Finalist: Staff of the Los Angeles Times

By Paige St. John

Photography by Brian Van Der Brug

At sunset from atop Haystack Butte, the desert floor below shimmers with a thousand lights.

Illegal cannabis farms.

At this hour and distance, serene hues cloak the rugged enclave of Mount Shasta Vista, a tense collective of seasonal camps guarded by guns and dogs where the daily runs of water trucks are interrupted by police raids, armed robberies and, sometimes, death. So many hoop houses pack this valley near the Oregon border that last year it had the capacity to supply half of California’s entire legal cannabis market.

Proposition 64, California’s 2016 landmark cannabis initiative, sold voters on the promise a legal market would cripple the drug’s outlaw trade, with its associated violence and environmental wreckage.

Instead, a Los Angeles Times investigation finds, the law triggered a surge in illegal cannabis on a scale California has never before witnessed.

Rogue cultivation centers like Mount Shasta Vista now engulf rural communities scattered across the state, as far afield as the Mojave Desert, the steep mountains on the North Coast, and the high desert and timberlands of the Sierra Nevada.

Residents in these places describe living in fear next to heavily armed camps. Criminal enterprises operate with near impunity, leasing private land and rapidly building out complexes of as many as 100 greenhouses. Police are overwhelmed, able to raid only a fraction of the farms, and even those are often back in business in days.

The raids rip out plants and snare low-wage laborers while those responsible, some operating with money from overseas, remain untouched by the law, hidden behind straw buyers and fake names on leases.

Labor exploitation is common, and conditions are sometimes lethal. The Times documented more than a dozen deaths of growers and workers poisoned by carbon monoxide.

The scale of the crisis is immense. A Times analysis of satellite imagery covering thousands of square miles of the state showed dramatic expansion in cannabis cultivation where land is cheap and law enforcement spread thin, regardless of whether those communities permitted commercial cultivation.

The boom accompanied a switch in cultivation technique, from annual harvests of outdoor plots to large, canopy-covered hoop houses that permit three to five harvests a year.

The explosive growth has had grave, far-reaching consequences, according to a Times review of state, county and court records as well as interviews with scores of local residents, legal and illegal cannabis growers, laborers, law enforcement, market analysts, community activists and public officials:

• Outlaw grows have exacerbated cannabis-related violence, bringing shootouts, robberies, kidnappings and, occasionally, killings. Some surrounded residents say they are afraid to venture onto their own properties.

• Laborers often toil in squalid, dangerous conditions and frequently are cheated of wages. In four counties alone since legalization, carbon monoxide from generators and charcoal braziers has killed seven workers as they labored or tried to stay warm in sealed greenhouses on illegal farms, and eight more inside uninhabitable buildings, coroner records show.

• Intense cultivation is causing unmeasured environmental damage. Millions of gallons of water are being diverted at a time of severe drought, pulled out of aquifers even as the wells of local homeowners go dry. Unchecked chemical fertilizers have been deployed, along with banned, lethal pesticides.

• The immense scale of illegal cultivation fed a glut that crashed wholesale prices last year, jeopardizing even those in the licensed market. Small-scale legal farmers unable to sell their crop have been pushed toward financial ruin.

The pitch for Proposition 64 focused on grand benefits: an end to drug possession laws that penalized the poor and people of color, and the creation of a commercial market that in 2021 generated $5.3 billion in taxed sales.

But California failed to address the reality that decriminalizing a vast and highly profitable illegal industry would open the door to a global pool of organized criminals and opportunists.

For those sidestepping taxes and regulation, the reduced criminal penalties included in Proposition 64 lowered the cost and risk of doing business.

Although no hard data exist on the size of the illegal market, it is indisputably many times larger than the licensed community. The Times’ analysis of satellite images shows that unlicensed operations in many of California’s biggest cultivation areas, such as parts of Trinity and Mendocino counties, outnumbered licensed farms by as much as 10 to 1.

Butte County, at the northern end of the state’s Central Valley, tried to ban commercial cultivation, but the area covered by cannabis greenhouses in Berry Creek soared 700% in five years. Ravaged by wildfire, it is not rebuilt homes but the shiny plastic of greenhouses that gleams between the charred black skeletons of the forest.

Neither a ban nor lack of water dissuaded outlaw growers from erecting hoop houses on the desert sands of Lucerne Valley, where the state mapped 13 cannabis plots before legalization and The Times last year found 935 greenhouses. A still-running campaign by the San Bernardino County sheriff in 12 months razed more than 8,200 greenhouses without running out of targets.

California has done little to address the crisis.

Enforcement efforts against the illicit market are spread across a variety of state agencies with insufficient resources and very different priorities. Seven years after water regulators set out to map and measure the impact of cannabis cultivation in California, the work remains unfinished.

Under Gov. Gavin Newsom, a champion of legalization, California has subscribed to an industry-backed theory that market forces will eventually squeeze out illegal growers. When licensed growers this year complained they could not compete, Newsom agreed to tax breaks and his administration created incentives to expand the market by giving grants to communities that allow commercial cannabis.

At the same time, he increased the penalties against those that don’t. Communities that prohibit commercial cannabis are already barred from key state enforcement grants. A measure written into Newsom’s budget bill also blocks them from the closed-door meetings of a task force set up to advise the governor’s administration on cannabis policy, including what to do about the illegal market.

Illegal cannabis’ thorniest challenges fall on overwhelmed local law enforcement agencies and code enforcement departments, ill-equipped to contend with criminal networks behind the growth.

The rugged forests and valleys of Mendocino County, deep in the heart of California’s famed Emerald Triangle, renowned for the quality and quantity of its weed production, have an estimated 5,000 illegal cannabis farms. The grows range from homestead farms to dangerous drug-trade operations, such as one where deputies this spring found an AK-47 modified for full-automatic fire.

The sheriff’s cannabis enforcement team consists of a single sergeant and a part-time deputy. They try to identify the worst offenders, borrow officers from neighboring counties for raids and ignore the rest.

“It’s like taking on a gargantuan army with a pocket knife,” said Sheriff Matt Kendall.

Noel Manners’ licensed farm had a problem — too much cannabis.

Regulators in 2020 sent satellite images that showed large hoop houses on his Mendocino County property that were not permitted under his state cultivation license.

But Manners knew the offending weed wasn’t his.

A large illegal grow had crept onto his 800-acre timber tract. Manners waited for winter, when he knew the operation would be dormant, and hiked up the hillside. He found trees felled for a half-acre clearing, three giant plastic-covered hoop houses, and — especially repugnant because the longtime grower was a leader in organic cannabis farming — chemical fertilizers spilled on the ground.

Manners shoved the outlaw operation back across his fence line with his mini-dozer. It returned the next spring — with unwelcome signs of activity.

Soap suds frothed in his mountain pond. Gunfire echoed at night. Walking his land one rainy day, Manners smelled something foul.

“I saw these little white, almost like, flowers on the ground,” he said.

He was standing in a field of toilet paper.

Manners, 63, was a pioneer in cannabis, a former bicycle shop owner with a laid-back smile and the habit of hanging his eyeglasses on the collars of his Grateful Dead T-shirts. He left the Sacramento Valley three decades ago to move his family to this remote mountain overlooking Round Valley.

He joined the generations of growers who dodged the law while building an economic and social fabric that filled the void left by the collapse of the timbering industry.

When California led the nation by legalizing medical marijuana in 1996, he and other farmers became part of a gray market — one that fostered sham medical recommendations and farms of 99 plants, one less than the federal threshold for a mandatory five-year prison term. Absent state regulation, permitting took the form of zip ties sold by the sheriff to identify legal plants and protect them from raids.

Manners successfully navigated every shift in California’s unstable cannabis landscape. He developed strains that would help form the foundation for today’s industrial growers. High Times, the counterculture magazine dedicated to weed, heralded his off-the-grid operation, Camp Cool, as one of the nation’s premier sun-grown cannabis farms.

The interlopers on his mountain made Manners uncomfortable. He would not go near the grow if it was occupied. But he could not avoid them.

Manners met growers cutting through the woods, one carrying an assault rifle. Another had a bandanna over half his face.

“I pointed at them and said, ‘This is my land. I’m the one who put up the “No Trespassing” signs and whatnot last year.’ And then I asked them, ‘So how long, when are you guys going to be finished and be off of my land?’

“And they said, ‘Oh, 10 weeks...’

“And I said, ‘Good enough.’ That was my cue to leave.”

In July 2021, Mendocino County sheriff’s deputies finally raided the operation.

Manners returned to the site this winter, and discovered the operation still standing. Three enormous hoop houses stood ready, each the length of two houses. Three giant Doughboy swimming pools were set up for mixing chemical-laden water for “fertigation.”

“They’re getting ready for another expansion,” Manners said as he documented the grow with his phone, his gray ponytail reflected in the glass of the abandoned truck. He pointed out an overturned truck camper top, and enclosures made from black plastic hung from the trees — makeshift toilets.

Manners died unexpectedly in early April, falling and cracking his head after the main artery from his heart suddenly tore. His brain swelled and he did not regain consciousness after emergency surgery. Afterward, his son noticed something uncharacteristic on his father’s nightstand: a .44 magnum pistol.

A coiled belt of ammunition sat on the shelf below.

In the run-up to California’s 2016 watershed cannabis vote, Mouying Lee positioned himself at the forefront of a wave.

He moved from Fresno to Siskiyou County’s high desert to snap up scores of cheap lots in a failed vacation resort called Mount Shasta Vista, little more than a spiderweb of cinder paths bulldozed between lava rock and juniper scrub.

Then Lee sold most of the dusty, empty plots to Hmong like himself. Hundreds moved from across the United States to the area populated mostly by white hay farmers and cattle ranchers.

The would-be entrepreneur described his vision of a cultural center for his people, Laotian refugees persecuted for siding with the U.S. during the Vietnam War.

But in the dry volcanic valley, punished by sun and desiccating wind, the newcomers built virtually no homes. They slept in sheds, or beneath tarps, and tended 99-plant gardens of cannabis, one leafy stalk short of the federal cutoff for prison. When the snow arrived, they and the harvest disappeared.

Similar cannabis-centric enclaves emerged across Northern California, often named after Laotian mountains or battlefields. They were controversial in the Hmong community, but even critics said the farms provided a steady flow of cash to a struggling population of immigrants.

Lee said most of the cannabis in Mount Shasta Vista was grown for personal use and “the old way of medicine,” such as brewing cannabis tea and putting it in the shower for steam baths. He voiced dismay that Siskiyou County’s more established residents accused the Hmong arrivals of organized crime.

Law enforcement frequently intercepted shipments of hundred-pound parcels of cannabis sent from the Mount Shasta Vista farms. The sheriff’s posse mounted dawn raids and the county Board of Supervisors passed ordinances that not only banned commercial cannabis but the water deliveries that kept the grows green.

Lee said it was a cultural misunderstanding, if not overt racism.

Court filings show Lee was central to a highly organized cannabis operation. Investigators raiding his houses found water delivery schedules and receipts for dues for a 534-member association. The files tracked members’ medical marijuana cards and voting records as well as search warrants executed by the sheriff. An investigator alleged the organization even insured members against losses from raids. In texts admitted into the court record, Lee brokered cannabis sales by the hundreds of pounds to buyers flying in from afar.

With the opening of the recreational cannabis market, Lee expanded beyond his Hmong clientele. He bought large parcels outside Mount Shasta Vista, bulldozing one 620-acre tract so barren the scar is visible from space. Dubbed the “Cinder Pit” by police, it contained 82 plots, each with two greenhouses and a shed. Tenants arrested during drug raids told police they had leased their plots for $10,000 a season.

It was not the sheriff but a tax agent who stopped Lee’s expansion.

In 2020, with help from the California Franchise Tax Board, county authorities charged Lee with money laundering and tax fraud, accusing him of hiding some $1.5 million in unreported earnings. Lee pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors asked a judge to set his bail at $3 million, but Lee was released on his own recognizance.

Even with Lee sidelined, the expansion of cannabis farms in Mount Shasta Vista continued, attracting other groups who spilled out across the valley of Juniper Flat.

Single-family plots gave way to multi-season greenhouses. Some built industrial-scale complexes that made the small Hmong camps look timid.

“I never thought it was going to be like that,” Lee said this spring as he paced the upper balcony at the courthouse, waiting for his Beverly Hills lawyer to fly in for settlement talks with the county prosecutor.

At night the cannabis camps glow like a small city. The Times mapped more than 1,300 farms in Juniper Flat last year. Their greenhouses covered more than 10 million square feet, a 4,200% increase since 2018.

It is the densest known concentration of illegal cannabis cultivation in California.

Once the dominion of ranchers and retirees, the valley has taken on outlaw qualities. Lookouts are posted at entrances off the highway. Armed robberies are frequent. In 2018, deputies seized seven guns during raids on illegal farms. Last year, they found 66. This spring, police were summoned to one farm to fetch two intruders left tied to a fence post.

Last month, four men who appeared to be in their 30s surrounded a Times photographer parked along the public highway outside Mount Shasta Vista, where he had stopped to document water trucks in the distance filling up at a hay farmer’s well. One of the men took out a tire iron and began hitting the photographer’s car, denting the body and smashing the rear windshield and a sideview mirror.

Another told him: “The only reason you don’t have a bullet in your head right now is because you are talking to me.”

Two years ago, masked assailants attacked a Mount Shasta Vista grower and his companions, tied them up and killed the grower. Police suspect it was an execution. It remains unsolved.

Also that summer, three men from Southern California carrying AR-15-style assault rifles tried to rob growers. In the ensuing shootout, one of the men was killed and his wounded accomplices fled on foot through the rocky cannabis farms, calling 911 to beckon police to their rescue. That killing also remains unsolved.

So do the killings of two Hmong women from Milwaukee in 2019. They were shot on a cannabis farm near the Oregon state line, where another enclave has settled, rarely visited by police.

Since 2016, at least eight cannabis growers in Siskiyou County have died of carbon monoxide poisoning as they tried to keep warm with charcoal braziers and unventilated generators, according to coroner records obtained by The Times. The body of a ninth carbon monoxide victim was found last year dumped on the side of Interstate 5, wrapped in his sleeping bag. Police have no clue where he died, but they presume it was a cannabis operation. Six of the dead were Hmong.

