If It Weeds, It Leads

With the 4/20 marijuana “holiday” upon us, it’s high season for hoary puns. Every April, news outlets big and small light up with the most dated and cringiest marijuana references imaginable in an attempt to capitalize on the buzz and bogart all the traffic. Take it from me. I’ve seen them all. I have been trying to cover cannabis seriously for a long time, and this cheesy ritual makes that task more difficult.

This essay was adapted from the Alta Weekly Newsletter, delivered every Thursday. To keep reading, become an Alta Journal member for as little as $3 a month.
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But this year feels different. Instead of the usual “blunt truths” and “high tensions” of the past, cannabis coverage in 2024 has taken on a more sinister and ominous vibe.

“Almost no one is happy with legal weed,” the Atlantic proclaimed on April 8. It’s a grabby headline, even if it contradicts the Pew Research Center’s February report that legalization has more broad public support than ever. But that polling doesn’t fit into the emerging narrative focusing on legalization’s dark side.

Last month, ProPublica published a big story claiming that the illegal marijuana trade is “dominated” by Chinese organized crime, with alleged direction coming straight from some of China’s government officials. Though Nixon-era federal marijuana restrictions could be loosened as soon as this year, after years of playful if vapid stories and some outright boosterism, newsrooms across the country appear to be obsessed with the negatives, be they scary (cartel violence), oversimplified (possible connections between weed and psychosis), or downright silly (cannabis smells bad).

The likely origin of this tonal shift is California, legal weed’s spiritual cradle and practical laboratory. Taxable sales dipped to $5.1 billion last year, down over $250 million from 2022. Cannabis businesses are going bust; many consumers (nobody knows exactly how many) still buy their weed from friends or strangers rather than from legal stores, where heavy taxes render the product significantly more expensive; federal legalization and legitimate interstate trade remain an elusive dream. And for almost two years now, readers of the Los Angeles Times have been hearing in exhaustive detail just how badly legal weed has failed to meet expectations.

That is the central premise of “Legal Weed, Broken Promises,” an 18-part (and counting!) series that launched in the fall of 2022. As its recent Scripps Howard Award for Excellence in Business Reporting citation noted, the paper deployed investigative reporters and photographers from the Mexican border to as far north as Oregon. Up and down the West Coast, they found that legalization “didn’t solve the major problems of the illegal marijuana trade as its proponents had once promised.”

The picture painted in the series is indeed bleak. Dozens of dead weed-farm workers (many victims of carbon monoxide poisoning). Corrupt politicians soliciting or accepting bribes for coveted business permits. (Coveted, at least, in the more than half of California communities that severely restrict or still ban commercial cannabis activity outright; in Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco, you can’t give a weed permit away.) And, as the reporters saw firsthand accompanying law enforcement on raids or via the surveillance power of satellite imagery, a state still awash in illicit cannabis.

You don’t need to cover weed for a living as I do to know that all of this is true and that none of it is good. You also don’t need to look very hard to find anyone in weed who will tell you that marijuana legalization’s fine print needs fine-tuning. Taxes are too high, regulations too onerous. This is a very difficult business to get right. (I reached out to a Times reporter for comment about the series; they were too busy to respond at length.)

Part of the reason is that the state tried to do too much all at once. Why have criminal justice reform when you can have a cash cow? “As I said at the time: we can eliminate the black market or raise money via taxes, but not both at the same time,” says W. David Ball, a Santa Clara University law professor who predicted the current state of affairs.

Ending prohibition is a significant cultural shift, but one of weed’s dirtiest secrets is that, buzzy headline puns aside, doing so can be extremely tedious. There’s tax policy…California’s decentralized government…excessive regulations…law enforcement reform, and…you’re bored already, I know. Policy stories rarely grab attention or win awards. Instead, the Times (and other news organizations) found ways to make the topic more exciting. But that also distorts the picture.

“It was sensationalist, it was alarmist, and it made it sound like the problem was cannabis, not the things around cannabis,” says Paul Gallegos, a former district attorney of Humboldt County, a region synonymous with weed cultivation.

“From my perspective,” he says, the Times “went into it with a certain amount of bias.”

I’d reached out to Gallegos and a handful of other interested observers to ask what they thought of the Times series. Some of them had been part of a “blue ribbon commission” convened by then–lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom, whose findings informed Proposition 64, the state’s 2016 legalization initiative. In a rare display of solidarity, of the former panel members I interviewed, they mostly all agreed: “Legal Weed, Broken Promises” told only a small and sensationalized part of the story.

“I think there’s a lot that’s good in there,” says University of Denver law professor Sam Kamin, who sat on the Newsom advisory panel. “I also think there’s a lot in there that’s problematic.”

Among the main problems: focusing on illegal operations (which by definition do not follow the law). Most (but not all) of the worker deaths, the Times wrote, happened at illegal farms. There’s also a missing broader context. Workers “dying for your high” is very bad, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, weed farming (based on available data) has a lower annual body count than construction (75 deaths in 2022 alone), truck transportation (57), and retail trade (39).

“Bribery is bad, worker abuses are bad, abusing undocumented people is bad,” says Robert Solomon, a professor of law at UC Irvine and cochair of UCI’s Center for the Study of Cannabis. “But it’s also not limited to cannabis. If you wanted to focus on the hotel industry, I bet you’d see a lot of people not getting paid as well.”

In other words, every industry has its bad actors and not-so-secret scandals, but news organizations don’t always throw precious resources behind an 18-part (and counting) series about them. Marijuana, though, is (to roll out one last bad weed pun) a sticky topic.

Even as its legalization marches on, its vilification may be with us forever. It’s just easy for reporters to rely on old narratives dressed up in new SEO terms. Mostly, it’s worth remembering that ending cannabis prohibition is an ongoing narrative, one that didn’t start with the first few state legalization laws and doesn’t end with a big party on 4/20.

“One thing I’ve been saying for a long time now—too long—is that we’re still in a transitional period,” Solomon says. “It’s not like when we made booze legal in 1933, by 1934, everything was hunky-dory. It’s still not hunky-dory. These things take time, and some of these things take figuring out.”•