Federal officials have been seizing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of marijuana from state-licensed cannabis businesses in New Mexico in recent weeks—detaining industry workers in what appears to be a localized escalation of national prohibition enforcement even as the federal government has largely refrained from interfering with the implementation of state legalization laws in recent years.
New Mexico marijuana businesses report that the more than dozen U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seizures, particularly at interior checkpoints around the Las Cruces area, are a relatively new phenomenon. Since adult-use marijuana sales launched in the state in 2022, the operators say they’ve generally been able to transport their products to testing facilities and retailers without incident.
Starting around two months ago, however, the agency has evidently taken a more proactive approach to enforcing federal prohibition, taking hundreds of pounds of cannabis at the checkpoints inside the state. CBP is able to carry out its activities within 100 miles of the U.S. border.
“There’s a lot of really successful important cannabis producers and cannabis manufacturers operating south of those checkpoints,” Ben Lewinger, executive director of the New Mexico Cannabis Chamber of Commerce, told Marijuana Moment. “Basically, every road that you could
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