Just before 10:40 p.m. Three masked guys armed with guns forced a security officer and an employee back inside the Cannabis Buyers Club of Berkeley on a Friday night in July. They emptied the registers and shelves and escaped in a waiting automobile. No one was physically injured.
It was not the first time. This was the dispensary’s third robbery in nine years: a gunpoint robbery in 2017, a carjacking and ram raid in 2023, and masked gunmen again in 2026. Three separate crews hit the same shop, nearly a decade apart.
An Industry-Wide Pattern, Not Bad Luck
Berkeley is not an outlier. In Los Angeles, four major dispensary burglaries made headlines in just the first eight months of 2025. One Chatsworth-area dispensary faced more than a dozen approaches in a single quarter.
The numbers back it up. In Denver, cannabis businesses make up less than 1% of local businesses but account for roughly 10% of commercial burglaries. Every year, robbers target nearly one in six Denver dispensaries.
Why Crews Target Dispensaries
A dispensary lines up several conditions that few other retail businesses share:
- A track record. Crews talk to each other. A shop with a known layout and routine gets hit again.
- Cash on hand. Federal banking restrictions keep most dispensaries running largely on cash, sitting in registers and safes on a predictable schedule.
- Easy-to-move product. Cannabis is lightweight, in constant demand, and doesn’t need a specialist fence.
- Quiet, predictable hours. Overnight closures and closing shifts leave the thinnest coverage—exactly when crews strike.
Cameras Record. They Do Not Prevent.
Every dispensary burglary that made news in Los Angeles in 2025 had 24/7 HD surveillance running. It recorded everything and stopped nothing. A camera is a witness, not a guard.
Compare that to a Chatsworth dispensary with live monitoring and an on-site audio system. Every one of its dozen-plus approaches turned around before becoming a break-in. Same risk, different outcome—because someone was watching in real time.
The Risk Is Not Always Just Property
Berkeley ended without injury, but not every case does. In a separate Los Angeles incident, suspects working through a string of dispensary robberies dragged a budtender by her hair into the store’s bathroom and held her and two coworkers at gunpoint.
What This Means for Your Business
The risk factors are predictable: cash, product, quiet hours, and a reputation for being an easy target. You can plan for all of them. What you can’t plan for is learning, as CBCB did three times over, that “it hasn’t happened yet” often means “it will.”
The businesses that avoid repeat incidents are the ones that treat a close call—or a news story about a shop nearby—as a reason to act now.
Do Not Wait to Become the Next Headline
A proactive security assessment identifies vulnerabilities before criminals exploit them and strengthens your response plan.
Want to lower your risk? Arrange a private security assessment with Massive Guard today.