The New War on Weed

"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."

"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 result has been a strange new inversion: states with some of the loosest marijuana restrictions in the nation arresting and charging sellers of a drug that was made legal at least in part to move away from such charges. Since the beginning of last year, Connecticut has arrested dozens for selling pot out of illegal shops. From April to June 2025, California, supposedly a bastion of recreational cannabis, arrested 93 people for illegally selling, growing, and distributing weed,"

Connecticut legalized recreational marijuana in 2021 aiming to repair harms from the War on Drugs, and possession arrests have fallen since. Legal neighborhood dispensaries proliferated, but unlicensed illegal shops have grown alongside them, often indistinguishable from licensed sellers. Illegal shops avoid the required licensing and can appear lawful to customers beyond basic paperwork checks. Local law enforcement has struggled to crack down, prompting some states to expand policing powers targeting unlicensed sellers. The shift has produced a paradox: jurisdictions with permissive cannabis laws increasingly arrest and charge illegal sellers, including dozens arrested in Connecticut and many in California.

Read at The Atlantic