United States: The new war on weed

When Connecticut legalized recreational marijuana in 2021, the state’s lieutenant governor, Susan Bysiewicz, boasted that the new law was “crafted to repair the wounds left by the War on Drugs.” The move followed the same rationale that had motivated legalization in 18 other states: fewer resources exhausted on policing a drug that legalization advocates view as largely unharmful, fewer lives derailed by what they argue to be excessive lockups. In a sense, the plan worked: Possession arrests have fallen precipitously in the years since. But as Connecticut’s number of legal neighborhood weed shops has grown, so too has a problem that the state, like others that have eased marijuana laws, was seemingly ill-prepared to deal with: the rise of illegal marijuana shops.

Such shops are largely indistinguishable from state-sanctioned ones. They look the same and operate in the same neighborhoods, but they’ve never gone through the required licensing process to become a seller. (Beyond asking for paperwork, you’d be unlikely to know if you were shopping in an illegal store.) And they have become a headache for local law-enforcement agencies that want to crack down. “This is an epidemic within the state of Connecticut,” Ryan Evarts, a sergeant at the Norwalk Police Department, told me. The problem has become so pronounced that some states, including Connecticut, have recently passed laws giving law enforcement greater powers to police these shops.

The result has been a strange new inversion: states with some of the loosest marijuana restrictions in the nation arresting and charging sellers of a drug that was made legal at least in part to move away from such charges. Since the beginning of last year, Connecticut has arrested dozens for selling pot out of illegal shops. From April to June 2025, California, supposedly a bastion of recreational cannabis, arrested 93 people for illegally selling, growing, and distributing weed, according to the state’s Department of Cannabis Control—the largest number of weed arrests in a three-month period since the state legalized the drug. Similar arrests have also been made within the past year in Illinois; Arizona; New Jersey; New York; Ohio; Washington, D.C.; and Washington State. It’s not just the owners of smoke shops who have been targeted—so have rank-and-file employees, according to news reports.