New York Accidentally Restarted the War on Drugs
Notes on the great weed bodega disaster of 2024.
Three years ago, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into legislation a bill legalizing the recreational consumption and purchase of marijuana in New York state. And today, the Big Apple can safely be described as a stoner’s paradise—without exception, weed is cheap, potent, and easy to find.
In East Williamsburg the transformation could not be starker. When school is in session, you can find clusters of uniformed teenagers lighting up at the corner of Grand Street and Bushwick Avenue before crossing the street for class, and then again after the bell rings in the afternoon. Like teenagers anywhere, they chase each other up and down the avenue hollering and talking shit, tramping on the colorful spent baggies which now seem to make up an additional layer of topsoil in the city.
Where they and everyone else get their hands on it is one of New York’s great open secrets: Like almost all of the city’s neighborhoods, East Williamsburg is home to a dozen or more “weed bodegas.” And like everywhere else in New York, despite legalization, the vast majority of East Williamsburg’s dispensaries are operating illegally—the byproduct of a bonanza several years in the making.
From the moment the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act passed the governor’s desk in 2021 until very recently, just about anyone with a folding table, a few jars and an out-of-state connection could roll up to Washington Square Park in Manhattan’s East Village and start their own small business—completely unencumbered by regulations, taxes, or the condition that weed sold in New York be New York-grown. These entrepreneurs named any price they liked and faced zero downside. In the summers of 2022 and 2023, nearly every public park in NYC seemed to feature such ad-hoc cannabis markets, and much of the packaging bore California labels with names like “Trump OG” (Fuck your feelings!) or “Sleepy Joe OG” (You won’t even remember what country you are in!).
What’s extraordinary is that, at first, police appeared to pull back entirely from prohibiting illicit sales. The black market exploded as a result: Illegal smoke shops quickly outnumbered legal dispensaries, by one estimate, 20-to-1. This past January, a joint investigation published by THE CITY and New York Magazine counted 34 dispensaries within a few blocks of one another on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Just one of them had been granted a license by NYC’s Office of Cannabis Management. Shops which had previously sold only smoking paraphernalia seemed to vertically integrate overnight. Almost the first thing in the morning, in the heart of downtown Manhattan, I was propositioned in the middle of a crosswalk by kids no older than 16 flashing me the contents of their duffle bags. Adding insult to injury, illegal stores often have much more attention-grabbing promotional displays and signage, utterly out of compliance with state regulations which, with an eye toward curb appeal and shielding young people from the allure of bright colors, require more sedate and refined aesthetics.
Lack of enforcement meant legitimate operators were crowded out entirely and opportunists flourished, while all of the touted benefits to society which legalization ought to have delivered—safe and legal marijuana; a transparent, regulated industry; and large additional tax revenues—remained largely hypothetical.
New Yorkers were left scratching their heads, asking how on earth did we get here?
New York did the right and sensible thing in legalizing marijuana for recreational use, not only to bring it under the tax umbrella but because, as Americans learned with alcohol long ago, people are going to use it anyway and regulation would help them do it safely and without recourse to the underworld of middlemen. If the drug’s loudest proponents can sometimes enter the realm of self-parody in touting its benefits to mankind (or in minimizing its possible harms) it’s certainly less harmful than booze and even boasts a number of medicinal applications—from its therapeutic qualities to its use as an appetite enhancer for patients undergoing weight loss from illness or chemotherapy. And, perhaps most importantly, full legalization was democratic, having for years been widely favored by an American public that witnessed firsthand the ruinous effects of the war on drugs.
But when it comes to fostering the growth of an entire legal industry from scratch, the devil’s in the details, and New York’s governing authorities have persistently ignored the details that matter in favor of a headlong, unrealistic strategy that ignores consumer welfare, public safety, and the rights of business owners.
Opening such a business is difficult enough: doing it the right way is, as a rule, very expensive. Legal fees, contractors, inventory, taxes, not to mention some of the highest storefront rents in the world—combined, these expenditures can and do very easily run into the millions of dollars before a single gram of bud finds its way to a customer.
Though it’s difficult to identify a single aspect of New York’s legal weed rollout that was well planned or well executed, the legislature committed an egregious own goal with its decision to steer the first available licenses to the previously “justice-impacted,” or those with prior cannabis-related convictions.
The idea was simple, maybe a little too simple: Before legalization, the laws surrounding marijuana were unfair, even draconian. Enforcement was wildly uneven, and otherwise law-abiding, peaceful individuals were classed as felons for possessing, using, and selling cannabis in small amounts, their lives upended as a result.
Spurred by a virtuous impulse, the “equity” plan’s prospects for success were immediately dampened by the fact that those with prior convictions from the war on drugs are not always willing or able candidates for opening and maintaining successful small businesses—especially in an industry fraught with onerous rules and regulations owing to the continuing federal prohibition on cannabis.
