The Brief

A funny thing happened on the way to cannabis legalization: illegal pot is still big business.

In the decade since the first states legalized recreational marijuana, about half the country has moved to allow adults to buy regulated pot from authorized sources. But in some states, that's been more theory than practice.

In New York, which legalized marijuana in 2021, retail sales are dominated by ubiquitous illegal "smoke shops," while the state struggles to license legitimate ones. Governor Kathy Hochul has called the transition "a disaster," and has pledged to crack down on the illegal sellers.

In Maine, the congressional delegation last summer asked the Justice Department for help in combatting illegal cannabis producers, who outnumber the state's licensed operations and are believed to be funded in part by Chinese investors.

Wilson Linares, commander of the L.A. County law enforcement division of the California Department of Cannabis Control, heads to the location to serve a search warrant on an unlicensed cannabis store in Long Beach, Calif., on March 5, 2024.

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And in California, where voters approved recreational pot in 2016, state officials readily acknowledge the industry still operates mostly in the shadows.

"The black market is very pervasive and it's definitely larger than the legal market," says Bill Jones, the head of enforcement for the state's Department of Cannabis Control.

California is the biggest example of the unfulfilled promise of a legitimate cannabis market. Some entrepreneurs blame high taxes and start-up costs for licensed producers and retailers. Smaller operators often have trouble getting access to capital, as the continued federal prohibition on the marijuana business makes it virtually impossible for them to tap into traditional financial services.

Wilson Linares, commander of the L.A. County law enforcement division of the California Dept. of Cannabis Control, shows a sampling of the unlicensed cannabis edibles seized from a black market store in Long Beach, Calif., on March 5.

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Jones, however, focuses on what law enforcement did — or rather, what it didn't do — in the first few years after the vote to allow a licensed weed industry.

"Most jurisdictions — local jurisdictions — police or sheriff's departments and district attorney's offices, were very reluctant to do any kind of enforcement on cannabis," he says. "It really created an air of impunity, and the unlicensed activity really skyrocketed."

Washington state, by contrast, maintained law enforcement pressure on illegal marijuana after voters legalized pot in 2012, which gave the new licensed industry time to establish itself.

Passersby watch as California Department of Cannabis Control detectives, with support of Long Beach Law enforcement, serve a search warrant on an unlicensed dispensary in Long Beach, Calif., on March 5, 2024. Like many unlicensed cannabis stores, this one is unmarked and still has signage from a previous business. Photo by Alisha Jucevic for NPR

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In California, the DCC is now trying to close the gap. It gathers anonymous tips about unlicensed cannabis stores, which operate semi-openly out of storefronts that aren't hard to identify.

"They'll occupy buildings [where] the business itself has moved or is out of business," says Wilson Linares, the DCC's head of enforcement for the Los Angeles area. His officers and local police recently raided a shabby storefront in Long Beach. The sign reads "Flores Cabinets," but inside they find cannabis edibles for sale, as well as loose marijuana flowers, sold in jars — a practice called "deli style," prohibited under California's cannabis regulations.

Linares says some of the unlicensed stores are identified with the green cross emblem, borrowed from the medical marijuana movement that predated recreational stores. Another clue, though, is the level of security. The ostensible cabinet store in Long Beach has a heavy metal door and security grates over mirrored windows.

California Department of Cannabis Control detectives lock the premises after serving a search warrant on an unlicensed dispensary in Long Beach, Calif., on March 5, 2024. The penalty for unlicensed cannabis sales is usually a fine, and officers raid the some addresses over and over.

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"One of the biggest things that you can see is the cameras. The building itself is old but the cameras are new. That's a pretty good indicator for us," Linares says.

These raids have ramped up in the last couple of years, especially in Los Angeles. Some of the unlicensed retailers have shifted toward delivery services. But the penalty for getting caught selling unlicensed marijuana is relatively light — usually a $500 fine, unless the person has broken other laws — and Linares says his officers find themselves raiding the same storefronts over and over again.

"These places don't pay taxes, it doesn't help provide services for the people who live around here," Linares says. "And the individuals who run these places, they're often not the best," he says. "Gangs and organized crime."

This doesn't come as much of a surprise to an economist.

Unlicensed cannabis products removed from a black market store in Long Beach, Calif. The products will be destroyed.

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"The black market becomes more competitive," says Tiffanie Perrault, a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University in Montreal who studies cannabis markets. She says it's understandable why illegal marijuana expanded in California after legalization.

"You remove risk — because you know, it's legal — so you have more consumers," she says. "And at the same time, your black market is going to react strategically by adjusting prices and levels of quality."

The black market in California also benefits from the restrictions on the licensed competitors, such as the fact that only about 40% of local jurisdictions in California permit cannabis stores. That leaves the other 60% to the retailers who don't wait for official approval.