Det. Sgt. Cory Persing commands the county drug enforcement unit, wrestling not just with cannabis but fentanyl, meth and everything else. The five-person unit is down to two, Persing and another sergeant, so they must call for volunteers from the jail to staff raids.

Because of the Proposition 64 prohibition barring counties that do not permit commercial growing from state enforcement grants, they rely on funding from the federal Drug Enforcement Agency.

The ballot measure also dramatically lowered the cost of business for illegal operators, reducing the criminal penalty for unlicensed cultivation from a felony punishable with time behind bars to a $500 misdemeanor no matter how large the crop. To bring a felony case that might shut down an operation, state prosecutors must find other charges. That requires investigators.

Persing has none.

He is caught in an endless cycle of writing search warrants and ripping out plants. Nine out of 10 grows go untouched. He has returned to raided farms three days later to find them back in operation.

On a sunny day in October, Persing’s team hit four small growing camps. Alerted by the lookouts, the growers had fled by the time the convoy arrived. Only a penned dog was left, snarling and snapping, a pile of dry food on the ground kicked through the bars as though even its owners were afraid to get close.

Officers used a mini-dozer to raze cannabis beneath a hoop house built out of PVC pipe, while Persing peered inside one of the plywood sheds used for habitation. He laid the search warrant and a receipt for 157 pounds of seized cannabis on a mattress set on two-by-fours, beside an empty rifle case.

An outdated watering schedule hung on the unfinished wall. The shed held personal financial papers for at least four people, and an offer to buy 70 acres in eastern Oklahoma where there is a cannabis land rush. A garbage pail and a plastic bucket in a makeshift stall suggested a shower. A single-burner camp stove suggested cooking, but there was no food.

Persing stood on the ridge road, sunglasses perched atop his close-cropped head, and pointed out Mount Shasta Vista.

Then he used his arm to trace the expansion since 2019. In the valley below, the white forms of hoop houses stretched for miles.

“This is all of the new stuff,” Persing said, sweeping his arm east across the valley. “I mean, like, prior to this, there was one house up in here. It has just grown, swoosh, all the way around.”

Some cannabis camps empty their pit toilets onto the ground and trash into other holes. When the wind blows, empty fertilizer bags wrap themselves around fences like tumbleweeds. Growers have bulldozed parcels flat, scraping away vegetation, and the land is cut by deep erosion scars littered with empty water totes and growing piles of detritus. With the market collapse, some of the hoop houses are abandoned, and dogs that once guarded the farms now run in packs that sometimes attack cattle, and are frequently found dead or starving.

“All of that’s illegal. Nobody seems to care,” said Persing, exasperation wearing on his voice.

Beyond Highway Patrol and wildlife officers who sometimes lend a hand with physical labor, Persing said, “we don’t get much help from any state agency.”

Struggling licensed cannabis growers like Mary Gaterud also feel abandoned.

She is part of the cultural movement that was at the core of California’s early cannabis industry.

Gaterud earned a master’s degree in existential phenomenal psychology, took a look at her job prospects in the late 1990s, and thought, “Yeah, I think I’m just going to drop out and grow weed.” She set up a small outdoor cannabis farm in Humboldt County on the banks of the Eel River.

Her plants are organically nurtured in microbe-rich soil and mulched with a winter cover of fava beans. She spent years developing sweet-scented stocks, grown herself from seed, so that when she pops opens a harvest tub in her state-inspected processing facility, a converted root cellar, the smell is heavy with pineapple and coconut.

Her harvest fell victim to a glut in cannabis that drove down wholesale prices. A pound of dried flower, which just a few years earlier would sell in California for more than $2,000, was now worth less than $300. If it sold at all.

Late last year, as Gaterud cut the summer’s harvest, her distributor in Los Angeles shipped back her 2020 crop, unsold and so damaged by poor storage Gaterud wasn’t even sure it was hers.

There was nothing else to do with the premium plants but ship them to an extractor to be mulched and reduced to generic oil.

Gaterud and many other small farmers now face financial disaster.

“I’m barely hanging on,” she said.

The glut was driven by two factors: the surge in illegal growing and the state’s issuance of licenses to grow more cannabis than Californians consume.

Nicole Elliott, the governor’s cannabis advisor and the head of the Department of Cannabis Control, said she believed California’s licensed cannabis crop was about 3.6 million pounds, in a state that consumed less than 2 million pounds.

The Times’ analysis of state licensing records and production estimates put the state’s 2021 legal crop at well more than 7 million pounds, even accounting for crop failures and growers who did not plant.

Asked about The Times’ findings of increased illegal cultivation, Elliott said: “Do I think it’s worse? I honestly couldn’t say one way or another.”

Elliott said ensuring the integrity of the legal market is her first focus “before we expand those efforts out to the illegal market.” Other state agencies, she said, are better equipped to contend with illicit grows.

Still, she said, “it’s not like we’re sitting on our hands doing nothing.”

In July, the department issued a news release heralding the removal of illicit cannabis from the market, but detailed warrant logs obtained by The Times under California’s public records law show most of those seizures were led by other police agencies. In the year since July 2021, the department’s 59 sworn officers have initiated only 26 of their own warrants against illicit growers.

The department’s enforcement chief told The Times he was unable to provide a list of criminal cases that resulted from those efforts.

The logs show most of the division’s focus is on urban areas and Southern California. In that same time frame, the Department of Cannabis Control enforcement actions in Mendocino County — beset with violent, large-scale criminal operations — were limited to a single day of raids on four small farms along a creek, at the behest of wildlife officers. There were no arrests.

The remainder of state enforcement is fractured and limited in focus. National Guard teams still conduct summer raids that slash plants, but they remove less than a quarter of the crop of eradication campaigns a decade earlier. The state water resources boards were front-runners in approaching illicit cannabis as an environmental threat, but when fees from cannabis permits fell short of budgeted projections, the boards in 2020 cut their cannabis enforcement departments by half.

The biggest state player in combating illicit cannabis is the Department of Fish and Wildlife, which focuses on the impact growers have on streams and fauna.

Cannabis growing that endangers either remains a felony. But the 68 Fish and Wildlife cannabis field officers who have the expertise to document those crimes are spread thin. Nine agents cover the seven-county area responsible for an estimated 40% of illegal cultivation.

State regulators have had authority since 2019 to fine unlicensed growers up to $30,000 a day, and to seek civil penalties that can exceed $300,000 a day.

Although the state has sanctioned licensed growers for violating regulations, The Times found the state attorney general has never invoked civil penalties for unlicensed cultivation. The Department of Cannabis Control used the tool once — against a Shasta County school janitor and his wife accused of leasing their land for nine illegal greenhouses.

Elliott could not explain why the case was filed at all. She said it was a departure from what she believed department priorities should be.

Other states experiencing rampant outlaw activity have taken more aggressive measures. In Oregon, the problem prompted a special session of the Legislature to step up police raids and services for exploited workers. Oklahoma’s attorney general is investigating law firms accused of helping growers skirt residency requirements.

Gaterud, on her farm deep in the mountains of Humboldt County, said she feels betrayed by California and angry that she suffers while those flouting the law go unstopped.

Regulators, she said, repeatedly demanded detailed drawings of her farm’s plans and conducted nine separate inspections. She estimates she spent $100,000 on fees and improvements to her property to meet local and state requirements.

As the winter rains set in, she began borrowing money from friends and relatives to live on. She got a part-time online job as coordinator of an astrology school to make ends meet.

Her 2021 crop came back from the distributor, also unsold.

“I’m afraid that I am one bad piece of news away from having to list my property,” she said, “and abandon my dream, life, everything I have fought for.”

In the summer of 2020, Julian “Terps” Sanchez left his Orange County apartment for long buying trips in Northern California to scour illegal farms for 100-pound boxes of processed cannabis buds.

At home, his father, a former meth distributor named Miguel Sarabia, used a strip mall cellphone and satellite dish franchise in Lakewood to build a clandestine lab to make distilled oil for edibles and vaping cartridges imported from Hong Kong.

The father and son represented the connection that enables illicit growers like those in Mount Shasta Vista to reach a national market.

Sanchez supplied a Milwaukee operation some 250 pounds of cannabis a month, and his father provided thousands of vape cartridges, according to plea statements and other court filings. In just six months, the California wholesalers were paid an estimated $1.7 million, much of it sent through the mail with bills painstakingly taped between the pages of magazines. It was a low-risk drug that commanded high street prices, especially sold as vape cartridges, Sarabia’s defense lawyer said, making cannabis more attractive and more lucrative than cocaine or heroin.

On the Milwaukee side, affidavits and plea statements filed in federal court detail stash houses, business fronts and large weapons caches that included untraceable “ghost guns.” The arsenal of one woman, who gathered family members in a basement to assemble vape cartridges, included a baby blue Glock on her dresser and another Glock in a baby bassinet. The ring’s local leader was a Mexican Posse gang member who, an informant told investigators, twice boasted of shooting a “snitch.”

Sarabia had his eyes on the expanding world of legal cannabis. Should Wisconsin approve recreational cannabis, he claimed on a 2020 wiretapped call, influential political connections guaranteed Sarabia a wholesale license. He had already bought the building.

“I’ll be the first one,” he boasted.

Federal and state investigators in Wisconsin shut down the trade in late 2020, charging 26 defendants. Sanchez pleaded guilty to drug and gun charges for a 10-year sentence. Sarabia admitted to a single drug conspiracy charge and was given five years in prison. None of the farms supplying the drug ring were identified.

Few ever are.

Police and prosecutors told The Times that cannabis-related crimes are a low priority, even in the federal court system, where cannabis is classified the same as heroin and LSD. They described unwritten hurdles their investigations must clear — such as proof of laundering millions of dollars — before superiors will approve money and time to prosecute. In the rare instances when charges are filed, they generally don’t target the people who head or fund the operations.

Federal justice officials in 2018 heralded investigators who used utility bills and tracking devices to identify some 130 indoor grow houses in Sacramento run by a network of buyers who wired money from China. Nearly half of the 21 people charged were Chinese citizens.

Five years after the first arrests, most of those charged have yet to go to trial. The operation’s leaders weren’t identified. A federal official connected with the case, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Chinese authorities won’t cooperate on such investigations and U.S. Justice Department supervisors in Washington, D.C., did not give the green light to continue digging.

The best hope, he said, was to seize local assets and “disrupt the finances ... and put pressure on whoever is organizing this stuff.”

Nearly half of the money for the grow houses came from local private investors who made high-interest loans to buyers with few obvious financial resources. Court records show the lenders included a Sacramento physician who told the court he hated cannabis, but was unwittingly steered into underwriting illegal grow houses by a real estate agent now charged in the conspiracy. And, he said, it was very profitable.

Federal prosecutors allowed him, as they do with other such lenders, to recoup his money when the property sold, even though a forfeiture motion remained pending.

In one of the few federal cases that resulted in a conviction for illegal cultivation, probation officials recommended four years in prison for Aaron Li.

Li, who has a PhD in vision science from UC Berkeley, used money from unindicted conspirators in China to turn nine suburban homes in San Bernardino County into clandestine grow houses. Court records laid out the mechanics of a sophisticated scheme that ran until 2019, involving stolen electricity, straw buyers, fake leases, purloined passport information and money moved from China to shell companies in the U.S. One of the participants was a confessed money-laundering courier for a Mexican narcotics ring.

Li’s defense lawyer told a judge that his client was acting under orders from unnamed bosses he feared, a claim she repeated to The Times.

U.S. District Judge George Wu initially announced an eight-month sentence. After Li said that he had young children, the judge reduced it to six months.

“Marijuana is being cultivated legally — it’s just a question of getting the licenses,” Wu said during sentencing. “There’s so much of it. So why would I impose a lengthy sentence?”

A federal prosecutor in the case said there was no interest in investigating beyond Li, saying the case had met its primary goal, shutting down a community nuisance.

State Assemblyman Thurston “Smitty” Smith (R-Apple Valley) this winter proposed restoring felony charges for large-scale growers, but with no co-signers he yanked the doomed bill before its first hearing. His substitute measure to increase civil fines passed the Assembly but failed to progress in the Senate.

A growers’ group, the California Cannabis Equity Alliance, called the proposed increase in fines “a symbolic deterrent that will be good for a press release and little else.”

“The potential profits to be made are too great.”

In the bowl of a beautiful and tragic valley bordered by the Eel River in Mendocino County sits tiny Covelo.

It was the site of California’s largest state-financed massacre — a campaign that in 1856-59 slaughtered more than 1,000 Yuki tribal members — and the destination for the U.S. military’s forced march of five more tribes. Remote and at times unreachable, the community has struggled since the downturn of the timber industry and closure of the local flour mill.

But Covelo had cannabis.

Small outdoor cash crops were common on Round Valley’s patchwork of private, federal and reservation lands. Mendocino County and the tribes were tolerant, even if the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs did not approve.

After legalization, outsiders rolled into the town in expensive, lifted trucks with Central Valley license plates, moving as a group. They began leasing land from tribal members.

By the summer of 2021, the town was overtaken. A Times analysis of satellite images showed the valley floor that summer had 1,033 homes and 2,423 cannabis hoop houses, almost one for every resident.

More than half are unlicensed. Hoop houses not only fill farm lots, but backyards and front yards. They stand by the schools, behind the auto parts store, beside the Catholic chapel.

“We have been totally overrun,” Round Valley Indian Tribes director James Russ said at a county advisory committee meeting last year. “Not just this reservation, but also this whole valley.”

With the surge in illegal cultivation came heavy-duty weapons, violence and lethal chemicals. On one 2021 raid, deputies found bottles of Metrifos, with “peligroso” — dangerous — and a skull and crossbones on the label. The nerve poison, taken off the U.S. market in 2009, is still sold in Mexico to protect crops from rodents. The sheriff said one deputy became ill after the raid and was hospitalized with poisoning symptoms.

Working conditions on the farms are harsh. Laborers described 14-hour days, living in tents without sanitation and having to provide their own food with the promise of pay after the harvest, if it came at all. Wage theft is so common laborers circulate lists of “no pay” farms.

In 2019, 40-year-old Jose Ramon Mejia Rios, a local man, died inside the cannabis greenhouse he was tending. The county coroner determined carbon monoxide killed him. A young woman living on the property told The Times that Rios was part of a crew of growers who leased space for their illegal greenhouses from her aunt. They pulled out after the death, she said, and others took over.

