California Governor Jerry Brown has proposed a system of five task forces aimed at stemming the state’s growing and problematic blackmarket cannabis market. As first reported by the L.A. Times, Gov. Brown has heard the complaints and cries of foul play from legal and licensed plant-touching businesses within the state.

“We have consistently maintained, since full implementation of the licensing and regulatory framework in January, that additional enforcement is essential to addressing illicit activity,” said Amy Jenkins, a legislative advocate for the California Cannabis Industry Assn, to the Times.

Brown’s proposed solution of establishing five teams within the state’s attorney genera’s office comes not a second too soon for business owners who have routinely noted the business they’re losing to gray and black market businesses. According to the proposal, Brown will call for the state to fund four teams within different regions of the state (Los Angeles, Sacramento, Fresno, and San Diego) with the fifth team focusing on interdiction within the state and elsewhere.

Brown’s proposal comes at a critical juncture for the recently legalized cannabis market. With more and more investors becoming piqued by the prospects that California’s marketplace has to offer, and with more and more politicians endorsing legalization, a controlled and regulated, above-board and open market for cannabis is what’s expected of the state and plant-touching businesses who have paid for proper local and state licenses. It’s the licenses and skirting thereof by blackmarket businesses that irks legit companies as they rightly feel left to a competitive disadvantage when blackmarket companies are paying no taxes or licensing fees.

But it’s more than just “having the right appearance for investors,” and even more than a matter of a competitive landscape (though both are crucial);  for all plant-touching businesses’ sake the state (and local) governments need to crackdown, to nip this illicit market problem in the bud, in an effort to keep back the ever lurking specter of Jeff Sessions and his one-man war against the Cole Memo and to prove that California can readily manage and nurture its new market.

California is at the dawn of a new era in its history, and there have been growing pains, but compliance and regulation has been a stipulation from Day Zero. Like all undertakings with legalizing and then opening the cannabis market, snuffing out the blackmarket will take time, consideration, and vigilance. Fortunately, Jerry Brown and the state seem to understand this.