Metrc Isn’t Broken: It’s Doing Exactly What It Was Designed to Do

by Industry Articles | Apr 28, 2025

Disclosure: At Cannabis Tech (cannabistech.com), we accept contributed content and guest posts from industry professionals. However, it is important to note that all contributed content must meet our rigorous Editorial Guidelines to ensure quality and relevance. We value the contributions from industry experts and strive to provide our readers with informative and insightful content. If you have any questions or concerns about our contributed content process, please feel free to contact us.

Contributed by: Luna Stower, a globally recognized cannabis executive and activist with over 25 years in the wellness space. Known for launching beloved brands like Jetty Extracts and Blue River, Luna combines deep field experience with a Master’s in Teaching to embed purpose into profit. Named among the “Top 100 Women in Cannabis,” she’s a frequent speaker, award-winning advocate, and powerful voice for social equity, plant medicine, and responsible industry growth. Follow Luna’s journey toward meaningful change.

Hot take: Metrc isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what it was built to do.

And no, that’s not to create a level playing field or ensure a safe, regulated cannabis market for consumers. It’s to protect monopolies, not markets.

If you’ve been paying attention (and I know many of you have), you probably caught wind of the lawsuit making waves right now.

A former Metrc executive (yeah, a whistleblower from inside the beast) dropped the bomb that the company was fully aware of large-scale diversion happening under its watch. Regulators knew too. They turned their heads and looked the other way.

This isn’t just a failure of oversight. It’s selective enforcement, plain and simple.

Let’s Break this Down: California Operators are Drowning

In California, the realities of operating in the industry are dire. We are suffocating under the weight of compliance costs, burning endless hours navigating glitchy Metrc interfaces that don’t work half the time, waiting on delayed tag shipments that hold up entire supply chains, and then getting slapped with fines for minor clerical errors.

That’s the system working exactly as designed.

Meanwhile, actual large-scale diversion, the thing the system was supposed to prevent, goes unchecked.

Why? Because the system isn’t failing, it’s doing what it’s supposed to do.

It’s protecting the big players, the multi-state operators with money and influence, squeezing out small independent farmers who made this industry what it is.

Mom-and-pops get squeezed. Corporations exploit the cracks. And the state pretends it’s all about “public safety.”

It’s not about safety. It’s about control.

Compliance has become a cover. It’s not there to create transparency or accountability. It’s there to keep the gate closed to anyone without deep pockets and a legal team on retainer. And we’re seeing the consequences of that.

There are now more surrendered licenses in California than active ones. More businesses are shutting their doors than are managing to stay open.

Black Market Still Reigns Supreme

And a majority of cannabis sales? Still happening in the unregulated market.

That’s right. After all this so-called “legalization,” the underground economy is thriving because the legal framework was designed to fail anyone who doesn’t have corporate backing.

Legacy operators — those who built this industry from the ground up — are being pushed out.

The system rewards volume, not values. It rewards those who can stack licenses, those who can afford to play the game of mass production at rock-bottom prices, not those who put quality, craft, and community at the heart of their work.

Look at the companies that have been able to stack licenses from Salinas to Santa Barbara, flooding the market, driving prices down, forcing everyone else to fold or go underground.

And they’ve been able to do it because the system was built to let them.

This is by design. When you step back and look at the bigger picture, it’s clear as day.

The industry isn’t being regulated for safety. It’s being regulated for consolidation. And Metrc is one of the tools making that happen.

Voting “Yes” To Commercialization & Corporations

And the worst part? This story is far from unique to California. Wherever you see cannabis “legalization,” you see the same pattern.

People vote “yes” thinking they’re voting for decriminalization. They believe they’re ending the war on cannabis users and creating opportunities for small businesses and local economies.

But what they’re actually voting for is commercialization; an overtaxed, over-regulated, corporate-dominated system that keeps the barriers high and the gates tightly shut.

That’s why I don’t use the word “legalization.” Because what we got wasn’t freedom for the plant or the people who’ve been working with it for generations.

What we got was commercialization; an industrial model that taxes, controls, and regulates the culture out of existence.

It punishes small farmers while rewarding corporations. It erases legacy operators in favor of MSOs with expensive lobbyists and lawyers.

Need proof?

Watch “Frenchy Dreams of Hashish” documentary (available on YouTube), which captures the rise and fall of the Emerald Triangle before and after Prop 64.

It shows what we had: thriving communities, generational knowledge, sustainable farming… and what we lost. Those dreams were destroyed, not because the farmers failed, but because the system was built to make them fail. Built to hand over the reins to corporate interests like Sean Parker and his Silicon Valley cronies, who saw cannabis not as medicine, not as culture, but as just another commodity.