Legal weed in CA: illegal grows, violence, worker exploitation and deaths
latimes.com
latimes.com
Their premise is that large, well-funded violent criminal organizations had previously stayed out of California because they were afraid of going to jail?
I knew some people that dealt with the weed side of cartel grows in California going back to the sixties, and those guys never gave a shit about jail.
If I had to guess, this has more to do with cartels employing fewer opium farmers since fentanyl supplanted a lot of the traditional heroin trade. The cartels don’t really let people retire, even farmers, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re just optimizing their workforce for maximum profit.
But sure, LA Times, it’s because of legalization. It’s only a coincidence that by blaming legalization they’re tacitly implying that it should be repealed! The return to prohibition and a massive increase in police power is what we need by happenstance! There is no agenda here!
Even if the ultimate cause of the problem turns out not to be legalization, the illegal grows are still the proximate issue, and need to be addressed.
I genuinely have my doubts that this narrative that some hippy liberals signed some bill to legalize weed and it directly led to an enormous increase in illegal activity is anything but synthetically derived from cherry picked data.
I agree that these grow operations are bad. They’ve been bad since the days of the advent of the Swanson TV dinner and The Twist being a nationwide dance craze.
I think this is the real issue here. Politicians legalized weed, not realizing how this would hurt farmers who used to able to grow it illegally.