Miyares wants law enforcement to crack down on stores that are distributing marijuana

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Attorney General Jason Miyares is calling on law enforcement to crack down on the stores that are distributing marijuana under the guise of being “membership” stores.

“Ultimately what I’d like to see is individuals who have authority to bring indictments,” he told Cardinal News.

Before I explain the context of those remarks, let’s review the current state of marijuana in Virginia.

Virginia is the only state where personal possession of small amounts of marijuana is legal but it remains illegal to sell that legal product (which now generally goes by the contemporary name of cannabis).

Over the past two years, Southwest Virginia, in particular, has seen a proliferation of stores where you can openly obtain marijuana. In some cases, these stores are set up as “membership clubs,” but anyone who walks in is given a membership card. I’ve documented some of these stores in previous columns. Others have purported to be “adult share” operations, where if you buy a legal but overpriced product, the store will “share” weed as a “gift.” I’ve also seen stores selling a green, vegetative product that is never described as marijuana but which testing has shown very much is plain old-fashioned weed.

These aren’t back-alley operations. These are typically stores out on Main Street. The one in Marion is across the street from a church. It’s now possible to drive from Montgomery County to the Tennessee state line and find a cannabis store in every county or city you go through. “It’s spreading like wildfire,” Miyares said. “I am incredibly frustrated by what I’ve seen and heard by your reporting. I walk a block or two from Capitol Square in Richmond and I smell the strong odor of the hippie lettuce — and that’s frustrating.”

Why aren’t these stores getting busted? Good question. I’ve tried multiple times to ask sheriffs and prosecutors, and most don’t want to talk about this. The few that do make it clear that cannabis simply isn’t a priority for them and that building a legal case against store operators is a lot more complicated than simply mounting a raid. A 2023 series of raids across nine localities from Roanoke County to Scott County has resulted in few prosecutions. Many of the stores raided then remain open.

In Louisa County, a woman was recently sentenced to 22 years in prison — with all but 15 months suspended — after being convicted of running an open-air drug market that was selling both marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms. However, she also runs a chain of physical storefronts known as Higher Education; I visited one at Zion Crossroads, where the store was selling a green, vegetative matter with the same name as a popular marijuana strain with a THC content that’s at least 800 times the legal limit in Virginia. THC is shorthand for tetrahydrocannabinol, the chemical that produces the buzz. It’s the level of THC in a cannabis plant that determines the difference between hemp and marijuana. Why isn’t the Louisa County Sheriff’s Office raiding this Higher Education store? Because no one has complained about it, the sheriff’s office told me.

All that is by way of background, and what led me to a conversation with the attorney general last week. The location of our meeting puts the disinterest in cannabis in context: Miyares was at Wytheville Community College for a roundtable discussion about fentanyl. For an hour and a half before our interview, he heard heart-rending stories about parents finding children dead from overdoses. It’s easy to see why law enforcement is a lot more concerned about “one pill that kills” than somebody selling a black market joint.

Nonetheless, it’s still illegal to sell marijuana in Virginia. The General Assembly passed a bill last year that would set up retail sales, and Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed it and has signaled that he’ll do so again when the legislature inevitably passes another retail bill this year. Separately, Miyares has issued a formal attorney general’s opinion that “adult share” operations are in violation of the law.

Why can’t he do anything? That’s partly a rhetorical question. Although the public often thinks of the attorney general as the state’s “top cop” (and many candidates for the office aren’t inclined to disabuse voters of that misunderstanding), the attorney general actually has no authority to enforce the state’s laws on cannabis. Local authorities do, but he says they are overwhelmed by what he calls “mass confusion” over the state’s cannabis laws.

“We are seeing the bitter fruits of the law of unintended consequences,” Miyares said. He calls the law legalizing personal possession “misguided legislation that was passed without thinking through the ramifications.”

The 2021 legislation law changed the legal standards for cannabis arrests: The mere odor of pot no longer constitutes probable cause, because odor simply indicates the presence of what might well be a legal product; it doesn’t indicate the amount, which is what turns legality into illegality.

At the same time, the penalties for that illegality were reduced. “An ounce to a pound of marijuana was treated the same way under the law as walking a dog without a leash,” Miyares said. “A pound is a lot of marijuana.”

The result, he said, is that “officers have an enormous amount of confusion” about what they can and cannot do. That, he said, has created “a huge loophole criminally that bad elements have exploited.”

He said that many cannabis dealers from out of state have opened stores in Virginia and operate “until challenged,” then close up shop and move on. “At times, we feel like we’re playing a game of whack-a-mole,” he said.

He faults liberal prosecutors who have declared they simply won’t prosecute cannabis cases. Even before Virginia legalized weed, Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano and Arlington County Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti announced they wouldn’t prosecute adults facing simple possession charges. Descano said such prosecutions often led to “unjust outcomes.” Dehghani-Tafti’s office filed in court that, “In a world of limited resources, it is the Commonwealth’s position that these should be directed towards more serious felony offenses, towards offenses against people and their property, and towards investment in programs that demonstrably reduce recidivism.”

As you might suspect, a Republican such as Miyares doesn’t have much use for these “social justice” prosecutors. “My hope is the localities where you have law-and-order commonwealth’s attorneys is they’ll prosecute some of these” cannabis stores, he told me. Miyares said that if some operators were charged there would be “a completely different calculus if they realize they could be charged with intent to distribute.” He said he understood that many prosecutors may feel they don’t have the staffing to pursue such cases, but he invited them to contact his office for consultation.

While the attorney general does not have the power to bust pot shops, he does have the power to enforce the state’s consumer protection laws. Miyares has used that power to target some weed stores on the grounds that their products aren’t properly packaged or labeled. When this approach first came to light, I called this “a legal curveball.”

So far, Miyares has sent out five such letters. As a result, one store has shut down. “The other four are pending investigation,” his office says. He did not disclose which stores received those letters, but Cardinal has previously reported three of them. The Good Vibes store in Radford has closed; the stores in Abingdon and Marion that were previously known as the Zarati Shop remain open under different names: The Abingdon Shop and The Marion Shop. That leaves two others, yet unidentified, that received warning letters.

There’s a chance, of course, that the fines the state could impose — $2,500 per violation, restitution to affected consumers, reimbursement of state expenses up to $1,000 per violation and attorney’s fees — won’t be much of a deterrence, given the volume of business some of these stores appear to be doing. Those fines, if they come, may simply constitute the cost of doing business and serve as little more than an unofficial tax.

For now, law enforcement may have little incentive to go after these stores, not when people are dealing deadly fentanyl. What happens, though, if and when Virginia legalizes retail sales? The companies that pay for those licenses won’t be happy if other stores are operating without a license and the regulation that entails. In Maryland, those licenses cost $5,000 in application fees and then $80,000 for the actual license. That would be a lot of incentive to put pressure on law enforcement to shut down the stores that are now allowed to operate openly.

About a mile from where I interviewed Miyares, there’s a cannabis store on Main Street. After we met, I paid a visit. A whiteboard over the counter advertised four different strains.

Afterward, I looked those strains up on According to All Bud, a site of cannabis reviews. It says Obama Runtz typically has a THC content of 14% to 18%, Cherry Crush 13% to 20%, Sherbanger 20% to 22%, and Candy Kush 20% to 30%.

The state limit for THC is 0.3%.