The secrecy of Pueblo County Sheriff’s green stings
A series of undercover retail marijuana store stings yields one offender since 2014, but raises questions of transparency and political motivation from local law enforcement.
By Theresa Wolf
Marijuana stores and dispensaries are subject to periodic compliance checks by law enforcement and code inspectors to ensure proper procedures and regulations are followed at all times. The facilities that are found in compliance continue operations. The ones that don’t are sanctioned.
An undercover sting operation Oct. 27 that involved the Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office Special Investigations and Narcotics Unit, the Pueblo Police Department and the Pueblo County Marijuana Compliance Inspector determined Strawberry Fields Retail Marijuana Store in Pueblo sold recreational marijuana to an underage customer.
A news release by the PCSO confirmed three store employees were implicated in the the bust and issued a court summons. The media release of the incident further stated a notice of the violation will be forwarded to the State Licensing Board.
The underage customer passed by two ID checkpoints, Mike and Rich Kwesell, co-owners of three Strawberry Fields locations in Colorado, confirmed. The brothers are disappointed but aware that compliance checks are necessary to keep business owners and the community safe.
“We have spent just over eight years building our company and reputation as a model for compliance and best business practices and in eight seconds it can be tarnished. The timing could not have been worse either, with every cannabis team putting so much effort to shed positive light on the regulated retail industry coming into the (November) election.
“Any time a marijuana company slips up, it leaves a black eye on the industry as a whole. However, we try to focus on the positive and to learn from hard experiences so we committed to making our organization even stronger and making sure our employees and security guards are even more careful now than they were before this happened.”
The employee who failed to catch the underage ID, has since been let go from the retail shop.
“She was terminated on the spot,” Rich Kwesell said.
“The third-party security guard and bud-tender must have gotten overwhelmed and just lost concentration on the numbers or math,” he added.
Mike Kwesell made a sobering comparison between the marijuana and the airline industries.
“There is no adequate reason or good excuse for this … Our industry is much like the airline industry in that one careless mistake can be fatal, which is why we took action so swiftly to ensure this never happens again,” Rich Kwesell said.
Since Amendment 64 passed in Colorado January 2014, law enforcement and state compliance officials have conducted an unspecified number of undercover sting operations to ensure marijuana dispensaries are operating in accordance with the strict regulations as dictated by Colorado legislation.
The number of facilities that pass undercover stings, however, are not publicized, neither are the names of all the ones that have undergone compliance checks.
Currently, Pueblo County has one Land Use and Marijuana Code Compliance Inspector, as confirmed by the Pueblo County Commissioner’s Office.
“Our code compliance officer was the one who coordinated the busts. The commissioners are very proud to have him on staff and that he has such a great working relationship with law enforcement agencies and the Marijuana Enforcement Division,” Paris Carmichael, Pueblo Board Of County Commissioners Community Information Manager, said in an email to PULP.
The number of facilities that pass undercover stings, however, are not publicized, neither are the names of all the ones that have undergone compliance checks.
In information contained through the Colorado Open Records Act, various news outlets reported that In 2014, Colorado officials shut down dozens of marijuana dispensaries statewide for violation — two of these were located in Pueblo.
Greener Side West in Pueblo was found in violation of proper inventory tracking and Legal Meds in Pueblo was fined $5,000 after an investigation determined various infractions that included on-premises consumption, illegal seed sales and problems with inventory. Yet, no mention was made of the dispensaries that passed compliance checks.
“Regulation needs to be tested constantly to ensure it exists. In fact, regulation is what validates this industry,” Mike Kwesell said.
While it is uncommon for employees to slip up when verifying customers’ IDs, it can and does happen. The procedure of confirming a customer’s identity involves several steps and safeguards at all Strawberry Fields locations.
“A person’s ID is checked at two different checkpoints when they come into any of our centers, first by the security guard when they are greeted and secondly at the bud bar. Everyone who is either a security guard or budtender has extensive training on ID verification and has a book with every state’s example for comparison, as well as electronic scanners which verify if the ID is authentic,” Mike Kwesell said.
The Kwesells have implemented additional measures and safeguards to prevent similar violations from occurring, including better systems of double-checking IDs and eliminating distractions that could hamper operations, such as phone calls or other customers.
“We have also had one-on-one trainings with each of our employees. Employees are required to sign a form stating they understand the monumental consequences of one slip up,” Mike Kwesell said.
The Kwesells have also invested in expensive ID scanners that are currently in use at all three locations.
“The ironic thing is that we actually ordered these scanners about four days before the infraction occurred to be proactive and to make sure we could never let an underage customer through our doors. The scanners arrived in the mail the day after the incident,” Rich Kwesell said.
He also encouraged others in the business to remain vigilant and not rely on routine practices as a fail-safe method to avoid infractions.
