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Virgil Grant can now talk about it — the illicit deals that went down at his family’s grocery store in Compton in the 1980s and ’90s. Mr. Grant would stuff bags of marijuana into empty boxes of Lucky Charms and hand them to his clients, a drug deal made to look like a trip to the bodega. He vacuum sealed the cash he received and buried it in his backyard, hundreds of thousands of dollars guaranteed to stay fresh.

The years of marijuana prohibition in California are over, and people like Mr. Grant straddle two eras, the criminal past and the legalized future.

Mr. Grant spent more than eight years in federal and state prisons for marijuana dealings. He now has three licensed cannabis businesses in Los Angeles.

As the state debates how to reconcile the legacy of the war on drugs with the new realities of legalization, San Francisco, San Diego and Alameda County have all announced that they will clear thousands of criminal records involving marijuana-related crimes.