Dying for your high: The untold exploitation and misery in America’s weed industry

Sareth Sin, 67, died upright, seated in a plastic chair, on Christmas Day. He was asphyxiated by fumes from the generator he ran to chase the desert chill out of a cannabis greenhouse on the eastern edge of Los Angeles County.

Leuane Chounlabout, 79, was found lifeless, lying on his back surrounded by a tangle of electrical cords connecting heat lamps to a greenhouse generator outside Palmdale. He had arrived two days earlier to help harvest.

Miguel and Rufino Garcia Rivera, 28 and 36, collapsed on the floor of a desert greenhouse not far away that reeked of diesel and pesticide fumes. The brothers, recent arrivals from Mexico, died of carbon monoxide poisoning near the small cannabis plants they had been hired to cultivate.

For millions of consumers, the legalization of cannabis has brought a multibillion-dollar industry out of the shadows and into brightly lit neighborhood dispensaries.

But California, birthplace of both the farm labor movement and counterculture pot, has largely ignored the immigrant workers who grow, harvest and trim America’s weed. Their exploitation and misery is one of the most defining, yet overlooked narratives of the era of legal cannabis.

From the forests of Oregon to the deserts of California, a Los Angeles Times investigation found, cannabis workers are subjected to abuse, wage theft, threats of violence and squalid and hazardous conditions. They are disregarded even in death.

At least 35 workers died on cannabis farms in a five-year span through 2021. Twenty died in carbon monoxide poisonings, according to coroner records. Their deaths were tied to substandard living conditions and a shift to growing in greenhouses to increase profits. Only one led to a workplace safety investigation.

Workers described living outdoors, without sanitation or sufficient food, and told of employers who directed them to charity food banks or ran them off at gunpoint without pay. While accompanying police on raids, Times journalists saw hazardous pesticides frequently in use, including at a San Bernardino County farm where a young couple slept in a shed next to a greenhouse that reeked of metamidofos, a deadly nerve agent no longer sold in the United States but still available in Mexico. The young woman said she was pregnant.

By searching private forums and official complaints, The Times counted wage theft claims against more than 200 farms, half of them licensed. The workers who turned to the state for help collecting pay faced wait times of more than a year if they did not settle or abandon the claim first.

Even when farms were inspected, regulators focused on water runoff and the noise level of generators, not on laborers who were unpaid and slept in tents and barns.

“We’re disposable,” said a man who worked at a licensed operation in Northern California where dozens of workers were unpaid for two years.

For years, the sheriff’s deputies who raided illegal grows