The next year, two more workers died less than a mile apart, under similar conditions, coroner records show.

Osnin Noe Quintanilla-Melendez, 32, from Honduras died sleeping in a cannabis hoop house with a running generator.

Across from the local landfill, on a site with 52 illegal greenhouses, Wilson Andres Rodriguez Villalobos, a 32-year-old worker from Colombia, was found face-down inside an illegal greenhouse warmed by propane torches.

Months later, on the same farm, another worker disappeared. Victor Medina’s family in San Jose received a ransom call from kidnappers unable to prove the missing man was still alive.

“Cuidado con Covelo,” one person wrote on a WhatsApp forum for cannabis workers, “que esta muy turbio.”

Watch out for Covelo. It’s very shady.

“Aparecen muertos a cada rato.”

Dead people appear all the time.

In the late fall, a game warden investigating the smell from an abandoned car outside Covelo opened the trunk to find the decomposed corpse of Marco Antonio Barrera Beltran, 51, a Mexican citizen who’d been living in the Central Valley. The sheriff said he had been working on an illegal cannabis farm in Covelo. Beltran had been shot to death.

The murder investigation included a search of a bank of cannabis farms where another worker died of carbon monoxide poisoning the year before. But the case remains unsolved.

Covelo residents who spoke to The Times asked that their names not be used because they were fearful of the growers around them.

One woman’s water well now runs dry each May, the shallow aquifer tapped by massive greenhouses that surround her house on three sides. She has gone to extremes: let the garden die, collect drips from the faucets, clean dishes with a spray bottle, and rely on a garden hose from the neighbors and a storage tank to get through the summer. The growers next door haul in water by the truckload. Their generators run constantly, workers defecate in her yard, and she must block her windows at night with cardboard to cut the glare from greenhouses.

Other residents described finding a cannabis worker, unpaid and stranded in the hills, weeping and afraid his employer would return to kill him. During a recent raid of an illegal farm, sheriff’s deputies encountered two workers from Mexico who said they had been held there against their will.

“Right now, from the decimation I see in my valley, it ... breaks my heart,” said Kat Willits, a local school administrator and former council member of the Round Valley Indian Tribes.

Willits spent her childhood in Covelo visiting family, roaming the valley, swimming in the creek beside spawning salmon. She was appalled to return as an adult and find so many community members dependent on leasing to illegal growers.

“Some people say that’s the only way they can make money now,” said Willits. “[But] they’re not making money... they’re also decimating their own land with the byproducts of cannabis grows.”

She said cannabis cash has hastened Covelo’s social decay, not uplifted it. There are more junked cars, more decaying homes, and more violence.

“Great tradeoff,” she said, with apparent sarcasm, “for some California college kids to be able to puff on a pen filled with a cannabis product in public.

“What people think of as a harmless drug or medicinal product have not seen what lies in the belly of the beast.”

Credits

Reporter: Paige St. John
Editor: Jack Leonard
Photography: Brian van der Brug
Photo Editing: Keith Bedford
Data & Graphics: Thomas Suh Lauder
Copy Editing: Jim Buzinski
Page Design: Keith Bedford
Audience Engagement: Javier Panzar

By Paige St. John, Marisa Gerber

Photography by Brian Van Der Brug

Sareth Sin, 67, died upright, seated in a plastic chair, on Christmas Day. He was asphyxiated by fumes from the generator he ran to chase the desert chill out of a cannabis greenhouse on the eastern edge of Los Angeles County.

Leuane Chounlabout, 79, was found lifeless, lying on his back surrounded by a tangle of electrical cords connecting heat lamps to a greenhouse generator outside Palmdale. He had arrived two days earlier to help harvest.

Miguel and Rufino Garcia Rivera, 28 and 36, collapsed on the floor of a desert greenhouse not far away that reeked of diesel and pesticide fumes. The brothers, recent arrivals from Mexico, died of carbon monoxide poisoning near the small cannabis plants they had been hired to cultivate.

For millions of consumers, the legalization of cannabis has brought a multibillion dollar industry out of the shadows and into brightly lit neighborhood dispensaries.

But California, birthplace of both the farm labor movement and counterculture pot, has largely ignored the immigrant workers who grow, harvest and trim America’s weed. Their exploitation and misery is one of the most defining, yet overlooked narratives of the era of legal cannabis.

From the forests of Oregon to the deserts of California, a Los Angeles Times investigation found, cannabis workers are subjected to abuse, wage theft, threats of violence and squalid and hazardous conditions. They are disregarded even in death.

At least 35 workers died on cannabis farms in a five-year span through 2021. Twenty died in carbon monoxide poisonings, according to coroner records. Their deaths were tied to substandard living conditions and a shift to growing in greenhouses to increase profits. Only one led to a workplace safety investigation.

Workers described living outdoors, without sanitation or sufficient food, and told of employers who directed them to charity food banks or ran them off at gunpoint without pay. While accompanying police on raids, Times journalists saw hazardous pesticides frequently in use, including at a San Bernardino County farm where a young couple slept in a shed next to a greenhouse that reeked of metamidofos, a deadly nerve agent no longer sold in the United States but still available in Mexico. The young woman said she was pregnant.

By searching private forums and official complaints, The Times counted wage theft claims against more than 200 farms, half of them licensed. The workers who turned to the state for help collecting pay faced wait times of more than a year if they did not settle or abandon the claim first.

Even when farms were inspected, regulators focused on water runoff and the noise level of generators, not on laborers who were unpaid and slept in tents and barns.

“We’re disposable,” said a man who worked at a licensed operation in Northern California where dozens of workers were unpaid for two years.

For years, the sheriff’s deputies who raided illegal grows regarded cannabis workers as criminal suspects, chasing them down, handcuffing them and sometimes hauling them to jail for mug shots.

But on a November raid three years ago, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea had a shift in perspective.

A Western sheriff still fighting the war on drugs, Honea watched as 15 people tried to flee when deputies stormed a cannabis farm in Berry Creek. Three turned out to be bosses, who had assault weapons and body armor on the property. The 12 workers, all from Mexico, were without cellphones or passports. Honea said investigators learned the travel documents were stashed at a different location, suggesting the workers were being held captive for their labor.

“Under no circumstances,” Honea said, “would any worker in any other industry, or for that matter in legitimate agriculture, be required to live in the conditions that these people are required to live in.”

Few crops are as labor-intensive as cannabis.

From the nursing of young clones to the trimming of dried flower buds for market, every step requires human hands. On most farms, it is hard labor. Workers physically lug heavy bags of soil and fertilizer, and in some places, must carry buckets of water to plants on steep slopes.

California’s historical cannabis farms relied on local networks of friends and family for labor. Legalization brought a rush of market speculators and dramatically changed labor conditions.

The new growers built massive greenhouses, increasing demand for mobile trimming crews who travel with their own tents, sometimes under the control of middlemen who take a cut of their earnings.

The farms recruit from Chinese communities in Los Angeles and New York, from Hmong enclaves in Wisconsin and among Mexican laborers working in San Jose and the farmlands of the Central Valley. They also pull workers directly out of economically depressed countries, such as Argentina and Chile, attracting some who are teachers, biologists and physical therapists.

But the rush to capitalize on legalization flooded the market, crashing both wholesale crop prices and the pay for farmworkers.

Four years ago, trimmers received $200 a pound or more for cutting the tiny leaves off dried cannabis buds, the most labor-intensive part of cultivation. The current rate is $80 a pound, and The Times found jobs quoting rates as low as $50 — well below minimum wage for slower workers.

Wage theft allegations skyrocketed.

Chris Van Hook, who runs Clean Green Certified, a private cannabis farm inspection company, said farmers in the broader agricultural community know that if they don’t provide workers with proper housing, restrooms and access to food and water, state regulators “will come down on you very hard.”

But cannabis work is different.

“The state agencies have completely turned a blind eye to the cannabis industry,” he said.

At the top of the steep grade, Chicken Ridge narrows, and the dirt road ends at a gate. A plaster angel holding the word “Welcome” stands next to a metal sign warning of attack dogs.

To the left, in the woods, were the tents of cannabis workers.

Half a dozen workers shared photographs and provided details of their lives last year on the licensed farm in Mendocino County. Their tents and vehicles encircled a giant oak, and an outdoor kitchen consisted of a propane stove propped on wooden pallets beneath a tarp. They said there was one toilet, so they often defecated in the woods. They warmed water for showers in black buckets hung in the sun.

And they grew a lot of cannabis — 1,000 plants, according to the farm manager’s records.

By December, a payroll ledger showed, the farm owed 25 workers more than $100,000.

The cannabis licenses were in the name of Mountain Top Management, a corporation held by Mike Womack, a North Carolina trucking company owner who showed up only sporadically.

Month after month, WhatsApp exchanges shared with The Times show, Womack responded to workers’ requests for pay by asking for more time to come up with their money. He blamed their lack of pay on falling market prices, crop losses from mold and most emphatically, on the woman he had hired to run the farm.

“Just been really horrible trying to pay so many people. Trying not to go out of business,” Womack wrote in March to a worker. “I am so ... broke right now.”

“I understand your situation but need you [to] understand mine and negotiate,” another worker told Womack. “I have no money and need food.”

Womack responded to phone calls from a Times reporter with a text message saying it was a bad time for him but he would talk later. He then stopped responding to calls and messages altogether. A farm employee from Spain instead called at what he said was Womack’s direction, to contend that Womack had no responsibility for paying people the manager brought onto his farm. “Mike had no workers,” Diego Alberto said.

Five workers have since filed claims with California’s labor agency, seeking $96,000 from Womack. An Argentine woman and her husband, a teacher, said they were owed more than $6,500, more than most Argentinians earn in a year. She said she was happy when Womack finally wired them $600.

“You play the game, know the risk,” she said.

A 32-year-old Portuguese worker who asked to be identified only by his first name, Cristiano, was convinced that if he left the Covelo area, he would never see the money he said Womack owed him. The farm’s payroll sheet said he was owed at least $4,300.

He spent the winter in the valley, living in a 1999 Ford Econoline van with a tiny wire-haired dog named Calif.

Times journalists found him still there in the spring. Foam pads insulated the van’s windows, and a massive pile of donated blankets crowded the plywood bed. Vinyl flooring tacked atop the floor was beginning to curl.

Cristiano said his savings were depleted. His eyes were sunken, and his cheekbones protruded. Cristiano said he had lost about 22 pounds. He raised his thin arms to demonstrate.

He had come to the United States, drawn by talk of quick cash on cannabis farms. He intended to stay three months, but it had been two years.

The winter was demoralizing, he said. “I had a lot of nights crying, ‘What the hell am I doing here? Why? Why did I decide to come here and end up like this?’ Swearing a lot, like, ‘Why? Why?’”

In many ways, Joey Jiorle felt invisible.

The day California cannabis regulators raided the licensed Humboldt County farm where the 34-year-old man worked, inspectors looked at the unpermitted hut where Jiorle had his bed and his belongings.

“They said, ‘You know, nobody’s supposed to be living here,’” he said. And they moved on.

On a wintry day in March, a piece of heavy farm equipment nearly severed his finger. At the hospital where it was reattached, a nurse asked if Jiorle had insurance from work. No, he said. He was working off the books, promised $20 an hour but unpaid for four months.

The farm’s county-approved operations plan declared only two workers would live on site, negating the need for housing. It never had fewer than six, Jiorle said, and for weeks at a stretch during harvest, more than 50 people would camp on the property. One November, trimmers set up their tents inside an empty greenhouse, and the structure collapsed during a heavy overnight snowfall.

Another farm in Mendocino County declared a single employee, though payroll sheets showed more than 30 workers. Two ridges away, another large farm said it would have no workers.

Though they didn’t exist on paper, these workers were not entirely invisible to the regulatory system.

Four California Department of Cannabis Control employees said they are often disturbed by the labor conditions they see and feel frustrated that there is nothing in cannabis regulations that deals with those situations. They spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of losing their jobs.

Five years after legalization, the agency had yet to establish a protocol for suspected human trafficking, itself a criminal offense that doesn’t cover the vast majority of exploitative work conditions.

In an October email exchange obtained by The Times, a branch manager told division chiefs at the licensing agency that inspectors were finding “circumstantial evidence of human trafficking,” including poor housing, wage complaints and allegations of violent threats. The agency’s enforcement chief replied that his office was setting up criteria for such referrals.

Cannabis workers frequently said they complained to the licensing agency about abusive farms. In a written response to questions from The Times, the agency refused to provide information about the labor complaints, saying any allegation against a licensed farm is confidential unless a finding is made. But, the department said, it has never “issued a final decision against a licensee for wage theft or workplace violations.”

The cannabis licensing agency said that it “takes the treatment of workers seriously” but that aggrieved employees should take their complaints to the Department of Industrial Relations, a sprawling state agency that deals with workplace safety, wages and workers’ compensation.

In the last two years, the labor agency said, its field officers scrutinized four cannabis farms. They included a San Mateo County hemp farm where the owner was prosecuted by the local district attorney for grand theft of labor and sentenced to a year in prison.

In most cases, workers must trigger action themselves. They can file claims for unpaid wages that by law the Industrial Relations Department must address within 4½ months.

The labor agency said it does “everything possible” to meet the legal time limits, but The Times found workers often waiting a year or more.

The law contains a loophole allowing delays that lead to “an equitable and just resolution.” But nearly half of 67 cannabis-related complaints closed since 2019 were dropped because workers withdrew or “abandoned” their claims, including those who could no longer be located. In six cases, the agency found in favor of workers. The remaining cases were settled privately between the workers and employers.

In one case, an advocate for two brothers who were Yolo County farmworkers told the state someone had threatened to kill the pair if they did not withdraw their claim. “Our clients fear for their lives,” she wrote to the state, asking for an expedited hearing.

The brothers already had waited a year. Seven more months passed before a hearing was held, and it was an additional four months before an administrative law judge told the workers they had won their case.

Workers repeatedly told The Times that they feared filing a wage claim would create a paper trail that could be tracked by immigration authorities, who could then bar them from returning to work the next season. Many also feared connections that they believed licensed farmers had to the criminal world.

