Earlier this week, California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta announced yet another cannabis enforcement program: the Cannabis Administrative Prosecutor Program (CAPP). CAPP is the newest of California’s ever-growing list of acronym enforcement programs, alongside EPIC (previously CAMP), UCETF, alongside countless other county and local agencies. Will the new enforcement program make a dent in the illegal market? If history tells us anything, the answer is no. And it’ll probably cost a whole lot to boot.
If you’re not familiar with how bad things are for California’s legal cannabis industry, I highly suggest you read my July 10, 2023 post “California Gives Up on the Illegal Cannabis Market.” Essentially, the illegal market may be 2-3x larger (or larger still) than the legal one. You would think that this would make enforcement easy, but you’d be wrong. In spite of all these fancily named enforcement programs, the state served a whopping 92 search warrants in Q2 2023, up from just 21 the quarter prior. That’s not a joke.
So now back to CAPP and why it probably won’t work. CAPP allows cities (Fresno will be the first) to use California’s Department of Justice (DOJ) essentially as backup in enforcement efforts. According to Bonta’s
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