Protecting pot in Washington’s new world

Three North Seattle medical marijuana dispensaries have been broken into in the last two weeks. With legal pot shops set to open across the state at the end of the year, can we expect to see an increase in these kind of crimes in our neighborhoods?

Before any legal pot shop or growing operation will be granted a license, the owners will have to meet very specific security standards to protect their shops and the community. They won’t be allowed to operate until the security systems are inspected and approved. Those rules are being written right now and should be available for shop owners later this month.

Dan Williams hopes to get in on some of that security work. He is the president of Canna Security America, the only pot-specific security company in business today, which has been operating in Colorado for four years.

He said the smash and grab burglaries, like those in North Seattle recently, went down as security regulations in Colorado went up.

“After the regulations went into place, they knew that all these facilities had high security and they wouldn’t bother,” Williams said. “It’s just a major deterrent.”

Williams said the biggest threat to these businesses likely won’t come from the outside. “The biggest theft we usually see is internal theft,” Williams said.

It’s likely criminals will test the systems early and crime around these shops will go up initially. But Williams expects criminals to find out quickly that marijuana businesses are not easy targets.

“We had a guy once chainsaw his way through the top of a grow facility in the middle of the night, hoping to fill a bag with marijuana and then exit through one of the emergency doors,” Williams said. “He didn’t realize that all of the doors were actually padlocked from the inside, and he basically dropped himself into his own cage.”

Canna Security America has offered to help Washington draft security rules and protocols. It has met with state lawmakers. Williams said he has seen it all in four years of providing security for marijuana shops, and he believes his company can help Washington avoid the security mistakes it has experienced.