Capone Of Cannabis: How Legalization Gave Way to Raids, Corruption, the CIA and the IRS - Paperback

by Ryan Richmond (Author), Ronit Wagman (Editor)

From state and federal courts to local and federal task forces, bribery, betrayal, and even CIA involvement, Capone Of Cannabis tells the story of how Ryan Richmond, Michigan's first licensed medical marijuana dispensary owner, was ultimately taken down not by bullets or battering rams, but by the IRS. When the guns, death threats, raids, and courtroom attacks did not work, they brought in the tax man. Richmond became the only American sent to prison under IRS Code 280E, better known as the pot tax.

Capone Of Cannabis is a true-crime memoir about what happened when the promise of marijuana legalization collided with the machinery of government power.

Ryan Richmond was there at the beginning of Michigan's medical marijuana industry, building in a space that was supposed to be legal, regulated, and driven by patient need. But the closer he got to success, the more he found himself trapped in a world of raids, asset forfeiture, police pressure, political corruption, and a federal tax code weaponized against cannabis entrepreneurs.

Part memoir and part exposé, Capone Of Cannabis tells the story of an industry that changed its language but not its enemies. What looked like progress from the outside often felt like a trap from the inside. Behind the headlines about reform and regulation was a darker truth: the war on marijuana never ended. It just got cleaner branding, better suits, and new methods.

At the center of the story is the human cost of that system. Richmond chronicles the rise of Michigan's early dispensary movement, the betrayals, the raids, the courtroom battles, the financial devastation, and the emotional toll of being targeted while trying to operate in good faith inside a broken and shifting legal framework. His story traces the line from street-level enforcement to paper-and-pen punishment to the US Supreme Court to federal prison, showing how the government is still winning the war on cannabis.

Unflinching, urgent, and deeply personal, Capone Of Cannabis is more than a cannabis story. It is a story about power, selective enforcement, race, money, and the American habit of changing the rules after people have already risked everything to play by them.

For readers interested in true crime, political corruption, criminal justice, and the real history of cannabis in America, Capone Of Cannabis pulls back the curtain on a system that never stopped punishing the people it claimed to tolerate.