Why are states with loose marijuana laws arresting people for selling the drug?
When Connecticut legalized recreational marijuana in 2021, the state’s lieutenant governor, Susan Bysiewicz, boasted that the new law was “crafted to repair the wounds left by the War on Drugs.” The move followed the same rationale that had motivated legalization in 18 other states: fewer resources exhausted on policing a drug that legalization advocates view as largely unharmful, fewer lives derailed by what they argue to be excessive lockups. In a sense, the plan worked: Possession arrests have fallen precipitously in the years since. But as Connecticut’s number of legal neighborhood weed shops has grown, so too has a problem that the state, like others that have eased marijuana laws, was seemingly ill-prepared to deal with: the rise of illegal marijuana shops.
Such shops are largely indistinguishable from state-sanctioned ones. They look the same and operate in the same neighborhoods, but they’ve never gone through the required licensing process to become a seller. (Beyond asking for paperwork, you’d be unlikely to know if you were shopping in an illegal store.) And they have become a headache for local law-enforcement agencies that want to crack down. “This is an epidemic within the state of Connecticut,” Ryan Evarts, a sergeant at the Norwalk Police Department, told me. The problem has become so pronounced that some states, including Connecticut, have recently passed laws giving law enforcement greater powers to police these shops.
Read the full article at The Atlantic