California cannabis buyers are often unaware of — or indifferent to — the legality of the product they buy, but they do notice prices. Depending on the jurisdiction, taxes on licensed pot can reach 38%.

California Department of Cannabis Control detectives, with support of Long Beach Law enforcement serve a search warrant and remove cannabis products at an unlicensed dispensary in Long Beach, Calif., on March 5, 2024.

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Alisha Jucevic for NPR

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"I got a disposable and some edibles," says Camerin Remmington as he exits an authorized store on the edge of town in Riverside. "It's almost 60 bucks for two items. It's a little more expensive here!"

He says he appreciates the fact that the licensed products are tested for quality.

"You know it is what it is," he says. "You can't go wrong with it!"

But with cannabis, legality for its own sake is not a concern for Remmington. He volunteers that he grew it illegally on his land in the high desert during the post-legalization boom a couple of years ago. He says it made money, until police showed up a year and a half ago.

"We got ticketed for it, for having a couple of processed plants, but they didn't catch the bulk of anything," he says. When he showed up for his court date, the case appeared to be a low priority. "They didn't even know who we were!"

Riverside County Sheriff Department Sergeant Jeremy Parsons collects cannabis clippings and firearms from an unlicensed greenhouse in Perris, CA.

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Those raids are still happening in rural Riverside County. On a Tuesday morning, the sheriff's department's Marijuana Enforcement Team leads a ten-vehicle convoy through the outskirts of the town of Perris. They're following up on a tip about a house hidden at the end of a private drive. The operation commander, Sgt. Jeremy Parsons, comes out to the main road to report that it is, indeed, an illegal grow.

"When we went up to the house we could smell marijuana. We found a greenhouse in the backyard which contained a few hundred small marijuana plants," he says. They also found guns, and they run the names of two people on the site to see if either one is a felon, and not allowed to have a firearm.

"There's not a lot of criminal consequences [for illegally growing marijuana]," Parsons says. But the strategy here is to try to charge growers with other crimes — that's why the convoy of vehicles was so long, as it included people from California Fish and Wildlife, the local water board and even code inspectors.

"That's what we're charging these people with: water contamination, pesticides that are illegal, the fertilizers that are illegal. That's where we're getting people," says Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco.

But for Bianco, the bigger issue is legalization itself. He's against it, because he believes it encourages the illegal pot farms in the hills of Riverside County.

"It made it worse. One hundred percent, it made it worse," he says.

A big problem, as he sees it, is exports. California has become a major exporter to states where marijuana is still illegal — and fetches a higher price — despite the warning from the Justice Department back when legalization got started that the states that legalize pot should make sure to keep it inside their borders.

Bianco says the marijuana gold rush has attracted Mexican drug cartels and Asian human smuggling rings.

"I mean, we've had multiple, multiple homicides, we've had multiple kidnappings, we've had multiple reports of human trafficking and rapes and the punishments that go with not doing your job — and it's all related to this," Bianco says.

Back at the DCC, Bill Jones says he thinks legalization was, as he puts it, "imperative," but he also believes it should be possible eventually to curb the black market.

"I think it's doable. But it's going to take a lot of resources and consistent enforcement over years to get our arms around this," Jones says.

It's not your mother's podcast — or your father's, or anyone else's. The Washington Post's new offering, "Your Personal Podcast," uses artificial intelligence to customize podcasts for its users, blending the algorithm you might find in a news feed with the convenience of portable audio.

The podcast is "personalized automatically based on your reading history" of Post articles, the newspaper says on its help page. Listeners also have some control: At the click of a button, they can alter their podcast's topic mix — or even swap its computer-generated "hosts."

The AI podcast immediately made headlines — and drew criticisms from people questioning its accuracy, and the motives behind it.

Nicholas Quah, a critic and staff writer for Vulture and New York magazine who writes a newsletter about podcasts, says the AI podcast is an example of the Post's wide-ranging digital experiments — but one that didn't go quite right.

"This is one of many technologically, digitally oriented experiments that they're doing" that is aimed at "getting more audience, breaking into new demographics," he says. Those broader efforts range from a generative AI tool for readers to a digital publishing platform. But in this case, Quah adds, "It feels like it's compromising the core idea of what the news product is."

On that help page, the newspaper stresses that the podcast is in its early beta phase and "is not a traditional editorial podcast."

Bailey Kattleman, head of product and design at the Post, calls it "an AI-powered audio briefing experience" — and one that will soon let listeners talk back to it.

"In an upcoming release, they'll be able to actually interact and ask follow up questions to dig in deeper to what they've just heard," Kattleman says in an interview with NPR.

