DAILY COVER STORY

Weed vs. Greed: How America Botched Legalizing Pot

ByWill Yakowicz Forbes Staff

Thanks to overregulation and overtaxation, the U.S. government has blown the easiest revenue opportunity ever—legalized drugs. But it’s not too late to save the $72 billion cannabis industry from the perils of prohibition.

Five hours north on Route 101 from San Francisco to Humboldt County, through a few cool redwood groves, Johnny Casali turns on a wood chipper and empties 55 pounds of pot into the chute. Casali grew cannabis illegally under the California sun for four decades. Now a state-licensed grower, he’s destroying what used to be his cash crop.

“It doesn’t matter how good your product is; there’s so much supply in California that it’s a race to the bottom,” says Casali, founder of the Garberville-based Huckleberry Hill Farms, which produces about 500 pounds of craft cannabis a year from the two small greenhouses in his backyard in America’s weed country. “It feels like I’m a lettuce farmer right now—I’m working on the smallest of small margins.”



Green Acreage: Glass House Brands’ 1.5-million-square-foot greenhouse in Camarillo, California, will eventually bring 200,000 pounds of pot to market, enough to influence the wholesale price of bud.ETHAN PINES FOR FORBES

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