At the beginning of the summer, I wrote a post entitled “California Gives Up on the Illegal Cannabis Market” in which I went into detail about the state’s failure to meaningfully address the festering illegal market. More recently, I wrote about “Another California Cannabis Enforcement Program That Won’t Work.” As the name suggests, this post was about yet another performative effort by the state to create an enforcement program that won’t be widely used and won’t work.
If you are interested in California’s massive illegal market and some thoughts I have on how to combat it, I suggest you read those posts. I don’t intend to do a full-on deep dive into those issues in this post. Instead, I want to highlight yet another example of how poorly the state is doing here.
Yesterday, October 5, 2023, the California Department of Cannabis Control (DCC) published an announcement with the header: “Unified Cannabis Enforcement Taskforce strategically disrupted illegal market by seizing over $101M worth of unlicensed cannabis products, seized 363% more firearms in Q3 2023”. And the first line of the announcement reads “Focusing on larger targets, the taskforce achieved similar results from previous quarter through serving 35 percent fewer search warrants.”
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