As technically sophisticated as that sounds, there are many questions about the new podcast's accuracy — even its ability to correctly pronounce the names of Post journalists it cites. Semafor reported that errors, cited by staffers at the Post, included "misattributing or inventing quotes and inserting commentary, such as interpreting a source's quotes" as the paper's own stance.

In the newspaper's app, a note advises listeners to "verify information" by checking the podcast against its source material.

In a statement, the Washington Post Guild — which represents newsroom employees and other staff — tells NPR, "We are concerned about this new product and its rollout," alleging that it undermines the Post's mission and its journalists' work.

Citing the paper's standing practice of issuing a correction if a story contains an error, the guild added, "why would we support any technology that is held to a different, lower standard?"

So, why is the Post rolling out an AI podcast? And will other news and audio outlets follow its lead?

Here are some questions, and answers:

Isn't AI podcasting already a thing?

"The Post has certainly gone out on a ledge here among U.S. legacy publishers," Andrew Deck tells NPR. But he adds that the newspaper isn't the first to experiment with AI-generated podcasts in the wider news industry.

Deck, who writes about journalism and AI for Harvard University's Nieman Lab, points to examples such as the BBC's My Club Daily, an AI-generated soccer podcast that lets users hear content related to their favorite club. In 2023, he adds, "a Swiss public broadcaster used voice clones of real radio hosts on the air."

News outlets have also long offered an automated feature that converts text articles into computer-generated voices.

Even outside of the news industry, AI tools for creating podcasts and other audio are more accessible than ever. Some promise to streamline the editing process, while others can synthesize documents or websites into what sounds like a podcast conversation.

Why do publishers want to experiment with AI podcasts?

"It's cost-effective," says Gabriel Soto, senior director of research at Edison Research, which tracks the podcast industry. "You cut out many of the resources and people needed to produce a podcast (studios, writers, editors, and the host themselves)."

And if a brand can create a successful AI virtual podcast in today's highly competitive podcasting market, Soto adds, it could become a valuable intellectual property in the future.

Deck says that if the Post's experiment works, the newspaper "may be able to significantly scale up and expand its audio journalism offerings, without investing in the labor that would normally be required to expand."

In an interview, Kattleman stresses the new product isn't meant to replace traditional podcasts: "We think they have a unique and enduring role, and that's not going away at the Post."

What's unique about the Post AI podcast?

For Deck, the level of customization it promises is an innovation. Being able to tailor a podcast specific to one person, he says, "is arguably beyond what any podcast team in journalism right now can produce manually."

In an example the Post published, listeners can choose from voice options with names like "Charlie and Lucy" and "Bert and Ernie."

Kattleman says her team was working from the idea that for an audience, there isn't a "one size fits all" when it comes to AI and journalism.

"Some people want that really straight briefing style; some people prefer something more conversational and more voicey," she says.

Quah says that adding an AI podcast is a bid to make stories accessible to a broader audience.

He says that with the podcast, the Post seems to be trying to reach young people who "don't want to read anymore, they just want to listen to the news."

A key goal, Kattleman says, is to make podcasts more flexible, to appeal to younger listeners who are on the go.

Outlining the process behind the Post's AI podcast, Kattleman says, "Everything is based on Washington Post journalism."

An LLM, or large language model, converts a story into a short audio script, she says. A second LLM then vets the script for accuracy. After the final script is stitched together, Kattleman adds, the voice narrates the episode.

Will listeners embrace an AI news podcast?

Soto, of Edison Research, says that 1 in 5 podcast consumers say they've listened to an AI-narrated podcast.

But, he adds that for podcast listeners, "many prefer the human connection, accepting AI tools to assist in creating the content, but not in executing or hosting the podcast."

The new AI podcast reminds Deck a bit of the hyper-personalized choices for users offered by TikTok and other social media.

"There is a level of familiarity
and, arguably, comfort with algorithmic curation among younger audiences," he says.

But while younger audiences tend to be tech savvy, many of them are also thoughtful about authenticity and connection.

"Community is at the core of why people listen to podcasts," Soto says.

Then there's the idea of a host or creator's personality, which drives engagement on TikTok and other platforms.

"These creators have built a relationship with their audience — and maybe even trust — even if they haven't spoken to sources themselves," Deck says. "This type of news content is a far cry from the disembodied banter of AI podcast hosts."

What are the potential downsides of AI podcasts?

One big potential consequence is the loss of jobs — and for companies, the loss of talent.

"The automation of it kind of erases the entire sort of voice performance industry," Quah says. "There are people who do this for a living," he adds, who could "produce higher quality versions of these recordings."

There are also concerns that, if AI chooses a story and controls how it's presented, it might create an echo chamber, omitting context or skepticism that a journalist would likely provide.