Already slow in the way that government bureaucracy can be, the licensing process was quickly hampered en toto by lawsuits brought by those who argued, not without reason, that they had been unjustly excluded from the process—including a veteran’s group and already-operating medical dispensaries with the existing capacity to expand into the recreational market. A judge’s halt then forestalled hundreds of applications, even in cases where approval had already been granted and stores were just days from opening.
Meanwhile, City Hall had yet to reckon with what would happen when marijuana became widely legal for personal use while even into the second and third year of the new paradigm only a few dozen legal dispensaries had opened to service a city of more than 8 million people.
Without a legal industry that could stand on its own two feet, entrepreneurs—including immigrant store owners, peripatetic hustlers, sophisticated networks of shadow retailers on bicycles, and even, one presumes, those formerly incarcerated for selling weed—took advantage of police pull-back and filled a gaping hole in the market. And it went on like this for years, during which time neither City Hall nor Albany had given anyone reason to believe that the consequences of starting one’s own illicit operation could possibly outweigh the benefits.
The message that city government and law enforcement was sending to these entrepreneurs was unmistakable: For now, at least, what you’re doing is A-OK.
That is, until “Operation Padlock to Protect.”
A few months ago, against the backdrop of a public increasingly frustrated by the ubiquitous smell of pot, the glare of neon, and a tsunami of weed-kitsch overtaking its streets—not to mention some illicit stores’ proximity to schools and places of worship—Mayor Eric Adams announced a new crackdown, this time with the support of the city Sheriff’s office.
“Padlock” would feature a level of beefed-up enforcement that previous efforts at tamping down the illegal supply had lacked: Law enforcement now had the authority to conduct wide-ranging inspections and—per its name—lock down unlicensed businesses on the spot for a period of up to one year.
These new sweeping powers were granted in response to the overwhelming political need for authorities to get the situation under control, or at least to give the appearance of doing so. In May, hundreds of shops were raided by the police, dozens shut down and millions of dollars handed out in fines, with at least half a dozen violators arrested—some for merely asking to see a court order before allowing the police to search.
But once again, for reasons that aren’t quite clear, New York ballsed it up. Operation Padlock failed to be consistent, cracking down on some illegal establishments rather than others. This past week, I stepped into a weed bodega north of Tompkins Square Park where I was immediately greeted by a smiling man seated behind the counter. Asked about the crackdown, he calmly confirmed what I had felt to be true upon entering: that he was operating without a license, that many stores around him were, and that there was little apparent difference between those who had been shut down permanently (including those with legal representation who were counter-mobilizing against the city at that very moment) and those who continued to operate.
His store, among others, had been spared by the first months’ sweeps. Padlock’s vaunted dragnet, it seemed, had just plain missed. “Fingers crossed,” he said.
With “Padlock to Protect,” New York seems to have achieved the impossible: Its new legal weed regime, rife with errors both self-inflicted and eminently foreseeable, has combined the worst of all worlds—the heavy-handed enforcement of the bad old days; a fledgling legal industry that has been handicapped by bad policy right out of the gate; and multiple illegal establishments avoiding the law, ensuring more minors have easier access to high potency weed than ever. The black and gray-market business is booming while severe legal penalties once again fall upon those least able to bear them.
Surely, there must be a better way.
If New York can’t be competent in its roll-out, then it can at least be consistent. Unlicensed shop owners should not fall within a coin flip’s chance of either being overlooked by the law (or even granted a license on the sly, as happened to one bodega earlier this year) or fined and sent to jail. Many of them would not be selling weed in the first place if not for an egregiously bungled rollout. Allowed to sell to the public for years without serious interruption, sellers can be forgiven for mistaking the city’s profound inaction for its tacit approval. They ought to be brought into compliance and licensed or, in the event of their refusal or incapacity, shut down indefinitely. Criminal charges and jail time ought to be spared for only the most egregious repeat offenders.
In its haste to clean up a mess of its own making and to placate a furious public, authorities have instead turned the enforcement dial to eleven, running roughshod over the rights of business owners while, in all likelihood, inflicting precisely the kind of harm that the equity-focused rollout was meant to ameliorate in the first place. The public should not be forced to swallow the blatant hypocrisy that the overwhelming force currently being directed at working class, often immigrant business owners is merely another effort designed to “better support the legal cannabis market by allowing justice-impacted cannabis business owners to thrive.”
In his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce’s fictional alter-ego, Stephen Dedalus, asks: “What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?” In the three years since New York legalized weed, the city has made exactly that trade-off.
Brendan Ruberry is Production Editor and Podcast Producer at Persuasion.
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Washington Square Park is not in the East Village, it is the heart of Greenwich Village proper.
Otherwise, good article. The whole episode has been a master class in woke stupidity and incompetence.
Like many liberals I was strongly in favor of legalizing weed but now I have changed my mind. People are driving around high as hell and it's obvious that there has been an upsurge in young people who are stoned all day every day and are very obviously rendering themsleves permanently stupified. This business of driving while smoking is especially depressing cause it's obviously a massive trend and I wonder how in the hell the police are going to contend with it.