This didn’t “mysteriously” happen (“Cannabis is California’s dead golden goose,” Jan. 15). California’s legal cannabis market didn’t fail—it was designed to fail, and the warning signs were there from day 1.
When Lori Ajax, a former alcohol regulator, was put in charge of cannabis, that should have told everyone everything they needed to know. The state didn’t build a system around public health, small farmers, or fairness—it built a booze-style control regime layered on top of a plant that literally grows out of the ground. You can’t regulate cannabis like alcohol and then act surprised when the result is collapse.
And let’s be honest about Proposition 64: It didn’t legalize a free market—it handed the keys to the same slimeballs who ran the predatory “medical nonprofit” racket for years. Fake nonprofits, shell entities, insider licensing, pay-to-play politics, and consultants who got rich selling access to regulators while small growers were crushed under fees, taxes, and ever-changing rules.
The state legalized cannabis—and then regulated it as if it were plutonium. Million-dollar sprinkler systems. Square-foot cultivation taxes. Endless permits layered on permits. Meanwhile, enforcement focused almost exclusively on the legal operators dumb enough to comply, while the black market—unburdened by taxes and bureaucracy—thrived.
The result? Exactly what any non-ideologue could have predicted:
• legal operators bleeding cash
• consumers going back to untaxed weed
• tax revenues collapsing
• bureaucracies congratulating themselves anyway
This wasn’t overregulation in the abstract—it was regulatory capture, arrogance, and moral posturing masquerading as governance.
Dan Tudor
Paso Robles
This article appears in Feb 5-12, 2026.
As someone who watched his father get carted away in cuffs by a CHP in the 1970s in Big Sur for nothing more than having a pot seed between the seats of our blue and white, split window VW van, Im just glad this kind of activity won’t happen again.