The Big Business of Making a Cannabis Surveillance State

8 December 2016

 - Walk into any licensed cannabis grow op in Colorado and one of the first things you’ll notice are the barcodes.

Every plant has a brightly colored tag—blue for recreational and yellow for medicinal—zip-tied to its stalk or planted in its soil, and each tag bears a bar code and a Radio Frequency ID (RFID) chip. Look up from the plants and you’ll notice the security cameras silently monitoring every inch of the floor 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Employees will likely be wearing badges that allow a computer program to track their movement from room to room. Perhaps you’ll run into an inspector from the state’s Marijuana Enforcement Division, who show up unannounced to verify the amount of flower produced by the grow op matches with what the state has recorded in their real-time inventory systems.

Welcome to the cannabis surveillance state, a multi-million dollar industry that is responsible for turning America’s favorite black market flower into one of the most highly regulated commodities on the market today.