Capone Of Cannabis (Case of 10 Books)

From state and federal courtrooms to local and federal task forces, Capone Of Cannabis follows a trail of raids, betrayal, bribery, political pressure, and CIA involvement to tell the story of Ryan Richmond — Michigan’s first licensed medical marijuana dispensary owner — and how he was ultimately brought down not by bullets or battering rams, but by the IRS.

When the guns, raids, death threats, and courtroom attacks failed to destroy him, the government turned to the tax code. 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.

Richmond was there at the beginning of Michigan’s medical marijuana industry, building businesses in a space voters believed was legal, regulated, and rooted in patient care. But the closer he got to success, the more he found himself trapped inside a system of raids, asset forfeiture, police intimidation, political corruption, and federal tax enforcement weaponized against cannabis entrepreneurs.

Part memoir, part exposé, Capone Of Cannabis reveals an industry that changed its language but not its enemies. From the outside, legalization looked like progress. From the inside, it often felt like a trap. Behind the headlines about reform and regulation was a darker truth: the war on marijuana never ended. It simply traded battering rams for subpoenas, ski masks for suits, and street-level raids for paper-and-pen punishment.

At the heart of the book is the human cost of that system. Richmond chronicles the rise of Michigan’s early dispensary movement, the betrayals that followed, 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 local enforcement to federal prosecution, from the U.S. Supreme Court to federal prison, showing how the government continued winning the war on cannabis long after claiming the war was over.

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 follow them.

For readers of 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.