Outlaw rules still govern much of the labor relations of cannabis. Workers take jobs on handshake deals struck in grocery store parking lots with owners whose full names they don’t know, following their new bosses into the mountains on nothing more than their word.

A worker could trust Kali Flower Farms, said its owner, Alessandro del Sordo, a loquacious 47-year-old with a tattoo of a grinning pirate skull wrapped around his neck. Del Sordo said he treated his laborers well. He said he held cookouts for the trimmer crews, gave them time to rest before the harvest and doled out bonuses.

The Mendocino County farm had been in operation for five years. During Kali Flower’s early flush years, Del Sordo used the profits to expand, purchase a stake in another farm and buy vehicles, including a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz. But he said the farm couldn’t survive the 2021 collapse in cannabis prices, the damage to crops caused by cold weather and cultivation mistakes. In two seasons, Del Sordo’s lawyer told a judge in his divorce proceedings, the farm racked up $210,000 in wage debt to more than two dozen workers. Workers said they think the amount is higher.

Outlaw rules still govern much of the labor relations of cannabis. Workers take jobs on handshake deals struck in grocery store parking lots with owners whose full names they don’t know, following their new bosses into the mountains on nothing more than their word.

A worker could trust Kali Flower Farms, said its owner, Alessandro del Sordo, a loquacious 47-year-old with a tattoo of a grinning pirate skull wrapped around his neck. Del Sordo said he treated his laborers well. He said he held cookouts for the trimmer crews, gave them time to rest before the harvest and doled out bonuses.

The Mendocino County farm had been in operation for five years. During Kali Flower’s early flush years, Del Sordo used the profits to expand, purchase a stake in another farm and buy vehicles, including a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz. But he said the farm couldn’t survive the 2021 collapse in cannabis prices, the damage to crops caused by cold weather and cultivation mistakes. In two seasons, Del Sordo’s lawyer told a judge in his divorce proceedings, the farm racked up $210,000 in wage debt to more than two dozen workers. Workers said they think the amount is higher.

“I would love to say to all of the employees, like, you know, that I’m really sorry that I couldn’t ... pay them,” he said, peppering his words with expletives. “You guys are losing, like $3,000, $5,000, $4,000. I’m losing my whole ... life.”

Del Sordo acknowledged that when a worker told him the laborers were organizing a lawsuit to collect their wages, he threatened to report them to immigration authorities. “I’m like, ‘Don’t open that door, because I love fighting,’” he said. “‘Get your ass out of the ... country.’”

His workers posted warnings to other laborers about the farm in WhatsApp group chats. Four of them also spoke to The Times, describing the lack of housing on the farm, washing in irrigation water and running out of food. They relied on a food bank more than an hour away.

A laborer said he often lay awake in sadness, listening to the sobs of a woman from Mexico, a worker like himself, stuck on the ridge far from home.

It was payday in the tiny Humboldt County community of Honeydew, and Eduardo stepped up to receive his wages for the week.

Instead of the $1,500 he was due, the boss handed him $700.

“You’re short, right?” Eduardo asked.

“No, no, no,” the boss replied, lifting the edge of his shirt to show a pistol, Eduardo said. “That’s all of it.”

Such threats are common, said Eduardo, a 41-year-old from Spain who asked to be identified only by his first name to avoid detection by immigration authorities. He said that in five years he has been repeatedly cheated and threatened.

“Because we are immigrants or because we are working in something illegal,” he said, “they think that truly we are really defenseless.”

Traveling remote areas and further isolated by language barriers, cannabis workers often turn to private groups on Telegram and WhatsApp. These insider channels offer leads on jobs and border-crossing advice and serve as a marketplace for cheap vehicles to live in, and cheap mechanics to fix them. In the face of deteriorating labor conditions, the platforms are also where workers seek a measure of self-protection, by way of “black list” warnings that name farms accused of exploiting workers.

“Farmer VIOLENTO y que no paga,” a worker posted in August, reporting a violent farmer in Mendocino County who ran off two laborers rather than pay them.

In Mad River, workers said they chose to leave a Trinity County farm with half their wages out of fear that if they asked for the rest, their boss would pull a gun on them.

At a state-licensed farm in nearby Hayfork, a worker said that when she threatened to call police and report the operation for missing wages, the owner grabbed her by the neck and choked her. Another worker said five others had reported similar experiences at that farm.

And in Covelo, notorious for its homicides, a man wrestled with the bleakness of working without pay and food while fearing his armed bosses who he said were using hard drugs.

“Leave from there, bro,” a worker advised in Spanish. “Neither money nor weed is more important than one’s life. We all have to run one day.”

“Thanks, bro, I’m already planning my escape,” he replied with a frowning emoji and praying hands. “There will be something good out there.”

In an interview with The Times, a 32-year-old trimmer from Mexico described arriving this summer at an illegal farm a few miles north of the Oregon border. Forty workers shared a single, filthy bathroom, she said.

She said helicopters began to pass overhead, spooking the farm’s armed foremen. The workers were herded at gunpoint into shipping containers to hide, frightening her so much that she and her companions left.

After five months of moving from farm to farm, fed up with sleeping in cold tents, going without showers and not getting paid, she returned to Mexico.

“They threaten you with guns and tell you to leave without getting paid,” she said. “There are many who die and no one knows where they are.”

Death in the cannabis fields is alarmingly common. Using coroner’s reports, The Times identified 35 fatalities in eight California and southern Oregon counties over a five-year span through 2021.

Fourteen died from violence, including seven massacred in a 2020 shooting at a farm in Riverside County. The five women and two men, mostly recent immigrants from Laos, were gunned down at peak harvest season in the Anza Valley, a longtime hub for cannabis cultivation. Sheriff’s deputies recovered more than 1,000 pounds of cannabis ready for sale, valued in the millions.

But most of the cannabis farm deaths were caused by carbon monoxide poisoning. Those workers were victims of both unsafe housing and the widespread, profit-driven shift from cultivating outdoors to using greenhouses that allow owners to extend the growing season.

The Times identified eight carbon monoxide deaths in greenhouses and an additional 12 inside trailers or unpermitted shelters on farms. The deaths were compiled primarily from four counties willing to provide coroner reports — Trinity, Siskiyou, Mendocino and Los Angeles. Among them were the deaths of Pa Doua Chang, 44, and Bee Lor, 53, asphyxiated in March 2021 in an outdoor shower rigged with a faulty propane heater, at a licensed cannabis farm atop Post Mountain in Trinity County.

The cause of death for one worker, who collapsed in a greenhouse in Oregon during a heat wave, was never determined.

Of the 35 total deaths, only one was included in a database of worker deaths and serious injuries investigated by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In that instance, the inquiry came five months later when the death of a man who was asphyxiated inside a hemp greenhouse in southern Oregon somehow came to the attention of a workers’ compensation employee.

“This is a tragedy,” said Stephen Knight, executive director of Worksafe, a national labor safety organization in Oakland. The cannabis deaths identified by The Times, he said, demonstrate “a pretty dramatic hole in the system for protecting workers.”

Employers are required to report worker fatalities to OSHA within eight hours, regardless of the legality of the workplace. Most of the deaths identified by The Times took place on unlicensed farms where employers were unknown or unlikely to step forward.

Responding police and fire departments are also required to report workplace deaths. Sheriff’s coroners almost always noted the link to cannabis farms on reports provided to The Times, but those fatalities did not make it into the OSHA database. Sheriff Matt Kendall in Mendocino County — where five workers died — did not think his office had forwarded the fatalities. “Pretty sure that was a missed step on our part,” he said.

But Kendall said he did call California’s local OSHA office in August 2021 to report the living conditions of 27 workers housed in tents and trailers outside an illegal cannabis warehouse. “The OSHA guy didn’t know how to handle the conditions in an illegal grow,” Kendall said. “We were both scratching our heads, wondering how to get that properly reported.”

Nor is it always easy to discern between employer and employee. It also is common practice for large cannabis farms to lease plots to subtenants, making it harder for police to determine who is in charge.

It was early 2020 and Victor Medina, 29, was among a large group of men from San Jose recruited to cultivate plants on a sprawling cannabis operation in Covelo.

He joined four partners and leased a plot on tribal land across the road from the town landfill. They slept outside in tents, lived off instant noodles and dug holes in the ground for toilets.

Medina’s relatives said he was uneasy and had grown suspicious of others on the compound, including his partners.

Police had their own concerns about safety at such grow sites. Within a five-week span early that season, two workers — one from Honduras and the other from Colombia — died of carbon monoxide poisoning in nearby greenhouses, one of them in the same compound as Medina’s plot. Deputies retrieved the bodies, but the cannabis was on federal trust lands, out of their jurisdiction.

On a Monday in April, Medina disappeared.

Mendocino County sheriff’s deputies searched the cannabis compound, using dogs to scour the scene. They never found his remains, and Medina’s family believes he was murdered.

His relatives made the four-hour drive to Covelo to look for answers. They tacked up missing-person signs on telephone poles and asked around for information, but learned little. A woman warned that Covelo was hostile to outsiders.

Medina’s stepfather, Jesus Alvarado, spent two weeks walking the roads in and around town. Near where Medina’s plot had been, the stepfather said, a truck pulled over and the driver flashed a gun, shouting:

“Go back to where you came from!”

In the Oregon woods, Dagoberto Morales surveyed the rain-soaked debris of an abandoned cannabis labor camp.

He picked his way past makeshift tables constructed from saplings and dozens of cold shower stalls made from sheets of plastic stapled to trees, each with its own collection of toothbrushes and razors. In places, the ground was littered with wads of toilet paper. A votive of the Virgen de Guadalupe lay on its side.

Morales recognized the lives spelled out by such artifacts. They were like his own, 35 years earlier working in the California strawberry fields, sleeping among the cliffs near Oceanside.

That such a labor camp could exist today told Morales how fast the gains of three decades can be undone.

Morales is the director of Unete, a Medford organization he formed to advocate for pickers in the pear tree orchards of southern Oregon. Increasingly the people contacting Unete for help are workers from cannabis farms in Oregon and California.

Even amid everything Morales has seen, what happened at the camp he explored in January stood out.

One of the hundreds of workers at the camp told The Times they were prohibited from leaving and relied on their employers for food and water. Morales pointed out the absence of fire rings or other features that might have suggested time for leisure or drawn attention from the outside world. The workers were trapped, he said.

“And that’s why they brought these people here,” he said, “because they know they can’t go anywhere.”

Unete counseled more than 200 cannabis wage theft victims in 2021. It has lobbied Oregon to conduct field inspections and hire more wage claim investigators. And the organization goes to the site of police raids to offer displaced workers hotel rooms or plane tickets home. It has also sought to enlist the aid of the Mexican Consulate.

But Morales doubts progress can be made until regulators look beyond borders and acknowledge the immense profits and global exploitation wrapped into cannabis.

“We see people from Mexico, from Chile, from Argentina, from Colombia, from Spain,” he said. “It’s time for all governments to start working together. We have no choice.”

The camp where Morales spoke stretched half a mile along the Illinois River, by the old Q Bar X cattle ranch. It was the largest of the giant, illegal farms occupying southern Oregon in addition to hundreds of small ones.

“The amount of greenhouses is crazy,” said a pilot who flew a Times reporter and photographer over the rural landscape. Nearly every grass valley and timbered ridge was studded with canopied greenhouses — most invisible from the ground but so extensive that, from the sky, it looked as if the land had been infested by giant white caterpillars.

The labor force required to tend those farms is immense and hard to hide.

In August 2021, a small army of federal Department of Homeland Security agents, state police and county deputies raided Q Bar X, following the trail of trucks from another large cannabis operation where a worker from Mexico named Crescencio Mejia had collapsed and died. Callers told the Josephine County Sheriff’s Office that hundreds of workers were locked inside Mejia’s farm, forced to sleep on greenhouse floors, without sufficient food and water.

In the two weeks it took for police to assemble a large enough raid party, Mejia’s farm was vacated. But at Q Bar X, police said they found more than 370 greenhouses and detained and questioned more than 200 workers, including some who believed they were still in California. Local residents described watching other workers jump into the river to escape.

Among those who fled across the river was a middle-aged woman from Medford, who told The Times that her job at Q Bar X promised good money — $180 a day, far more than other field jobs. But unlike at her previous jobs at cannabis farms where middlemen sometimes arranged group housing and ferried workers between farms, the bosses at Q Bar X didn’t let them leave.

It was her job, and that of her sister, to cook for the hundreds of workers at the camp. They used an outdoor kitchen stocked with sacks of rice, dried lentils and crates of eggs. They slept in a small tent within a hoop house. It was uncomfortable, she said, but they needed the work.

“If that’s the only place where I can get a job,” she said, “that’s where I will go.”

Times staff writers Cindy Chang and Anh Do contributed to this report.

By Adam Elmahrek, Robert J. Lopez, Ruben Vives

In the San Gabriel Valley, a city councilman demanded bribes from businesses seeking cannabis licenses, according to a source cooperating with the FBI.

In another small L.A. County city, a cannabis industry group offered $15,000 to council candidates who would pledge to support changes to city regulations that weed businesses wanted — an exchange one legal expert said “flirted at the edges” of the law.

And in rural Northern California, an elected official pushed to expand the amount of weed that farms could legally grow, a proposal sought by a cannabis business that was paying her and her husband hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy their ranch.

California’s decision to legalize recreational cannabis in 2016 ushered in a multibillion-dollar commercial pot market that officials in many small, struggling communities hoped would bring new jobs and an infusion of tax revenue to spend on police, parks and roads. But for some cities, the riches never materialized.

Instead, the advent of commercial cannabis unleashed a wave of corruption, prosecutions and accusations that has rocked local governments across the state and left them with few effective tools to combat the problem.

From the rugged mountains near Oregon to the desert along the Mexican border, a Times investigation found corruption or other questionable conduct covering a vast area of activities: public officials demanding cash from cannabis business owners to approve licenses; government officials threatened with physical violence over pot regulations; and elected officials accepting money from cannabis businesses even as they regulated them. In addition, the industry has donated a torrent of campaign cash to local government officials as cannabis became a new and powerful special interest.

Lobbyists, pot entrepreneurs and public officials say bribery and shakedowns have become so commonplace in cannabis licensing that it feels like a normal part of doing business.