“Don’t ever get comfortable or complacent, and redundancy is the name of the game when it comes to compliance. You must not rely on just one person or machine to verify IDs,” he said.
Despite an uncertain future, the Kwesells commend local law enforcement and code compliance officers for their continued diligence in regulating the legal sale of marijuana in Pueblo.
Jim Parco and his wife, Pam, own Mesa Organics, a licensed retail marijuana operation on the St. Charles Mesa in eastern Pueblo County.
Parco, who teaches economics and business at Colorado College when he’s not tending to his retail cannabis operation, is an advocate for legalization and strict compliance as it relates to recreational and medical cannabis sales in Pueblo County.
He has the proper licensure to grow, manufacture and sell cannabis and cannabis-infused products, although he has not yet opted to operate in the capacity of a medical cannabis dispensary.
“When you look at the medical code and the retail code at the state level, they are, for the most part, nearly identical. The only difference is the retail code is much more restrictive; it’s far more regulated,” Parco said.
Currently, the main differences between recreational and medical marijuana laws pertain to taxes, purchase and possession restrictions and minimum age requirements for purchase locations.
While a person of 21 years or older are restricted to purchase one ounce of retail marijuana a day, a person of 18 years or older, with a medical marijuana card, is allowed to purchase up to two ounces a day.
“It doesn’t take much to imagine what an 18-year-old is going to do with two ounces of tax-free cannabis a day,” Parco said.
“Don’t ever get comfortable or complacent, and redundancy is the name of the game when it comes to compliance. You must not rely on just one person or machine to verify IDs.” — Rich Kwesell, Strawberry Fields
Retail marijuana sales are taxed much higher, at 17.4 percent, than medical marijuana, which is taxed at the standard 2.9 percent state sales tax rate. The differences in taxes makes retail marijuana more profitable than medical marijuana.
Before the election others in the marijuana industry said they suspected stings were happening more frequently because there seemed to be an influx of people trying to buy without IDs or over the legal limit — while unconfirmed that the incidents were stings, some budtenders said the occurrences seemed out of place and odd.
On the issue of undercover compliance checks, Parco said, “The sheriff has been doing quite a few stings. We’re pretty confident — people come in and we know it’s a sting because they’re asking all the wrong questions.”
“Recently when they’ve been doing a sting operation for any of compliancy issue with retail stores, the sheriff’s office is all of a sudden putting out press releases. They won’t say who complied and how many they checked,” Parco said.
PULP reached out to the Pueblo County Commissioner’s Office Nov. 23 for comment on the undercover sting operations on retail marijuana stores.
“The first thing I want to stress is we do have an investigative wing of our marijuana division in our planning and development department,” said Pueblo County Commissioner Sal Pace, who has been an advocate of the retail marijuana industry.
Instead of watching election results roll in with fellow Democrats, Pace spent the night with the marijuana industry at a downtown Pueblo bar waiting to see if Pueblo ballot questions 200 and 300 would prohibit the retail marijuana industry in Pueblo County. Both measures failed.
“Our marijuana department does not coordinate with the Board of County Commissioners or even with the licensing portion of marijuana; that way, there is no conflict or an appearance of conflict,” he said.
Pace said when the stings occur the board of county commissioners are not notified beforehand, and there is no coordination with the county’s communications director.
“There’s no political discussion. The only press release that came out was the one that came from the sheriff’s office, and this is all from second hand,” Pace said. “The sheriff sent out a press release about 10 days before Nov. 8, when the sting was conducted, and said that a store had failed.”
The news release sent by the sheriff’s office was titled “Compliance checks at MJ retail shops yield mixed results.” But when PULP asked how many compliance checks occurred, the sheriff’s office media contact, Lisa Shorter, said “I asked the guys but they told me not to mention a (number). They are careful with these as to not jeopardize any secondary operations or have the stores get lax if they feel like we visited the majority of them already.”
Pace said during that specific compliance check the county planning director learned eight stores were the focus for attempted stings for underage sales, though that wasn’t shared to media outlets via a press release.
“We didn’t see this as an issue to be promoting without going through due process, and when there’s a violation or reported violation, it goes to the liquor and marijuana licensing board, and they propose sanctions,” Pace said.
“It would be inappropriate for us to be commenting on it before the marijuana board imposes sanctions.”
Pace said when the stings occur the board of county commissioners are not notified beforehand, and there is no coordination with the county’s communications director.
Pace added that he heard there was a series of stings on Nov. 7, but hasn’t been able to confirm, “I did not see a press release on those stings, and we don’t coordinate with the sheriff on his press statements and so that falls strictly within his purview.
“We’re not publicizing, from Pueblo County, ones that pass or ones that fail,” Pace said. “These are really questions for the sheriff’s office.”
When asked for comment, PCSO officials referred the reporter back to the county.
