Is California fighting a losing battle with cannabis enforcement?

Is California fighting a losing battle with its unlicensed marijuana market, more than six years after the state supposedly legalized cannabis?

It sure seems like it.

Just in the 2024 calendar year alone, state officials claim to have seized more than half a billion in illegal marijuana – $353 million by the state Department of Justice and another $191 million by a task force with the governor’s office, for a combined total of $544 million – but the Los Angeles Times concluded that such immense figures are barely scratching the surface.

Rather, the Times – quoting a number of career law enforcement officials from up and down the Golden State – reported that the illicit market is “as big and as bad as ever,” in the words of one Mendocino County Sheriff Matthew Kendall.

Enforcement attempts have not made any serious difference in the massive scale of illegal cannabis production in California, the Times found, in part due to systemic problems that are keeping the legal marijuana trade from piercing all corners of the state to truly replace the underground market.

Even repeated attempts at state-level reform – including a recent ban on “double taxation” of legal cannabis companies by municipal and county governments and a major state-level marijuana tax structure overhaul in 2022 – have not made a real difference, the Times found.

“Onerous taxation and regulations” for licensed marijuana companies is still a major factor in constraining the legal market, as well as more than half of cities and counties in California maintaining complete bans on all cannabis commerce. Though it doesn’t seem like there’s much reason for the state’s 15% marijuana excise tax, since the industry is behind by $730 million on tax bills and 72% of the companies that owe have gone under, according to a report by GreenWave Advisors cited by the Times.

It’s gotten to the point where even law enforcement officials are arguing that the state needs to make life easier for legal marijuana businesses, if for no other reason than to finally eliminate the illegal market once and for all. Combine financial incentives for legal operators with new criminal penalties for lawbreakers, sheriffs told the Times, and that could be a recipe for success.

“We have reached a time in the state of California where the architects of these laws – the governor, the legislators – they’re refusing to speak with the carpenters, and that’s the sheriffs and the police chiefs,” Kendall told the Times. “When we say this isn’t going to work, it’s falling on deaf ears.”

Maybe it’s time for a change in strategy. Maybe California policymakers should try fighting illegal cannabis with economic tools – lower taxes, lower barriers to entry for entrepreneurs, and lower prices for legal consumers – instead of the tried-and-failed tactics of the drug war era.