Ruben Guerra, board chairman of the Montebello-based Latin Business Assn., said he has worked with 10 applicants trying to obtain cannabis licenses from Southern California cities. He witnessed cash shakedowns of half those applicants and notified a retired FBI agent he knows.

“I was right in the middle of the negotiations, and [public officials] were telling me they need this much,” Guerra said, adding that the bribe request usually ranges from $150,000 to $250,000.

The corrupting flow of money has its roots in how California crafted its cannabis legalization law to regulate an industry that until recently operated underground. Proposition 64, the statewide measure that paved the way for commercial cannabis to launch in 2018, put the ultimate decision on where pot businesses could operate in the hands of cities and counties.

More than 12,000 licenses are active, a Times analysis of state data shows, but those are concentrated in a minority of California’s cities and counties, including many small, struggling communities that viewed cannabis and its potential tax revenue as a financial lifeline. More than half of cities and counties refuse to allow any type of operation, including recreational sales or farming. Those that do authorize pot businesses generally restrict the number of licenses, creating fierce competition among entrepreneurs looking to cash in.

Giving thousands of often part-time, low-paid officials across the state the power to choose winners and losers in the new “green rush” created fertile ground for corruption.

“You pay your way into one of the few spots,” said Dominic Corva, a sociology professor and co-director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research at Cal Poly Humboldt. “Once the game was limited licensing … it was like, who gets to have it?”

The link between bribery and cannabis grew so quickly that FBI agents issued a public warning in 2019, saying the corruption threat was especially acute in Western states like California that had implemented this “decentralized” system.

In May, a cannabis business operator, Helios Dayspring, was sentenced to 22 months in federal prison for paying more than $30,000 in bribes to a San Luis Obispo County supervisor. In June, Jermaine Wright, the former mayor pro tem of Adelanto, was convicted of taking a $10,000 bribe from an FBI agent posing as a pot businessman in the high desert city in San Bernardino County. The city’s former mayor, Richard Kerr, is awaiting trial on charges of accepting more than $57,000 in bribes and kickbacks in exchange for helping cannabis businesses. Two more former government officials in Imperial County are serving federal prison sentences for taking pot-related bribes.

Accusations of wrongdoing also abound in civil court.

A legal malpractice case over a pot business in the small L.A. County city of Maywood boiled over in July when a lawyer introduced candid emails from several years earlier in which he accused a client of paying off the city’s mayor at the time, Ramon Medina, to secure a cannabis license, according to trial exhibits filed in the case. In an interview with The Times, Medina denied accepting money from the client, or even knowing him. Medina, who is no longer in office, has also pleaded not guilty to unrelated bribery charges filed last year.

A former staffer to then-L.A. City Councilman Jose Huizar alleged in a lawsuit that he was fired as retaliation for informing the FBI, among others, that he believed Huizar was engaged in a scheme to obtain “cash payments” from cannabis applicants in exchange for permits. Huizar, who has pleaded not guilty to unrelated charges of taking bribes from downtown real estate developers, denied the allegation. The lawsuit was settled.

The situation has become so dire that some in the cannabis industry are calling for a radical solution. Adam Spiker, executive director of Southern California Coalition, a cannabis trade association, said corruption is so endemic in local cannabis licensing that cities and counties should consider banning people who want licenses from direct contact with the government officials who will make the decisions. Spiker said it’s the only way to ensure that licenses are awarded without any possible interference or influence by applicants.

“Is that a silver bullet? No,” he said. “But do things like that need to happen? Yeah, until [the corruption] goes away.”

Baldwin Park leaders saw cannabis as a financial boon for their struggling community in the heart of the San Gabriel Valley.

But from the start, pot licensing stirred allegations of corruption.

One of the licenses approved by Baldwin Park gave the exclusive right to distribute cannabis in the city to a local business, Rukli Inc. The city required other licensed weed businesses to use Rukli as their sole distributor. The arrangement prompted another cannabis business to file a lawsuit accusing Rukli of engaging in a conspiracy to secure an illegal monopoly and racketeering, including bribery and kickbacks. Rukli denied wrongdoing. The lawsuit was eventually dropped after Rukli pulled out of its exclusive deal.

Before the end of Rukli’s exclusive arrangement, a Baldwin Park police lieutenant visited the firm’s distribution center to make sure it was complying with the city’s requirements for securing the property. Lt. Chris Kuberry told The Times one of the firm’s partners mentioned paying $250,000 in cash to city officials.

Kuberry said that the comment was “certainly suspicious” and that he had heard the FBI was investigating possible corruption in the city. But he didn’t inquire further, file a report or contact the FBI. He said his department of about 50 officers was rife with complaints of retaliation and he feared for his job if he raised any questions.

“To be honest, [it was] out of self-preservation,” said Kuberry, who retired shortly after.

In a lawsuit the city brought against its former police chief, Kuberry said in a sworn declaration that pot operators complained to him about “questionable business practices which included paying as much as $250,000 cash in a brown paper bag to city officials.” His declaration did not name the firms or their owners, but Kuberry told The Times he was referring to Rukli.

Scott Russo, an attorney for one of Rukli’s partners at the time, said the company never paid a bribe. He declined to comment on whether any city officials solicited bribes, citing an ongoing federal investigation.

“There’s a process [the FBI] would appreciate I respect,” he said.

A source who is cooperating with the FBI told The Times he was present when Ricardo Pacheco, then a member of the Baldwin Park City Council, asked that Rukli pay him $250,000 in cash to ensure the city would approve a license for the firm.

The money was never paid, and at least one of the firm’s partners instead spoke to the FBI, said the source, who requested anonymity because of the ongoing federal investigation.

Pacheco and an FBI spokeswoman declined to comment.

Pacheco is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to a federal charge of bribery related to a contract with the city’s police union. FBI agents also raided the city attorney’s office and the homes of officials in other cities as part of an investigation targeting cannabis licensing in Baldwin Park and nearby cities.

Cruz Baca, who served on the council from 2013 to 2018, said in interviews with The Times that three men representing two other cannabis firms told her in 2018 that city officials shook them down for campaign contributions. All three, Baca said, alleged Pacheco solicited thousands of dollars in campaign money in exchange for approving a license. They did not say whether they paid the money. Campaign records show a $6,500 payment by the owner of one of the firms to Pacheco’s political action committee and no contributions from the other business. Both firms got licenses.

Baca said that she reported the allegations to Baldwin Park police officials.

Jason Adams, then a Baldwin Park police officer, confirmed that Baca informed him of complaints from pot businesses about cash “shakedowns” by Pacheco. He said he told the FBI weeks later about the bribery allegations against Pacheco.

Baca said she was contacted by the FBI four years ago and that she reported the businessmen’s allegations about Pacheco and others soliciting bribes. Agents, she said, also asked about other elected officials and pot consultants, and were looking at their links to cannabis interests in nearby cities, including Montebello.

“They were connecting dots,” she said.

Vanessa Delgado was the mayor of Montebello when two local property owners asked her to meet in 2018 to discuss where the city would allow cannabis businesses to operate.

At the meeting, she said, the men demanded Delgado vote to limit the city’s cannabis zone in a way that would benefit their properties.

“I was told if I didn’t go along with limiting the zones that my friends or those close to me would be hurt,” said Delgado, who soon afterward was elected to the state Senate. “It’s just my daughter and I who live alone. I was afraid.”

She declined to name the men out of fear of retaliation but said she informed a Montebello police officer.

The officer, former Lt. Julio Calleros, confirmed that Delgado contacted him about the alleged threat. He said she declined to file a police report, fearing that it could lead to physical harm.

“I could tell she was concerned about it,” Calleros said.

Still, Delgado said she refused to vote in favor of limiting the cannabis zone: “I wasn’t going to let that threat stop me from doing what was right.”

Delgado was part of a majority on the council that embraced weed. City officials publicly predicted that money from pot licenses could be used for road improvements and other community needs. The appeal was obvious for a suburban enclave of roughly 60,000 residents whose city government had spent years in the red.

But residents warned at council meetings about increased crime, especially around schools. Two of the five members on the council voted against the city’s cannabis regulations.

Council members on both sides were threatened with recalls.

In her bid for reelection to the council in 2018, Vivian Romero alleged on a campaign flier that “marijuana special interests tried buying my vote for $50,000.” Romero, who had voted against the city’s cannabis regulations, told The Times that the offer came from a cannabis businessman seeking a license in Montebello.

“The state has created a breeding ground for bribery and favoritism,” Romero said. “This is not hyperbole. These are facts.”

She said a pot consultant threatened to have her ousted from office unless she changed her position on the issue.

Cannabis companies and lobbyists poured about $40,000 into the city’s election, finance records show, helping defeat Romero and the other council member who had voted against Montebello’s pot regulations.

Few cities in California were as bullish on pot as Lynwood, one of a cluster of small towns in southeast L.A. County that have long struggled with financial woes and municipal corruption.

City leaders said cannabis would bring good-paying jobs and millions of dollars in revenue, and the town quickly gained a reputation as the next “mecca” of weed.

By 2018, cannabis interests had become a major power broker in the city’s political machine. But some pot business owners were unhappy and wanted changes. The local cannabis business association was pushing the city to extend the terms of licenses to the applicant’s lifetime and to provide a path for them to sell their licenses.

In that year’s election, the Lynwood Cannabis Assn. asked council candidates to sign a pledge card. The card promised that the signer would “fully support” the association and back “the industry and the efforts underway to modify the current city ordinance and development agreement for the members of the organization.”

“Let me know when each candidate signs it so I can give direction to the treasurer to issue the check,” one Lynwood Cannabis Assn. board member wrote to other leaders of the group in an email reviewed by The Times.

In other emails, the association’s president, Tony Torres, asked one of the candidates, Candice Nunez, to sign the card and said she would receive “a check for $15,000 when you return the pledge card.” Torres promised in another email that the pledge cards would be kept confidential until after the election “to avoid anyone potentially using this information in a negative way toward your campaign.”

Nunez recalled thinking when she saw the card, “I’m selling my soul.”

Still, she signed and returned the pledge. She received the $15,000 check a few days later and showed it to a Times reporter.

She said she feared she might be engaging in illegal bribery and never deposited the check.

Nunez lost the election. Three candidates who won received a combined $40,000 from the cannabis association, according to campaign finance records.

Councilwoman Marisela Santana, who received $15,000, acknowledged signing the pledge. She said she already favored the association’s proposals because they were good for the city. “The best way to ensure that the cannabis industry grows in such a way that it doesn’t harm the community is to engage the industry and make policy decisions that benefit the Lynwood community first,” Santana said.

Torres, the association president, said in a brief interview that the pledge card didn’t result in any major legislative gains for the association. “Nothing came of it. We never brought it up again,” he said. He declined to comment further.

City records show the council approved some of the association’s requests, including allowing businesses to sell their licenses.

Interest groups are allowed to ask election candidates to promise support for legislative causes and to offer campaign contributions as long as there isn’t an explicit cash-for-votes deal, legal experts said.

Prosecutors face a high bar trying to establish that a campaign contribution amounts to a bribe. They have to show an explicit quid pro quo agreement between the public official and the donor, and that there was corrupt intent.

Bob Fellmeth, a University of San Diego law professor and former white-collar crime prosecutor, questioned whether the Lynwood pledge’s language was specific enough to qualify as a bribe, but he said it “could be an interesting test case to bring.”

“They’re flirting at the edges of felony bribery,” he said. “They’re getting pretty close.”

No charges have been filed in connection with the pledge.

Nunez, the unsuccessful candidate who didn’t cash the association’s check, said she was introduced to the association during a meeting at Tequila Jack’s restaurant in Long Beach that was brokered by Aide Castro, a longtime Lynwood councilwoman.

In 2017, Castro was on the payroll of the giant dispensary tracking app Weedmaps, earning $10,000 a month as a consultant — income she didn’t report on her financial statements as required by state law until she was questioned by The Times.

She did, however, disclose ownership stakes in two cannabis companies, which she estimated at the time to be each worth more than $1 million. She paid nothing for her shares in the companies, and told The Times that she received her ownership stakes in return for providing the businesses with her government expertise. Castro served on the council until the end of 2020, when she was termed out.

The California Fair Political Practices Commission, which enforces state law on disclosing such financial ties, opened an investigation into Castro’s links to cannabis. The inquiry, launched after The Times’ report more than three years ago, is ongoing.

Lynwood does not have its own ethics agency to conduct such inquiries. Few cities and counties do, which means there is little independent oversight of the financial relationships between local officials and the cannabis industry.

The Times identified more than a dozen government officials statewide who received income — ranging from thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands — from cannabis companies or had interests in weed businesses while still in office. The payments are legal as long as officials disclose them and don’t cast votes that would financially benefit the firms paying them.

Even when legal, such arrangements raise doubts about whether government officials voting on cannabis issues are looking out primarily for the interests of the public or the interests of the pot industry, good government experts said.

“Maybe they’re completely ignoring their financial interests. ... Maybe they’re making decisions that are not in the best interests of their constituents because they’re trying to put some money in their pocket,” said Tracy Westen, a government ethics expert and founder of the now-shuttered Center for Governmental Studies. “At the very least, it becomes a public confidence issue.”

As Santa Ana’s mayor, Miguel Pulido helped reshape the city for more than a quarter-century. The Orange County city became a pioneer in the region for allowing medical marijuana dispensaries before the legalization of recreational pot.

Pulido has come under fire for his support of the cannabis industry. A former police chief said in a lawsuit that he passed along a report to the district attorney’s office alleging that Pulido had accepted $25,000 in exchange for guaranteeing a cannabis license, and sources told The Times four years ago that county and federal authorities launched criminal investigations of Pulido. He was never charged and denied wrongdoing.

In late 2020, Pulido testified in a sworn deposition that while mayor he received a $10,000 consulting payment from Touchstone, a licensed cannabis company operating in the city. Pulido didn’t report income from Touchstone on his statement of economic interests.

Responding to questions from The Times, an attorney for Touchstone denied the company paid Pulido but didn’t respond to questions about the deposition.

Pulido’s testimony detailed the work he did for the company, the amount he was paid and his close relationship with the company’s owner. He said he was paid to help the cannabis business get off the ground by putting the company in touch with others who sold the necessary equipment.

