Seven weeks before the nation’s first retail marijuana shops open in Colorado, federal authorities Thursday morning raided more than a dozen Denver metro area marijuana facilities.

In the largest federal raid on Colorado marijuana facilities since medical marijuana became legal, federal law enforcement agents with an assist from local police officers executed search and seizure warrants at multiple dispensaries and cultivation facilities throughout the region — at least a dozen in Denver alone.

At one raid in Boulder, a pile of seized marijuana lay in the snow like Christmas trees until a front-end loader scooped it up. At the VIP Cannabis dispensary in Denver, broken glass from a shattered front window littered the parking lot while masked agents hauled boxes of evidence into a U-Haul truck.

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Police turned customers away. And the dispensary’s website said it would be closed on Thursday and Friday.

Jeff Dorschner, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice in Denver, said the raids were being conducted by the Drug Enforcement Administration, Internal Revenue Service criminal investigations unit, the Denver Police Department and state and local law enforcement.

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