The longtime marijuana dispensary at 985 South Logan Street was first broken into at approximately 7:30 a.m. on Saturday, February 3, according to general manager Mike Marlow. Only around $200 worth of low-dose edibles was stolen, he says, but the thieves caused plenty of damage to the store before leaving.
Surveillance video taken at the Herbal Cure shows three people ripping out computer monitors and cash registers in hopes of finding cash inside. Footage also shows them leaving with boxes full of retail marijuana packaging, but Marlow says the packages were for display purposes and contained no product.
After damaging the recreational shopping area and waiting room, one of the men who broke into the store smashed a hole into the Herbal Cure's 250-gallon freshwater fish tank. Just enough water was left in the tank for the fish to survive, Marlow says, but a heater on the tank fell during the damage and began melting plastic, poisoning and killing fish in the process.
The fish tank in the Herbal Cure's waiting room has been synonymous with the store for the better part of a decade, and some of the dispensary's customers and medical marijuana patients have become attached to the tank's cichlids and pleco fish, according to Marlow.
"People were standing around by the store, walking their dogs and calling it in," Marlow says. "Trying to steal from a business is one thing, but then you had to do needless damage and kill our pets? What's the point of that?"
After spending around thirteen minutes inside the store, the thieves drove away before police arrived, according to security footage. That wasn't the end of the long, hard weekend for the Herbal Cure, however.
Less than 48 hours later, Marlow was woken up by an alarm alert from the Herbal Cure a little after 2 a.m. on Monday, February 5. Two garage bays in a storage building on the property had been broken into by cars that had backed through the doors. The building, a former growing facility that had been shut down for years, "had nothing of value inside," according to Marlow, who says he didn't notice anything missing — but a mural that had been on the garage for six years is now damaged.
The Herbal Cure was forced to close on Saturday and Sunday but was open again on February 5; the damage to the bay doors and a taped-off fish tank are still visible. Marlow says the store plans on buying another tank and restocking it soon.
Attempted break-ins are somewhat common at the Herbal Cure and other marijuana dispensaries, Marlow notes. A few years ago, four "refrigerator-sized men walked out of a van and ripped our ATM out of the floor," he recalls, and "every dispensary owner or manager has stories about burglaries."
But this one hurt more.
"Some of these fish had been in that tank for over four years," he says. "Usually, they just kind of mess up the front door and give up. There's been a lot of attempts at that. But it's not like there's $90,000 hanging around in the store. The Colorado industry has been in such a downturn lately, and we have new security rules so that we can't leave as much out on the floor anymore."
Colorado's marijuana industry has been stuck in a two-year recession since breaking annual sales records in 2020 and 2021, forcing a growing number of businesses to close and lay off employees. In 2021, Denver City Council adopted stricter storage rules for dispensaries, requiring that cash and most products to be off the store floor or in locked storage after closing.
The incidents are still under investigation by the Denver Police Department, but no arrests have been made and police have not determined if the break-ins are related.
Crimes Targeting Denver Dispensaries
The Herbal Cure wasn't the only Denver dispensary to be targeted over the last several days. Everbloom dispensary at 5110 Race Street was also the target of an attempted break-in early Monday morning. That incident is still under investigation, says a DPD spokesperson, who didn't believe the suspects were successful in accessing the store.Everbloom did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Because of marijuana's federal prohibition, pot-related businesses are technically banned from using bank credit-card processing and other financial services. Although some smaller banks and credit unions will take on that risk for high fees, the majority of dispensary transactions are still done in cash.
Denver dispensaries and growing operations have been consistent targets for burglaries and even armed robberies since recreational pot sales began in 2014. According to a 2023 report from the Denver Department of Excise & Licenses, there were 162 instances of criminal offenses against the local marijuana industry in 2022, accounting for 0.5 percent of the city's total crime reports. Of those 162 offenses, 156 were burglaries, while larceny accounted for the other six.
Last December, federal agencies and local law enforcement authorities in Aurora, Denver and Thornton announced the arrest of 23 individuals in two separate crime rings accused of using stolen vehicles and weapons to burglarize over forty marijuana dispensaries in 2022 and 2023. One of the cases, dubbed Operation Say Less, resulted in the arrests of fourteen people, while an unrelated grand jury indictment charged nine others with similar crimes.
The investigations were connected to a wave of cannabis business robberies in 2022 and 2023, which resulted in the theft of an estimated $780,000 in cash, various retail merchandise and entire ATM machines.
"Obviously, it has become a lucrative endeavor," Denver DA Beth McCann said after the bust in December. "Given what we've found through this investigation, there should be some emphasis on solving these kinds of crimes when you've got organized groups like this."