Santa Ana spokesman Paul Eakins confirmed that in April 2019 Pulido spoke to a staffer in the city’s planning division, which regulates cannabis, about whether Touchstone was required to build a wall to hide a carbon monoxide tank from the street. He said Pulido never asked for special treatment for Touchstone. Pulido, whose mayoral term ended in 2020, did not return phone calls from The Times.

In the far reaches of California’s northern region lies sparsely populated Trinity County, part of the famed Emerald Triangle, a wide expanse of lush forest and mountains renowned for its high-quality weed. Whether to allow cannabis farms to operate became a lightning-rod issue in the county’s rural communities, with some blaming pot for destroying an idyllic way of life.

In 2018, county Supervisor Barbara “Bobbi” Chadwick and her husband sold their 80-acre ranch to a pot farming company, Family Trees LLC, for $1.5 million, court records show. Family Trees agreed to pay for the property in installments.

As the monthly payments arrived, Chadwick urged her colleagues on the board to allow pot farmers to grow far more cannabis. Family Trees’ head grower sent an email to Chadwick and other supervisors in support, asserting that removing limits on pot growing would allow the farm to “once again send profits back into the [local] economy,” according to county records.

But a majority of the board voted to sharply curtail how much cannabis a licensed farm was allowed to grow.

At a candidate’s forum in 2020, Chadwick said she had no relationship with a cannabis business and only used the drug as medicine for ailing relatives. She did include the sale of the ranch on a financial disclosure statement filed for 2018 but did not disclose on subsequent statements the ongoing payments from Family Trees.

Chadwick, who served on the board from 2017 until 2021, told the California Fair Political Practices Commission that Family Trees also paid her husband’s contracting firm more than $96,000 for work the company did on the ranch from 2018 through 2020, according to county emails obtained by The Times under a public records request. She did not detail those payments on her financial disclosure statements.

Chadwick declined to answer questions from The Times, saying during a brief phone interview last year only that she has no financial interests in cannabis in Trinity County. In a lawsuit filed a day before the interview, she and her husband claimed Family Trees owed them hundreds of thousands of dollars in outstanding payments for the ranch. Chadwick and her husband had been receiving annual payments of $180,000 and monthly payments of $1,900 from Family Trees since June 2018, but the firm was no longer paying in 2021, according to court records. The couple’s lawyer said the dispute was resolved; the suit was dismissed in January.

Attorney Charles M. Farano, who represented Chadwick and her husband in the lawsuit, said that she had no interest in the firm’s pot business and that the purchase agreement was solely for the land and “had nothing to do with cannabis.” He said her “voting record on the cannabis business in general stands and is based upon her position regarding cannabis.”

“She has never had a conflict of interest regarding cannabis and currently has no conflict in these regards,” Farano said, adding that Chadwick “has complied with all disclosure laws.”

Brad Gilbert, a longtime friend of the Chadwicks who incorporated Family Trees and oversaw its county license application, said the firm followed all state and county procedures and has created jobs for local residents.

Trinity County Administrative Officer Richard Kuhns told The Times shortly before his retirement in May that he was concerned at how quickly planning department staff processed Family Trees’ license and questioned whether it was properly handled.

“It just stinks all around,” Kuhns said.

For the city of Calexico, the promise of cannabis was too good to pass up.

The small border community in Imperial County was desperate. City officials were considering layoffs of essential workers, and 20% of the 40,000 or so residents were living in poverty.

By permitting cannabis businesses, council members argued, money would pour into local coffers and bring better times.

“I truly believe that God has it here for a reason,” the city’s mayor, Armando Real, said at a June 2017 council meeting where he and his colleagues voted to allow pot businesses.

But instead of blessings, cannabis brought disgrace.

In late 2019, a businessman known simply as Manny met with two local government officials — Councilman David Romero and a city commissioner, Bruno Suarez. Manny drove a white BMW and wore guayabera shirts and a leather jacket. A clean-cut 30-something, he was an avid NFL fan and sprinkled his conversations with Mexican slang.

Inside a downtown café decorated with colorful posters and images of artist Frida Kahlo, Manny said he and his partners in L.A. wanted to open a dispensary. Suarez offered to help for a price — $35,000.

Suarez said the money “guarantees you a … top spot in the queue” for city permits. Romero noted that he had the authority to revoke other applicants’ permits and could push Manny’s to the front.

In early January 2020, the three men met again at an Italian restaurant in neighboring El Centro. After bonding over beers and wood-fired pizza, the men headed to the parking lot where Manny handed Suarez two envelopes containing a total of $17,500 in cash.

“We’re good?” Manny asked.

“Trust me,” Romero responded. “In my line of business, I can’t f— up.”

In late January, the three men met again at the Italian restaurant and Manny handed Suarez envelopes stuffed with $17,500 in cash.

Moments later, federal authorities swooped down and arrested the two officials. Manny, it turned out, was an undercover FBI agent. His conversations with the two officials had been recorded and were documented in court filings by federal prosecutors.

Romero and Suarez pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery and were sentenced in May 2021 to two years in prison.

Beyond public embarrassment, Calexico has little to show for its embrace of weed. Major cannabis projects never materialized. Nor did the anticipated jobs or $700,000 in annual tax revenue that had been projected. The city has taken in only about $220,000 since first issuing licenses in 2018.

In interviews with The Times before they reported to federal authorities in June 2021, Romero and Suarez said the undercover agent led their conversations, but both expressed remorse and said they made mistakes.

A key error that officials made, Romero said, was to limit the number of dispensary licenses in the city. That created tense competition for just 12 permits and an incentive for people to try to game the system.

“If you put a number on it, you’ll turn it into a political mess,” Romero said of the process, hours before he was remanded to the custody of U.S. marshals.

“It was just a ticking time bomb.”

Times researcher Scott Wilson and Times Staff Writer Aida Ylanan contributed to this report.

By Kiera Feldman

Nearly two decades ago, on a high desert road in San Bernardino County, Sara Rodriguez was pulled over and arrested with 10 small packets of cannabis in her car. She was convicted of a felony, possession of the drug for sale, and eventually spent more than two years in prison.

In the years since, Rodriguez, 39, became the first in her family to go to college, and in June graduated from UCLA with a master’s degree in social welfare.

But Rodriguez still has a felony on her record — a potential black mark for employers and the state social work licensing board.

When California voters legalized cannabis for recreational use in 2016, one promise was the creation of a legal pathway through the courts for clearing many past marijuana-related convictions or reducing them to a lesser charge.

It was a step championed by reform advocates, meant to right many of the injustices inflicted by the nation’s war on drugs that was disproportionately waged on poor people and communities of color.

But despite a 2018 law intended to speed up and automate the process, tens of thousands of Californians like Rodriguez are still stuck with felonies, misdemeanors and other convictions on their records, a Los Angeles Times investigation found.

At least 34,000 marijuana records still have not been fully processed by the courts, according to an analysis of data provided by court officials throughout the state. The number was more than twice that in August, before The Times began questioning the slow processing times.

The delays in clearing drug charges can have dire consequences for those seeking employment, professional licensing, housing, loans and in other instances in which background checks are required.

The courts have emerged as the primary bottleneck in a process that has entangled the state Department of Justice and prosecutors’ offices in 58 counties. Although a number of counties have moved aggressively to clear records, many others have moved at a snail’s pace. Some courts — including in Riverside and San Bernardino, where Rodriguez was convicted — haven’t fully processed a single case.

Court officials blamed a combination of factors for delays, including COVID-19, staffing shortages, outdated case management systems, old records that require manual review and technical issues.

San Bernardino County Superior Court “was severely impacted by COVID-19 with being partially closed for 75 days, and experienced staffing shortages, illnesses and quarantining, along with severe budget reductions,” spokeswoman Julie Van Hook wrote in an email.

But many advocates see the delays as a continuation of a long pattern of failing to address the disparate impact of drug policies on people of color, especially for Black Californians, who for decades have had the highest arrest rates in the state.

“When it’s an issue that is largely impacting Black people, we move slowly on getting things done,” said Eliana Green, an attorney at the Hood Incubator, which advocates for racial and economic equity in the cannabis industry.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who wrote the law to clear criminal records while he served in the state Legislature, acknowledged problems with its implementation.

“It’s not acceptable. It’s taking too long,” Bonta told The Times in an interview.

About 117,000 Californians have gotten legal relief for their marijuana convictions, Bonta said, but the state has faced significant challenges, particularly given the lack of a centralized statewide records system.

“What a shame!” said Felicia Carbajal, executive director of the Social Impact Center in Los Angeles. “The community deserves better than the half-measures we’re seeing on this.”

Many public defenders and district attorneys shared similar concerns that the state’s effort lacked the necessary resources and technology to succeed.

Yolo County Dist. Atty. Jeff Reisig described the court record systems in California as “totally screwed up.”

“There’s no coordination. Counties don’t communicate with one another. They barely communicate with DOJ,” Reisig said. “You have 58 counties in California and each one is like its own state.”

The 2018 law — Assembly Bill 1793 — was supposed to clear past cannabis convictions en masse, doing away with the need to file individual court petitions — an onerous process that few Californians undertook, whether for lack of resources or awareness it was an option. The burden was placed on the state to automate the process of identifying eligible cases, updating records, and dismissing and sealing many of them so they do not appear on background checks.

The law was the first in the nation to offer automatic record clearance for marijuana convictions. At least six other states looked to California and modeled similar legislation.

“The vision,” said Bonta, was “that the government should have a primary and central role in delivering the existing rights to people, instead of making them go fight for it and find it and take 10 different steps.”

The Justice Department sent district attorneys 191,055 potentially eligible marijuana cases for review. Their deadline was July 1, 2020, to send cases to the courts, and most counties complied.

But the law didn’t give California’s 58 superior courts a deadline to complete their end: updating case records and transmitting them back to the Justice Department, which maintains the statewide criminal history database and responds to background checks.

The Times collected data from more than three dozen superior courts around the state and found many counties are moving slowly. Riverside County Superior Court has not fully processed any of its 21,000 cases.

Many courts were at varying stages: For example, Alameda County has processed 58% of cases, and Santa Cruz County 39%. Kern County is at 18%.

Kern County officials cited technical glitches for the delay in getting cases to the Department of Justice. Santa Cruz officials said their progress had stalled because the court was awaiting a software fix from its record management system vendor.

Some counties have fared better. Pandemic notwithstanding, Santa Clara finished its 11,500 cases in April 2020. Los Angeles finished processing 66,000 cases in late 2021.

The delays are not for lack of funding. The courts got $16.83 million from the state budget to pay for the costs of processing records, such as staffing and development of information technology. The Judicial Council of California, which oversees the superior courts, distributed the money among the counties, but a representative said the agency does not track how the funds are used or how much progress the courts have made.

The Inland Empire has among the lowest clearance rates in the state.

In San Bernardino County, Rodriguez’s felony conviction was one of about 5,400 cannabis cases that were essentially gathering dust. After questions from The Times, the court began reviewing records at the end of 2021, but none of the cases have been completed, a representative confirmed.

Riverside County Superior Court Chief Deputy of Operations Carrie Snuggs pointed to “overall backlogs related to the pandemic,” technical issues and inadequate staffing.

Authorities there had finished reviewing about 3,600 misdemeanors and infractions, but all 17,400 felonies remained. And the court hadn’t sent even the misdemeanors and infractions to the Department of Justice because of an apparent misunderstanding of directions, The Times found. (After questions from The Times, the Justice Department said it was assisting the court in its first transmission of cases.)

“It’s not a priority. This is something that has been mandated by law and they’re still not doing it,” said Shaun LeFlore, an organizer in Riverside with the group All of Us or None, which advocates for formerly incarcerated people. “For those 21,000 people in Riverside or 5,400 people in San Bernardino, they deserve to have their life back.”

When Rodriguez got out of prison, “a felony really felt like dream-crushing,” she said. She was turned down for jobs and, if she hadn’t lived with her mom, probably would have been turned down for housing. Many communities in California have “crime-free housing” policies, which often pressure landlords to exclude tenants with criminal backgrounds. And people can be denied public housing or Section 8 vouchers for drug convictions.

But Rodriguez found a place in higher education and attended Cal Poly Pomona, where she joined a program called Project Rebound, a support network for formerly incarcerated students at Cal State schools. She and her friends in the group helped one another navigate housing and jobs, leading her to pursue a graduate degree at UCLA.

Yet she worried that her career could hit roadblocks until her felony conviction was downgraded to a misdemeanor.

“I just feel very overwhelmed and stuck,” Rodriguez said. “I was under the impression that this would happen automatically, but it’s not.”

Under another recent state law, the social work licensing board at least in theory can’t deny her application based on her conviction alone. But reality could be a different matter, she said, and a misdemeanor looks a lot better than a felony.

Many advocates said the lag in clearing records hits Black and Latino communities especially hard. While national studies show marijuana usage is roughly the same among white, Black and Latino people, in 2015 in California, the marijuana arrest rates for Latinos were 1.4 times higher than white people, and Black Californians were arrested at 3 ½ times the rate of white people, according to a 2016 report by Drug Policy Alliance. That year, Black people were nearly five times more likely than white people to be arrested for a marijuana felony, the report found.

“It creates a permanent underclass. By not purging marijuana records, we’re helping to foster poverty” for Black and brown people, said attorney Vonya Quarles, executive director of Starting Over, which provides services for formerly incarcerated people in the Inland Empire and Los Angeles. “The types of jobs that are available to people with felony convictions are not as good as the types of jobs that are available to people without them.”

Under AB 1793, which applied retroactively for marijuana convictions based on possession, sale, cultivation and transportation, prosecutors had a great deal of discretion: They could challenge cases identified by the Justice Department and were free to add more names to the list of those who qualified for relief. Many prosecutors downgraded felonies to misdemeanors, and the misdemeanors and infractions — which were no longer illegal under Proposition 64 — they dismissed and sealed.

Sealing a case means that the conviction is wiped from the public record. In that sense, it’s “cleared.”

In Los Angeles, then-Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey, facing a reform-minded challenger in the November 2020 election, announced she would petition the court to seal all 66,000 marijuana cases.

L.A. County Superior Court completed updating its records and sent the bulk of its cases to the Department of Justice in April, a representative said.

Statewide, the Justice Department has yet to seal about 10,000 cases, and 4,000 of those convictions are from L.A.

