The outlaw’s Bordeaux, California cannabis has for decades fetched a premium price—and serious profit—for anyone with the chutzpah to smuggle pounds out-of-state. Marijuana legalization has not changed this.
Jars featuring the familiar packaging of the West Coast’s most-hyped brands line the shelves of high-end cannabis speakeasies in New York City. How did they get there? Same as it ever was—someone broke the law—but in the legalization era, there’s a twist.
Audacious rule-breakers are gaming California’s supposedly strict “track-and-trace” system and are diverting “untold millions of pounds” of legally grown cannabis to the illicit market across the country, a recent lawsuit alleges.
And state cannabis industry regulators, fully aware of the cannabis industry’s “worst kept secret,” aren’t bothering to do anything about it, “threatening the integrity” of the entire marijuana legalization experiment in the process, according to the suit.