS are incapable of accepting marijuana’s legality on its face. There has to be a catch, they think.

  You’ll recall that when Mr. Pink and I first invested in the legal cannabis business, our spouses worried that the law might be repealed and everyone who had gone into the legal marijuana business would be instantly arrested without a chance to defend themselves. Longtime marijuana smokers fretted that the law was a ploy to root them out and get them on the record so they could be arrested later, when the law was repealed. Certainly it wouldn’t be the first time the government had lied to its citizens.

  Mr. Pink and I didn’t make a big deal of this, but we, too, worried about it privately. For that reason, many of my leases were negotiated to expire on inauguration day, every fourth year, on the twenty-first of January—just in case the new presidential and gubernatorial administrations and state legislature were unfavorable to our business. We hypothesized that the previous autumn’s election would give us some hint if they intended to shut us down. If anti-marijuana candidates won the election, we would know by November. That would give us until January to conclude operations and then not renew our lease. This was the closest we ever came to an emergency exit plan, and one we needed uniquely for this type of business. It’s also one we’ve never needed to employ, thankfully.

  When we started going downtown to apply for a host of paperwork—from business licenses to building permits—we were met with quiet resistance ripped from the MLDS playbook. Some city and state employees were solidly in the grip of MLDS. “I know it’s the law,” was their attitude, “but I haven’t been told how to handle it and I am not going out of my way for people like you.” This was the first time in my life that I felt the sting of a negative stereotype. These employees assumed that I was a criminal who was trying to exploit a loophole in the law. Let me say for the record that there is no such loophole; the law was as unambiguous as possible. Marijuana was legal. But now I was being confronted with a form of prejudice. It wasn’t a typical example of prejudice, but it was prejudice just the same. It could only be met by my own quiet persistence and compassion.

  “I’m opening a medical marijuana business,” I’d say. “I have the legal paperwork to prove it. We just need a business license.”

  “There’s no such thing as a business license for medical marijuana.”

  Or . . .

  “I need a building permit for a medical marijuana growing facility,” I’d say.

  “Can’t help you,” the bureaucrat at the desk would say. “There’s no such thing as building code for a marijuana grow.”

  Well, duh. The law was so new, no one really knew what sort of specs such a building should have. But were they really going to sit there and tell me they couldn’t help me?

  Turns out, they were.

  Nothing irritates an entrepreneur as much as a pencil pusher who can’t be motivated to solve problems and think his or her way out of a situation.

  Surely they had heard that marijuana was legal in the state?

  Yep. They just hadn’t been told what to do about it. And they couldn’t be bothered to look into it. They had a break coming up in a few minutes.

  I was less irritated when I visited the state offices that were charged with regulating our new industry and enforcing the laws surrounding it. There, the folks wanted to be helpful but were underfunded and overwhelmed.

  Over at the Department of Health, the office in charge of processing all those medical marijuana red cards was hopelessly backlogged. All over the state, prescribing physicians were giving their patients a temporary card with the promise that their official red card would arrive from the state within thirty days. That office had been slammed with more than fifty thousand red card applications and had only one person to deal with it all.

  The new Medical Marijuana Enforcement Division (MMED), run as part of the Colorado Department of Revenue, hadn’t set up its new offices yet. It had yet to lease space, furnish the offices, and hire and train personnel. The division drew enforcement personnel from the ranks of the state police, who wore badges and carried weapons on their hips.

  When the MMED first opened, it rented space in a dog track that was about to be torn down. It used to be the home of live greyhound racing. That business had stopped operating some years ago. The dirt track and manicured infield had gone to seed. On the site, an off-track betting parlor, or OTB, continued to operate. It lured a strange assortment of weathered men who all seemed to smell of stale beer and cigarettes.

  The first of my many meetings with the MMED took place at the dog track, staring out at an unkempt field of tall grass. A few years later, when I’d take meetings with senior MMED officials who remembered the old dog-track days, we couldn’t help reminiscing about where it had all started and how much had happened to get us where we were today. That’s where I met Lewis Koski, who started as a staff-level investigator and now, at the time of this writing, is the director of the newly renamed Marijuana Enforcement Division for the Colorado Department of Revenue.

  In the end, of all the people we were dealing with, the cops would turn out to be the coolest and most level-headed. And I say that in spite of my run-in with that officer in the parking lot.

  I’m a law-abiding person. I wouldn’t be in this business if it wasn’t legal. So I tried to understand the position of everyone I was coming in contact with—cops, judges, bureaucrats—and tried to see the situation from their point of view.

  When you do that, you can’t help but empathize with their plight. Imagine if you have spent your entire career hearing only one message about marijuana. Imagine if you have busted thousands of people with this drug and heard nothing but excuses and professions of innocence. Imagine if you’ve witnessed firsthand what violent drug users and criminals have done to our cities.

  You’d be suspicious if the law suddenly said marijuana was okay.

  You’d feel as if the rug had been pulled out from under you.

  Maybe you’d even feel betrayed by politicians and the justice system that employed you.

  I empathized with them. I knew how hard the United States had worked to stem the growth of the drug trade. I had grown to adulthood in the age of First Lady Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No to Drugs campaign. I had seen police officers address classrooms following the precepts outlined by the D.A.R.E. America program, which was designed to empower kids to resist the lure of drug culture.

  But I was now far more educated about the history of marijuana than I had been as a teen, a young adult, or even the young father I had been just a short time ago. Because I was willing to look beyond my country’s pat pronouncements about marijuana, I believed that I actually had more information at my disposal than the authorities I was meeting.

  I was now more convinced than ever that our national policy on marijuana was the product of distortions, poor judgment, a
nd injustice.

  President Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974, but his hard-line legacy on marijuana has lived on and been expanded on by subsequent administrations. It’s an embarrassing, appalling record. Back in 1965, only 119,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana offenses. Today, that number averages more than 800,000 Americans annually. In all, we’ve arrested 22 million people since the Nixon era. Today, half of all arrests are marijuana related. Not all people end up prosecuted, of course, but sentences, when they are handed down, are disproportionately harder on minorities.

  Most arrests are for mere possession, and federal, state, and local governments often portray the resulting sentences as slaps on the wrist. But even if you’re not imprisoned, the penalties for marijuana use and possession are often life-changing and harsh. You’re fined. You end up in court. You are forced into drug rehab programs. You’re saddled with a criminal record for life. You can lose your license, your kids, your home, your job, and even your right to vote. If you step out of line, you can go to jail. In his research, the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser has found that in some U.S. states, the penalties for marijuana trafficking can be harsher than the penalties for murder.

  In the civil sector, the advent of drug testing has made it harder to evade punishment for occasional use. Because traces of marijuana remain in your system far longer than alcohol—as much as a month, in the case of heavy users—it’s easy to paint someone as a stoner with a random test. You could end up losing your job or losing your chance of being hired, while habitual alcoholics will come off as squeaky clean until someone notices alcohol on their breath.

  If we can be cynical for a second, the point I made earlier about certain industries thriving by having hemp out of the way is true for our justice system as well. As long as marijuana stays illegal, our jails stay full. Our courts stay busy and can more easily justify their expense to voters. When law-abiding people are manipulated by alarming drug arrest statistics, law enforcement agencies get funded and stay funded. Federal drug czars get to look like they’re accomplishing something. Tons of rehab centers get more bodies thrust through their front door.