But the department has developed ways to circumvent some potential problems, officials said. For example, some background checks that go through the department — such as those for public housing and employment — are flagged to expedite sealing marijuana convictions if they appear.

Los Angeles County Deputy Public Defender Nick Stewart-Oaten said the courts, the Department of Justice and the police have yet to fully synchronize information. He said he is aware of at least two cases in which people were jailed and falsely accused of felonies because their marijuana convictions hadn’t been updated at either the state or local level.

This fall, Lacey’s successor, George Gascón, announced that his office had unearthed an additional 58,000 cannabis convictions and would petition that they be sealed.

Alameda County, which includes Oakland, didn’t send its first batch of cases to the Department of Justice until June 2021, court officials said. Only 4,718 court records have been updated and transmitted so far, with 3,438 cases remaining.

Alameda Court Executive Officer Chad Finke said the court has been short-staffed during the pandemic and hiring has been difficult. The remaining cases require manual review, as many of them are old or not in the court’s electronic record system, Finke said.

“Meanwhile, those staff that we do have in our Criminal division have other work that they must perform every day to ensure that defendants’ rights are protected, deadlines are met, etc.,” Finke wrote in an email.

One of the languishing marijuana cases in Alameda belonged to Justin, who asked to be identified by his nickname to avoid questions from his employer.

He was arrested at 18 after he said cops caught him carrying just over an ounce of weed in a Mason jar. In 2007, he was convicted of felony marijuana possession and sentenced to three years of probation.

After probation, the court reduced Justin’s felony to a misdemeanor. Until recently, he had no idea laws were on the books that should have wiped his record clean.

He worried his criminal record would get in the way of securing a visa to work abroad. Eventually, he connected with an attorney at Oakland-based Root & Rebound, who helped him petition the court. The process took about four months, and in mid-October his record was cleared.

“There was a certain disservice being done,” Justin, 33, said. “Not only was it not automatic, there was never any transparency about the process.”

It took San Diego County Superior Court until the end of September — more than a year and a half — to finish reviewing 35,662 records. Nearly 26,000 of those convictions were felonies. During the pandemic, creating virtual courtrooms, electronic filing and livestreaming hearings “have taken priority and resources,” court spokeswoman Julie Myres said in an email.

But by mid-November, none of the cases had been sent to the Department of Justice to update its criminal history database, officials said. Since then, the department said it assisted San Diego on its first successful transmission. (San Diego recently sent 25,550 cases to the Justice Department, officials said.)

San Diego received $2.196 million from the state in anticipation of requiring extensive clerical resources for the marijuana records, but the court only spent about $28,000, according to Judicial Council data. The court created computer programs that nearly eliminated the need for clerks, Myres said, and the leftover money will be returned to the state.

In December, the state Department of Justice sent out a bulletin imploring prosecutors and courts to speed up.

“We urge prosecuting agencies and courts to prioritize implementation of the cannabis resentencing process … so Californians can promptly obtain the relief to which they are entitled under the law,” the bulletin said.

Bonta said his agency is reaching out to the courts to offer resources and support to “make sure there’s clarity on the system.”

“We’re learning from this how better systems can lead ... to real on-the-ground impacts for real people,” Bonta said. “It’s an important lesson and we need to do better.”

Meanwhile, Rodriguez recently contacted the public defender’s office in San Bernardino County to begin filing a petition on her own. They warned her the process would take six to eight months.

The social work licensing board application had an entire section asking her to explain her felony. Knowing the long-ago conviction will still show up in a mandatory background check, she drafted a long narrative about her marijuana arrest, her prison time, her rehabilitation and the many awards and achievements she’s racked up since.

“It’s a lot of work always having to explain myself,” Rodriguez said. Eventually, she hoped, she wouldn’t have to.

By Adam Elmahrek

When UCLA started its cannabis research initiative five years ago, the university hailed the undertaking as one of the first academic programs in the world dedicated to studying the health effects of pot.

Legalization was quickly taking hold around the country, and the cannabis industry was attempting to transform the plant’s image from an illicit substance that gets you high to a health and wellness product.

The Times asked UCLA officials whether the university accepted donations from the industry to support the program. They said no.

However, documents obtained by the newspaper, eventually released by UCLA under the California Public Records Act, show that cannabis companies and investors provided at least some of the early financial support, writing checks for tens of thousands of dollars in donations and assisting with fundraising events.

The industry support underscores potential conflicts of interest as pot goes mainstream and researchers try to assess the health and other effects of cannabis. A marijuana investor and foundations with ties to the newly legal cannabis industry have donated millions of dollars to university research programs studying claims of the plant’s medical virtues, raising questions about how independent the scientific research can be.

Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and UC San Diego are among the schools that have accepted multimillion-dollar gifts in recent years.

At a New York fundraiser in 2019 hosted by members of the cannabis industry, the UCLA program’s executive director at the time appealed for donations, promising groundbreaking research into pot’s potential to treat a variety of serious diseases, according to a video of the event reviewed by The Times. He told the audience that the research would be crucial to ensuring that cannabis remain legal and available to future generations.

Those kinds of comments trouble academic ethics experts, who warn that the cannabis-related donations echo past efforts by various industries, most notably Big Tobacco, to bankroll scientific research in which they have a vested interest in the outcome. A 2003 study showed a link between donations from industry and research outcomes favorable to the donors.

“Should universities accept money from Marlboro to study the benefits of smoking or Coca-Cola to study the benefits of sugar?” said John Ayers, a public health professor at UC San Diego. “Both of these analogies are universally unacceptable because of the self-evident potential conflicts of interest and a legacy where for-profit companies have routinely interfered with the science.”

The universities accepting the funds have embarked on research that aims to fill a significant void in scientific knowledge about the health effects of cannabis, a gap caused in part by the federal government’s decades-long classification of cannabis as a Schedule I controlled substance. The classification is reserved for drugs considered to have no currently accepted medical use and have high potential for abuse. The possession of recreational cannabis by adults is now legal in 21 states and Washington, D.C., and weed has become a multibillion-dollar business.

The cannabis industry markets the compounds of the plant — both the substance that produces a high as well as nonpsychoactive chemicals such as cannabidiol, known as CBD — as health and wellness products and even a potential cure-all for some ailments, like insomnia and chronic pain.

Among the largest gifts was a $9-million donation in 2019 to MIT and Harvard by Charles Broderick, an alumnus of both schools and an investor in Canadian cannabis businesses, according to Harvard’s gift announcement. Broderick gave $4.5 million to each university for research into how cannabis affects human health. MIT researchers will also be looking into whether cannabis can treat schizophrenia.

Other announcements have been less transparent about donors’ ties to the cannabis industry.

The Wholistic Research and Education Foundation partnered with the Ray and Tye Noorda Foundation to make a $4.7-million gift in 2018 to fund a UC San Diego study into whether cannabis can treat autism, according to the university’s gift announcement. The foundations partnered again to give $740,000 to the University of Utah to research how cannabis affects the brain, the school said.

The news releases didn’t mention that the founders of a CBD products company serve in key positions at both foundations.

The Wholistic foundation partners with companies in the cannabis industry to support cannabis research, according to the nonprofit’s website, and said it takes “a ‘venture philanthropy’ approach to our work by identifying the top researchers and having our Medical Advisory Committee collaborate with them in study design.” The foundation is also sponsoring a UC Irvine study into whether CBD and cannabis can effectively treat anxiety.

Andy Noorda, who has been chairman and co-founder of Wholistic and an officer at the Ray and Tye Noorda Foundation, said he became interested in cannabinoids as a treatment after seeing it help his son, who struggles with cerebral palsy. He said he applied a CBD cream to his son’s arm, and for the first time the child was able to relax his arm enough to open his hand.

He downplayed his ties to the industry, saying that he and Wholistic’s other co-founder, Pelin Thorogood, sold their business two or three years ago. He has a 13-acre hemp farm in Utah where he produces cannabinoid distillates, he said. But he said he’s never made money off cannabis and is not part of “Big Cannabis,” merely running a “farm that’s barely trying to make it.”

“I’m not trying to make money. I’m really trying to make a product to help people,” Noorda said.

In a statement to The Times, Thorogood said none “of the studies included companies or products with whom we had any association, and thus, there was no conflict of interest at any time.”

Officials with the universities say that the foundations have had no involvement with the research and that they’ve faced no pressure to produce results that would favor the industry.

“I never got any indication as to what kind of findings they were hoping to get,” said Jace King, a researcher working on the University of Utah study.

King said preliminary findings indicated that CBD on its own has no more effect on brain activity than taking a placebo.

“Harvard has stringent rules that shield against undue donor influence and interference,” a Harvard Medical School spokesperson said in an emailed statement to The Times. “Donors have no role in the conceptualization, design, execution, or analysis of the research, do not have access to or a right to review unpublished data and do not have any influence over the peer-reviewed publication of the research findings.”

UCLA, meanwhile, initially declined to publicly disclose the identity of donors to its Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoids. Dr. Timothy W. Fong, a senior researcher with the UCLA program, told The Times that the university accepts no funding from cannabis businesses. A spokesman with the university also denied that the program received industry funding.

However, after multiple requests from The Times, the university eventually released a list of donors showing that some gifts did come from the cannabis industry.

Donors included GSW Creative Corp., which sells cannabis vape pens; NuggMD, a company that makes an app connecting patients with physicians who recommend cannabis; Ventura County Cannabis & Wellness, which has been acquiring dispensaries; Archytas Ventures, a cannabis investment firm; and the Atlantic Group FPPM Inc., a furniture company co-founded by cannabis industry investor Roger Abramson.

The university listed the identity of the donor of a $50,000 gift as “anonymous.”

Asked about these donors, Fong said he wasn’t aware of all donations to the program. He added that he and his team have walked out of meetings with cannabis companies that wanted to fund specific projects because he found their requests “unscrupulous.”

Gifts from businesses and people serving the industry and disclosed on the donors list amounted to more than $100,000.

That doesn’t include other fundraising help. Members of the cannabis industry have hosted at least two fundraisers for the center, according to university records.

The program’s research director has also received millions of dollars in grants from the National Institutes of Health, a federal government agency that funds biomedical research.

Some in the cannabis industry are eager to drum up studies that would bolster the already widespread marketing claims.

Scientific credibility is the “missing link” in establishing trust with customers, according to a web post by Trailblazers, a cannabis industry booster group, announcing a partnership with the Wholistic foundation.

It was also a “key takeaway” from its gathering of cannabis business leaders at a ski resort in Utah in 2019, the post said.

Among the speakers at the Trailblazers event was Jeff Chen, the founder and then-executive director of the UCLA initiative. Chen had been personally soliciting the industry for donations, speaking at fundraisers and promising research into cannabis’ potential to treat cancer, Alzheimer’s and the opioid addiction crisis gripping the nation.

At a 2019 fundraiser held in New York’s trendy Tribeca neighborhood, Chen said the studies would be instrumental in making sure the public will always have access to cannabis, which remains federally illegal and which some states still prohibit. The fundraiser was held by the cannabis arm of the marketing firm ForceBrands, which donated $25,000 to the UCLA program, according to donor records.

“If we do these studies, using natural, democratized, generic cannabis plant, you have essentially created the precedent as to why the cannabis plant should always be allowed, for all future generations,” Chen said in a video of the event reviewed by The Times.

Chen has cultivated other ties to the industry, having been an investor or an advisor with several companies associated with cannabis, according to his LinkedIn page.

It’s unclear whether those relationships existed while he was the UCLA cannabis program’s executive director. Chen stepped down from the position in June 2020 after questions from The Times and public records requests about his fundraising. His LinkedIn page stated that some investment and advisory positions began that same year, but also says he was an investor starting in 2018 in Solo Sciences Inc., which sells authentication technology to cannabis companies to prevent counterfeiting.

In a statement to The Times on Wednesday, Chen said he “had no financial interests in any cannabis companies while serving as executive director” of UCLA’s program but “did serve in volunteer advisory roles in cannabis-related organizations in areas such as education, research, and event/conference production.”

He said that he “never promised positive study outcomes in his research presentations” and that all donors and donations for the program were vetted by an independent UCLA commission, which rejected some.

Asked about Chen’s industry relationships before he stepped down, officials with UCLA Health and the David Geffen School of Medicine said they were unaware of any potential conflicts of interest related to Chen’s employment with the university and his relationship with cannabis interests.

“Staff and faculty are expected to conduct themselves in a manner consistent with high ethical standards,” the statement said.

Some donors said that they were aware their gifts could create the perception of a conflict of interest but that they weren’t pushing for research to result in any specific benefits for the industry.

Alex Milligan, the co-founder of NuggMD, which gave the UCLA program $50,000 in 2017, said he gave because of the dearth of research into the plant’s medical uses.

Milligan said his company’s gift came with no strings attached. He said he has no influence over the program’s research.

“What I can definitely attest to is the rigor ... to make sure that that risk for conflict of interest is not present whatsoever,” Milligan said.

Private industry funding of biomedical research has become increasingly common over the decades, to the point where it is now the largest source of funding for research. Past studies have shown industry-funded research has a greater tendency to produce results favorable to the industry, according to Joanna Cohen, professor of disease prevention at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“The research is strong enough that we know the source of the funds is problematic,” Cohen said. “There’s no reason to think cannabis will be any different.”

In 2003, a study conducted at the Yale School of Medicine found that industry-funded studies were 3.6 times more likely to produce outcomes favorable to their sponsors.

Biomedical researchers say there are greater safeguards in place today than in the past. Academic journals where studies are published require more transparency, and usually include conflict of interest sections for the authors to disclose financial ties.

Raphael Gruener, professor emeritus at University of Arizona’s College of Medicine and an expert on cannabis research, said such reforms have left him less concerned about conflicts of interest in university studies. But those reforms rest on the university’s willingness to disclose funding sources, he said.

“If you insert this kind of protected anonymity, it raises the question, is this biased research funding, or is it objective?” Gruener said.

After leaving his post at UCLA, Chen teamed up with Thorogood, Wholistic’s president, to start the research company Radicle Science, which for a price will conduct studies on behalf of cannabis businesses and other supplement makers. In one study involving 3,000 participants, the company claims to have found that botanical products containing CBD relieved anxiety and improved sleeping, quality of life and general well-being.

