Dispensary Owner Goes to Sleep "Every Night Expecting a Call" About Burglaries

Cody Carr couldn't believe his ears as he stood inside Everbloom, a dispensary he owns at 5110 Race Street, in the early hours of February 6. The store had just suffered the latest in a series of break-in attempts dating back to December, and Carr hadn't finished reporting the crime when his phone started buzzing.

It was the building alarm at his other Everbloom dispensary, at 4095 Jackson Street, notifying Carr that store was also the target of a break-in.

"While we were on the phone with the police about one store, someone was actively breaking into another one," he recalls. "I asked the police if they'd go over there instead. The stores are about four minutes apart and in the same neighborhood."

Police got to the scene but didn't pursue any suspects, Carr says; he estimates the scofflaws did around $50,000 worth of damage to the building, and also stole an ATM as well as a few hundred dollars of edibles. But that wasn't the worst blow he's suffered: During a December 27 burglary at the Everbloom on Race, $20,000 worth of marijuana was stolen, according to Carr, and there's no insurance for stolen weed, even if it's state-legal.

Everbloom has four Colorado stores: two in Denver, one in Wheat Ridge and another in Rifle. However, the Denver dispensaries have become such consistent burglary targets that Carr is beginning to reconsider at least one store's operational status.

"Since December, I've gone to sleep every night expecting a call," he says, adding that slower dispensary sales at the Jackson Street location in northeast Denver coupled with recent property damage has made the dispensary's future "a conversation that needs to be had."

For the first few years after it was founded in 2018, Everbloom averaged around one burglary attempt per year across its dispensaries and growing operations. But the business has suffered four attempts since late 2023, Carr says, with miscreants successfully entering stores twice. Carr isn't alone in his struggles with burglaries and property damage, either.

Days before Everbloom's February 6 break-ins, the Herbal Cure dispensary at 985 South Logan Street was broken into at approximately 7:30 a.m. on February 3, according to general manager Mike Marlow. Only around $200 worth of low-dose edibles was stolen, he says, but the thieves did considerable damage. After ransacking the recreational shopping area and waiting room, one of the masked men who'd broken into the store smashed a hole in the Herbal Cure's popular 250-gallon freshwater fish tank, which eventually killed all of the animals in the tank.

Less than 48 hours later, early on Monday, February 5, an alarm went off at the Herbal Cure. Two garage bays in a storage building on the property had been broken into: cars 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.

Legal marijuana businesses have been a target for burglaries and robberies since medical dispensaries opened over fifteen years ago. Because of federal prohibition, the majority of retail marijuana transactions must be done in cash and, as Carr points out, "if they get thirty pounds of weed or something good in the ATM, then it's worth it if they're not getting busted."

Carr and Marlow say they've both noticed an uptick in dispensary break-ins across Denver. In late January, a car was driven into the front of A Cut Above, a popular dispensary at 1911 South Broadway, in an unsuccessful attempt to break into the store, according to employees. A Cut Above management did not respond to requests for comment, but the damage to the storefront is still there.

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.

In law enforcement documents connected to both crime rings, suspects stole both unoccupied and occupied vehicles in the Denver area, sometimes at gunpoint, and then used them for dispensary burglaries. Carr and Marlow say that the vehicles used in the burglary attempts against their stores were both stolen.

"Every dispensary owner or manager has stories about burglaries," Marlow notes, but the days of unlocked weed and safes full of cash are over.

"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," he adds.

High Response Times, Low Marijuana Sales

Colorado's marijuana industry has been stuck in a two-year recession, with annual dispensary sales falling almost 42 percent from 2021 to 2023, according to the Colorado Department of Revenue.

In 2021, Denver City Council adopted stricter storage rules for dispensaries in order to combat theft, requiring that cash and most products be off the store floor or in locked storage after closing.

"We don't leave anything on the floor. They got in the locked storage containers somehow. One time they got into our flower lockers and got all of our flower, so we had to go out and buy all new safes," Carr says of the dispensary burglars. "This is completely speculative, but I have heard and believe that this is a syndicate of tens of people, upwards of maybe forty or fifty people, who are trying to hit places, draw police away and then hit another place."

Carr says the Denver Police Department has responded to all of his calls and detectives are providing him with updates, but he's concerned about police response times — which he says are usually around fifteen minutes or more. Suspects in the Herbal Cure break-in were in the store for around thirteen minutes during the February 5 burglary, according to Marlow.

Armed security would cost around $100,000 per year for either Everbloom store in Denver, Carr says, and his $10,000 plexiglass doors aren't cutting it. He feels like he's running out of options.

"I assume that it's not just dispensaries that they're chasing, but maybe we really are so low on the totem pole in police response that criminals know they can hit us and spend twenty minutes in our buildings. I know restaurants are getting hit, too. Even the lock company that repaired our store got hit," Carr says. "I think the fact that people are desperate right now, the economy is bad and it's expensive to live in Denver...maybe it's making people do desperate things."

Denver 911 calls fall into six levels of priority, according to the DPD. Property crimes without a threat to human safety are on the lowest end of the priority scale at numbers five and six, while threats to human life are priorities zero through two. According to DPD data, current police response times to low-priority crimes are currently around 34 minutes, while response times to high-priority crimes are just under fifteen minutes.

The DPD was not available for an interview, but provided a 2023 report published by the Denver Department of Excise & Licenses. According to the report, 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. Of those 162 offenses, 156 were burglaries, while larceny accounted for the other six.