"AI-based news personalization tends to land firmly in the camp of delivering audiences what they want to know," Deck says.

Deck says he's willing to give the Post's AI podcast a bit of time to see how it plays out. But Deck does have a chief concern: "I can say point blank, generative AI models hallucinate."

And when AI models are wrong, he says, they're often confidently so.

Blurring boundaries between human and AI voices could also raise questions of trust — a critical factor for a news organization.

As Soto puts it, "What happens when your audience expects content from the real you and ends up finding AI instead?"

Storylines about abortion and conversations about it showed up on television 65 times this year, on prestigious dramas like The Pitt and Call the Midwife, on reality shows such as W.A.G.s to Riches and Love is Blind and on lowbrow animated comedies like Family Guy and South Park. That's about the same as last year. In 2024, TV shows featured 66 such plotlines.

But in the past few years, there's been a significant drop in the number of characters who actually went through with an abortion. 37% obtained an abortion in 2025, a 14% decline since 2023.

That's according to the annual Abortion Onscreen report. It comes from Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a research program on abortion and reproductive health based at the University of California San Francisco.

"I think there still is a lot of stigma, even in allegedly liberal Hollywood," says researcher Steph Herold. She says the report, which has come out for about a decade, reflects a profound lack of accurate representation of abortion use in America. For example, she points to research showing that about 60% of real life Americans who seek an abortion deal with some sort of barrier.

"But only about a third of people who are characters on screen face any kind of barrier to abortion," Herold said. "Whether it was not being able to come up with the cost of the abortion, not having somebody to watch their kids or cover for them at work, having to deal with clinics that are miles away, or in other states having insurance that wouldn't cover the cost." Most TV shows in 2025 depicting women struggling to get abortions focused on legal obstacles in the past and present.

On TV, 80% of characters seeking abortions are upper or middle class, but in real life, most abortion patients struggle to make ends meet. "This [disparity] obscures the role that poverty plays in obstructing access to abortion, and perhaps explains why we so rarely see plotlines in which characters wrestle with financial barriers to abortion access," the study says.

This year, a teenager on The Pitt sought abortion pills to end her pregnancy — one of only three stories depicting medication abortion out of 65 plotlines about abortion this year. That's another disparity between representation on-screen and real-world numbers: research shows that abortion pills account for the majority of abortions in the U.S. Another difference: only 8% of people seeking abortion on TV are parents. In real life, most abortion patients have at least one child.

It is unrealistic, says Herold, to expect TV to perfectly reflect current abortion use in the U.S., but she said she was disappointed by certain trends. Fewer characters this year received emotional support around their abortions, and more shows, she said, including Chicago Med, 1923, Breathless and Secrets We Keep featured plotlines that emphasized shame and stigma around abortions, especially because of religion. These storylines, the report says, "both obscure the diversity of religious observance among people having abortions, portraying religious patients as exclusively Christian, and also only associating religion with prohibiting abortion, instead of being a meaningful or supportive part of someone's abortion decision-making and experience."

But even though abortion has long been a hot-button political issue, Herold says millions of Americans have had some sort of experience with abortions. "Whether it's having one themselves or helping a daughter or a friend," she said, adding that stories that reflect a diversity of abortion experiences will be familiar to many viewers.

One bright spot, she added, was that television is doing a better job of reflecting the racial realities of abortion. A slight majority of characters in abortion plotlines are people of color — and although they are by far the majority of abortion seekers in real life, this marks a notable improvement from a decade ago, when TV shows more often portrayed women seeking abortions as wealthy and white.

Geminids, the strongest meteor shower of the year, hit a peak this weekend, sending over 150 meteors per hour through the night sky tonight and Sunday.

Vanessa Alarcon, an astronomical observer at the Griffith Observatory, says despite being the best and brightest every year, these meteors don’t tend to get many fans.

" It's usually not as heavily attended, I think because it's a lot colder in the winter. So it's definitely a deterrent, but technically, it's more meteors per hour than the Perseids are," Alarcon said.

The Perseids are typically visible between July and August, but this summer, they were mostly drowned out because of light pollution from the full moon.

Alarcon says it will be a different story this weekend.

" The Geminids ... there's about a 25% crescent moon. So it's actually going be even better than the Perseids," Alarcon said.

Where to go for the best view

For the best viewing experience, you'll have to brave the cold of the deserts and mountains at night, but it should be worth the trip.

"You should go to a darker sky," Alarcon said. "And basically, you just want to get away from the city lights — anything away from the city lights is going to be an improvement from trying to watch it at home."

When to best see it

The Geminids are notable for being exceptionally bright, burning like fireballs for several seconds. The meteors can be seen after 8 p.m. tonight, Alarcon said, peaking between 1:20 and 2:20 a.m. and visible until 5:20 a.m.