The Radicle Science website says its research will allow businesses to “get objective proof to enable strong claims, drive revenue” and asks whether they’re ready to “finally show your product wasn’t just placebo.”

By Matthew Ormseth

When the cannabis dispensary Hierba opened on Cesar Chavez Avenue in October, customers had “sticker shock,” Guillermo Menjivar, the general manager, recalled.

Even with a 30% opening week discount, shoppers still couldn’t understand why, for instance, a gram of First Class Funk cost $15.

They could be forgiven: Until Hierba — the first legal dispensary in the city’s Boyle Heights neighborhood — opened its doors, the only options in the area were unlicensed storefronts that charge far less for cannabis products because they don’t abide by the raft of taxes and regulatory obligations that state and local officials impose on legitimate operations.

A mile east of Menjivar’s clean, brightly lit business, in fact, an unmarked and unlicensed shop had put a folding sign out on the sidewalk that read, “4.5 grams for $20.” Inside the dimly lit room was a bare-bones array of grimy mason jars piled high with bargain-priced buds.

The continuing success of illegal cannabis shops and the struggles of legal ones in the heart of L.A.’s Eastside offer a stark illustration of how California’s legalization of marijuana has gone wrong. Far from being eradicated, the black market is booming in plain sight, luring customers away from aboveboard retailers with their cheaper — if untested and unregulated — product.

Unlicensed dispensaries have become hotbeds of crime. Sometimes the operators are the perpetrators, authorities say, selling cocaine and methamphetamine alongside cannabis. At other times, they are the victims. In August 2021, a man was gunned down in the doorway of the illegal dispensary he ran in East Los Angeles.

Authorities have made little progress in curbing the cannabis black market. Prosecutions are rare, according to court records, and shop employees say some dispensaries don’t even wait a day to reopen after being shut down by the police.

“I don’t see it slowing down,” said one security guard at an illegal dispensary that has been raided four times in the last year and a half. “Just look up and down the street. It’s everywhere. And everyone’s making money.”

In the battle over black-market and legal cannabis, Indiana Street is a dividing line. To its west is the city of Los Angeles, where local laws allow retail cannabis businesses to operate, provided the required licenses and permits are obtained.

On the other side of Indiana Street is East Los Angeles, unincorporated county land where cannabis licenses are not issued and it remains illegal for anyone to operate a dispensary.

Investigators for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department say there are 25 to 30 illegal dispensaries operating in the East Los Angeles area — the most of any of the department’s patrol regions. In all, there are an estimated 150 to 160 illegal dispensaries in the department’s jurisdiction, which includes unincorporated county land and cities that contract with the sheriff, according to a sheriff’s narcotics investigator who asked to remain anonymous because he works undercover.

Most of East L.A.’s dispensaries are clustered along Whittier Boulevard. Long the commercial heart of the neighborhood, the boulevard is crowded with narrow storefronts offering money transfers, phone repairs and tailoring, pawnshops and medical clinics, shoe stores and immigration law practices. Racks of discounted clothing compete for sidewalk space with women selling aguas frescas and chopped fruit.

Some of the dozen or so illegal dispensaries operating on any given day along the boulevard advertise openly, with signage on the property and Yelp pages. Others are more discreet, changing their names or forgoing names altogether. One shop covered its windows with signage from the car insurance agency next door.

When undercover detectives asked employees in the shop’s lobby if they sold insurance, they laughed and said no, according to a search warrant application. Detectives served the warrant last September, seizing cannabis, cash from the register and a safe, two handguns, a rifle, a drum ammunition magazine and bags of what authorities suspected was cocaine, court records show.

A Times reporter visited the dispensary two months after the raid. Through the first door was a gloomy lobby with couches pushed up against the walls, a vending machine in a corner and a door at the back with a sign that read, “We’re open.” Through that door, then another one, was a small room lined with glass display cases. Inside were jars full of cannabis priced from $8 to $10 a gram.

The sole employee said he was just a clerk and couldn’t say who managed the dispensary. A request for comment left with the clerk wasn’t returned.

Dozens of affidavits filed at the East Los Angeles courthouse to obtain search warrants make clear that for most dispensaries along Whittier Boulevard, being raided by the police is no deterrent. One shop on Whittier Boulevard has been searched by the Sheriff’s Department four times in the last year and a half, most recently in February, when detectives carried off its inventory and $819 in cash.

The dispensary’s security guard described a recent raid to a Times reporter. Deputies broke down the door, seized all the product and money, and cited him and several other employees. With a court date approaching, the guard said he didn’t plan to show up and predicted the authorities wouldn’t pursue the case.

The security guard, who declined to give his name, said he had worked at a Marshalls department store before getting the job at the dispensary. He said he didn’t know who owns the shop, the source of the cannabis it sells or how much money it makes. He and other employees were “just trying to make our bread,” he said.

“People come in and they’re appreciative because it’s a lot cheaper than if they went somewhere legal,” the guard said, noting that the price they see is the price they pay — no taxes added.

Down Whittier Boulevard, a dispensary called Whittier’s Best Buds has been raided five times in the last year, search warrants show.

Investigators seeking a judge’s permission to search an unlicensed dispensary and carry off evidence — cannabis, digital video recorders, cash, paperwork that might indicate its ownership structure — have a low bar to clear, search warrant records show. It is often as simple as noting people entering a storefront empty-handed and leaving with small white bags, walking into a shop in plainclothes and asking an employee about marijuana prices, or citing a dispensary’s Yelp page.

Detectives can also apply for a court order to shut off the business’ power for 90 days, although, as a deputy wrote in seeking yet another warrant to search Whittier’s Best Buds, operators “find creative ways to power the business.” When the shop was raided in February, detectives carried off a Predator 3500 generator along with cannabis and $4,159 in cash.

Sandwiched between a cellphone store and a shop selling women’s clothing, the dispensary offers grams of “top shelf” marijuana for as little as $8, according to a menu taped above a security window. In the dispensary’s lobby, which was painted with a large, colorful cartoon character inhaling from a bong, a man who identified himself as the owner complained to a Times reporter about the Sheriff’s Department’s raids, which he described as “legal robbery.”

Wearing a baseball cap that read “F— Joe Biden,” he said his initial goal was to obtain a license and the necessary permits to run an above-board business in an area of the county that allows it. “Lots of people want to get licensed, but the government doesn’t want to give it to them,” he said.

“Tax, permit, license,” he said, ticking off the things for which a legal operator has to pay. “We’re going to take your money. Without [the] license, we’re going to f— you up with raids. Either way, you’re going to lose.”

The raids have not made him consider shutting down, he said. “Why am I going to close shop? People are crying for this stuff, crying for weed.”

Many of the people arrested on suspicion of operating or working at illegal dispensaries in unincorporated parts of the county are not prosecuted. Those who are typically don’t face cannabis offenses, but weapons charges after being caught with guns, according to a review of court records. Even then, some defendants were allowed to enter diversion programs and have their charges dismissed.

One man was arrested at Whittier’s Best Buds on suspicion of maintaining a place to sell controlled substances, a felony, and was found to be carrying a handgun, records show. Charged five months later with a misdemeanor crime of possessing a concealed gun, the man avoided prosecution by entering a diversion program. After he showed he’d taken a gun safety class and registered the weapon, the judge ordered the Sheriff’s Department to return $600 in cash and the newly registered Glock 19 handgun they’d seized from him, records show.

Greg Risling, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, said prosecutors charge people with crimes associated with operating illegal dispensaries “when the evidence has been sufficient to prove.” The typical charge, Risling said, is a violation of the county prohibition on cannabis dispensaries, a misdemeanor.

Lt. Howard Fuchs of the Sheriff’s Department’s Narcotics Bureau disputed this. “The district attorney will not file these cases whatsoever,” he said. “Even if it’s near a school, they’ve told us they will not file these cases.”

The lieutenant said prosecuting people who operate or work at illegal dispensaries — and securing meaningful penalties — would be the most effective way to shut them down. Other strategies, like obtaining court orders to cut off a dispensary’s utilities, are easily circumvented, he said, while civil actions pursued by county lawyers to evict or lock out illegal operators are time-consuming and difficult to carry out in a meaningful way given the scale of the problem.

When it comes to charging people for crimes related to illegal dispensaries, “there’s this attitude: It’s just cannabis, we’re not going to incarcerate people for that,” Fuchs said. “Well, you’re just telling the legal market, ‘Good luck.’”

Illegal dispensaries, meanwhile, are making money “hand over fist,” Fuchs said. His detectives have seized cash and ledgers documenting sales that indicate the busier ones are making as much as $25,000 a day in revenue, he said.

An illegal dispensary can cost just a few thousand dollars to open, investigators say: rent, product, some display cases, a surveillance system, wages for a few employees.

Compare this to Menjivar’s dispensary, Hierba. The shop’s backers have invested several million dollars and worked for nearly three years to open it, he said. Driving up the start-up cost, he said, are delays in the application process: state regulators certified the dispensary in April 2021, but city authorities did not allow it to open until October.

For some applicants, the process has taken as long as 18 months, Menjivar said. All the while they must keep paying rent. “You’re literally at their mercy,” he said.

Legal operators must also abide by local regulations that dictate where dispensaries can operate, so called “green zones” away from schools and playgrounds. This restricts the real estate available to a scrupulous dispensary operator.

All of this contributes to the price that consumers pay, Menjivar said. Certification that the product has been tested for toxins, excise taxes on wholesale purchases, sales taxes levied by state and local authorities — “it costs more to do it the right way,” he said.

Vito Ceccia, a detective supervisor who oversees enforcement of unlicensed cannabis shops for the LAPD, said police work alone won’t be enough to ensure legal dispensaries survive. Local officials will need to educate the public about the benefits of patronizing licensed shops and stress the quality control that goes into their products.

“We realize this is not a law-enforcement-specific issue anymore,” he said. “We’re not going to arrest our way out of unlicensed cannabis sales.”

The evening of Aug. 11, 2021, Daniel Franco was standing outside the illegal dispensary that he operated on Whittier Boulevard when a barrage of gunshots were fired from across the street.

As Franco tried to retreat inside, a bullet went through his head. He died on the floor of the shop, six feet from his revolver, which was resting on a table, according to a coroner’s report. A coroner’s investigator noted bullet holes in the walls and “large amounts” of cannabis heaped in plastic trays in the room where Franco died.

Twelve shell casings fired from an assault rifle were found across the street. Eight more casings lay near the doorway of the dispensary, indicating that the shooter had chased after Franco, the investigator wrote.

His death is one example of the violence that plagues illegal dispensaries, whose owners, employees and customers are vulnerable to being robbed, swindled or killed, authorities say. Nonfatal crimes are rarely reported for fear of drawing scrutiny from the police.

It’s unclear why Franco was targeted; the sheriff’s detective investigating his death, Scott Giles, declined to discuss the case. “We don’t want the public or the people responsible to know what we know,” he said. No arrests have been made.

In a search warrant served in connection with the shooting, sheriff’s investigators said they believed Franco’s shop may have been associated with another illegal dispensary. A week after the killing, someone called the Sheriff’s Department to report seeing two men, one carrying an AR-15-style assault rifle, enter a store on Cesar Chavez Avenue a mile and a half northwest of Franco’s shop, a detective wrote in an affidavit used to obtain the warrant.

When deputies responded to the call and entered the store, they discovered it was a dispensary. Cannabis, hashish, honey oil and, in a corner, an AR-15 were in plain view, according to the warrant. Three men and a woman were detained, and detectives carried off the rifle, the cannabis products and $971 in cash.

Deputies had raided the shop — a blue stucco building with an iron security door and no signage — three times in the last four months. Detectives believed the dispensary was “related” to Franco’s shop “because the same employees have been arrested at both locations on multiple occasions,” the warrant says.

One of the men detained that day, Israel Zuniga, has been charged with possessing a concealed gun in a public place, records show. He was arrested at the same dispensary three months later and charged with maintaining a place for the purposes of selling marijuana. In March, he was arrested a third time at the shop and now faces a second charge of possessing a concealed firearm, records show. Zuniga, 23, has pleaded not guilty to the charges — all misdemeanors — and remains free, pending the resolution of his cases. He has not been charged in connection to Franco’s killing.

The dispensary on Cesar Chavez Avenue where Zuniga was detained remains open. In its reception area, a Times reporter asked the clerk to speak with the shop’s proprietor. “Hold on,” he said, and disappeared through a door in the back of the store. He returned about a minute later and said he would have to “kindly decline” due to “privacy reasons.”

Most of the illegal dispensaries in East Los Angeles are being “taxed” by gangs, said the undercover sheriff’s investigator. The more sophisticated gangs demand money, while the cruder ones are content with free product, the investigator said.

“They know they’re both doing illicit activity, and no one’s going to say anything,” he said.

Two of the area’s largest gangs, Varrio Nuevo Estrada and East L.A.-13, have opened dispensaries of their own, according to the investigator, staffing them with gang members and selling not just marijuana but methamphetamine, heroin and guns.

“They saw it was not complicated at all to run a cannabis storefront,” he said.

One security guard who works at several illegal dispensaries said gang members had been trying to tax the owners of a shop where he worked on Whittier Boulevard. The guard, a 26-year-old Compton resident who earns $15 an hour to stand guard with an unregistered handgun, asked not to be identified because he is involved in illegal activity.

Around 9 one night last September, he noticed several men standing outside the dispensary. It seemed like they were casing the shop, he said, so he walked outside and hid his gun in his car: If he was about to get robbed, he thought he’d rather not have it on him.

Eight men walked into the dispensary. One pointed a gun at him and told him to lay down and put his hands behind his head, he recalled. They took his phone and his keys. He heard the screams of the women who worked as bud tenders, he said, and he thought they were all about to die.

The men took “everything we had,” he said, including the shop’s product, money from the register, and money and personal property from him and other employees.

He believed the men who robbed the dispensary were from the same gang that had been trying to tax it. As far as he knew, he said, the owners never reported the robbery or the extortion.

“What are the shops going to do?” he asked. “Call the cops, when it’s illegal?”

Credits

Reporter: Matthew Ormseth
Editor: Joel Rubin
Photographer: Brian van der Brug
Photo Editing: Keith Bedford
Copy Editing: Jim Buzinski
Page Design: Keith Bedford
Audience Engagement: Mary Kate Metivier