Authorities Claim Colorado's Legal Weed Is Being Exported to the Rest of the US

In early December, local police in Nashville, Tennessee nabbed a couple carrying nearly 500 pounds of Colorado's finest cannabis and $355,000 in cash. The alleged partners-in-crime were from Breckenridge, Colorado, part of a group accused of traveling around the US selling pot diverted from their home state, according to the Nashville cops.

The case is a typical example of diversion, or trafficking weed that's legal — whether for recreational or medicinal purposes — from one state to another where the drug is still banned. Diversion has long been an issue in California, where the state's primo marijuana is consistently trafficked out of state to more lucrative, less competitive markets.

But federal officials say Colorado's alleged weed exports are a growing concern. The state's recreational pot market has now operated for an entire year, and medical marijuana has been legal there since 2000. Diversion from Colorado has already prompted a legal challenge from neighboring Nebraska and Oklahoma, which filed a civil action in the US Supreme Court earlier this month.

Although statistics aren't available yet for 2014, figures from a 2013 report by the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) — one of several federally designated zones designed to coordinate drug-control efforts among local, state and federal agencies — show that pot busts on the region's highways are on the rise. There were reportedly 274 seizures of Colorado marijuana destined for other states in 2012, compared to 54 in 2005 — a 407 percent increase. The 2012 busts netted more than 7,000 pounds of Colorado pot.

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"From what I'm seeing so far this year, from what we're hearing, there's going to be another increase in 2014," Tom Gorman, director of the Rocky Mountain HIDTA, told VICE News.

Gorman claimed that pot supplied by major drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) and legal grow operations has fueled the spike in diversion.

"We still see marijuana coming out of recreational sites," he said. "And we've seen that edibles have expanded substantially. For example, we got word from El Paso, Texas that they received their first Colorado-produced edibles this year. That's something we haven't see before."

Marijuana industry groups disagree with the theory that recreational legalization has caused an increase in diversion. Taylor West, deputy director of the Colorado-based National Cannabis Industry Association, cited data from state pot tax revenues and told VICE News that the recreational pot industry is tightly regulated. West suggested that the spike in seizures and arrests is the result of increased law enforcement efforts to prevent interstate trafficking.

"[The statistics] seem to be showing that [law enforcement] has significantly been ramping up their efforts to catch people involved in interstate trafficking," West said. "If you're doing more searches, it's not surprising that you'd find more [trafficking] taking place. I think what you see with a legal system that requires to inventory tracking, is an advantage to law enforcement officials that are looking to find people acting illegally."

West noted that it's difficult — if not impossible — to circumvent Colorado's sophisticated system that tracks legal pot from plant to point of sale.

Both Gorman and a DEA spokesman in Washington, DC acknowledged that law enforcement is more interested than ever in preventing interstate trafficking. But they also pointed out that the Justice Department has issued guidance dictating that those in compliance with state marijuana laws are not an enforcement priority.

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Jeffrey Dorschner, a spokesman for the Colorado US Attorney's office, claimed that Mexican cartels are taking pot seedlings from Colorado back south of the border. "They're buying marijuana grown here, and shipping it back down there in order to replicate it," Dorschner said.

Dorschner pointed to several recent high-profile prosecutions of Mexican traffickers who moved multi-ton loads of weed through Colorado, using drug pipelines already in existence to ship the Mexican pot (along with cocaine and meth) to major drug markets across the Midwest, East Coast, and Canada.

One case involved a cartel using Mexican Mennonites as drug mules. Another revolved around Colombian nationals making illicit investments in Colorado pot operations with the likely intent of producing marijuana to be shipped out of state. Gorman, the HIDTA director, speculated that cartels and other organized crime elements have become interested in Colorado as a base of operations because they believe — mistakenly, he said — that legal recreational pot will make it easier to operate.

The lawsuit filed by Oklahoma and Nebraska claims that Colorado's recreational legalization is undermining their own state marijuana bans, "draining their treasuries, and placing stress on their criminal justice systems."

Although Colorado's recreational pot law did not go into effect until January 1, 2014, annual weed arrests have increased dramatically since the state approved medical marijuana — increasing from 500 in 2000 to 7,665 in 2013.

Nebraska's incoming attorney general Doug Peterson claimed that the Justice Department was turning a blind eye on Colorado while pot "wreaks all sorts of havoc on surrounding states."

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Marijuana policy reform advocates see the problem beyond the narrow rubric of "Colorado's laws are the problem." Paul Armentano, the deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), placed diversion in the context of existing demand for marijuana nationwide — and antiquated laws that attempt to curtail the demand via enforcement and incarceration.

"The reality is that in Nebraska and Oklahoma there is a preexisting market demand for marijuana," Armentano told VICE News. "Whether it's from Mexico, or California, and so on, there is going to be a consistent stream of marijuana in that state. The only difference is that in Colorado it's a regulated state-licensed product. Because one state has a legal market, that legal market is going to affect availability in surrounding markets. It's demand for the product that's driving the industry."

Despite the increase in marijuana arrests and interdictions, questions still remain about how much of Colorado's recreational marijuana is moving across state lines.

Gorman admitted that many, if not most, law enforcement agencies around the country aren't required to determine the origin of the marijuana they seize, so it's virtually impossible to get a clear picture of what's happening to Colorado's weed.

"[Origin] information isn't always logged," the HIDTA director said. "I wouldn't know the entire scope of diversion because the only way we hear about it is through word of mouth."

Follow Max Cherney on Twitter: @chernandburn