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Our Local Correspondents


LEGAL WEED IN NEW YORK WAS GOING TO BE A REVOLUTION. WHAT HAPPENED?

Lawsuits. Unlicensed dispensaries. Corporations pushing to get in. The messy
rollout of a law that has tried to deliver social justice with marijuana.

By Jia Tolentino

February 19, 2024
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“This is America,” a public defender said. “And it’s playing out like
America.”Illustration by Rose Wong
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A few years ago, Howell Miller was in prison in New York State, walking laps
around the track with a fellow-inmate he’d befriended, who happened to be a
former U.S. congressman. Prior to the prison stint, Miller, a cheerful guy in
his early fifties, had run a construction company and a serious marijuana
operation, simultaneously. “I was a silent baller,” he told me. “Then one of my
guys got caught with forty-four hundred pounds on a truck.” As Miller neared the
end of a twelve-year sentence, he began hearing stories of people getting rich
running weed shops: “I was thinking, Why the hell am I still in jail?” His
ex-congressman friend, Anthony Weiner, told him on the track that day that the
first dispensary licenses were going to be awarded to people who had marijuana
convictions. “I thought, I’m gonna get out and look into that,” Miller said.

What Weiner had described was the Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary
program, or CAURD. It’s the flagship program of the Office of Cannabis
Management (O.C.M.), the agency created, in 2021, to oversee the legalization of
marijuana in New York. The state’s cannabis restrictions had been loosening for
almost a decade, but that year the government passed a law that would have
seemed unthinkable just a short while before. The governor at the time, Andrew
Cuomo, had been pushed left on the issue during a primary challenge from Cynthia
Nixon; after his reëlection, he found himself knee-deep in multiple scandals,
and unusually pliable. The law not only made pot legal for adults; it also
allocated forty per cent of weed-related tax revenue to communities where cops
had made disproportionate marijuana arrests, and it set a goal of awarding half
of all licenses to “social and economic equity” applicants: women, people of
color, service-disabled veterans, distressed farmers, and residents of those
overpoliced communities.

CAURD went a step further, mandating that the first licenses for the sale of
recreational weed go to people who had, or whose family members had, a
marijuana-related conviction. In the previous four decades, according to an
analysis by the Legal Aid Society, police in New York had made more than a
million marijuana arrests. Although weed is consumed in roughly equal
proportions across the racial and economic spectrum, as recently as 2020 people
of color were subjected to ninety-four per cent of marijuana arrests and
summonses in New York City; arrests in the city were also much heavier in
high-poverty areas. The idea for CAURD was plain: legal weed as reparations.

After the program was announced, I called Damian Fagon, a cannabis activist and
educator who was once one of the state’s few Black hemp farmers, to get his
take. (We used to smoke weed together in college.) He told me that he’d just
been appointed the O.C.M.’s chief equity officer. His new boss, the director of
the O.C.M., was Chris Alexander, the thirty-three-year-old son of immigrants
from Grenada, who’d helped shape the law while working for a progressive
nonprofit. Fagon had been texting his weed dealer, Misha, for feedback on policy
proposals. The activists had won.

Howell Miller got out of prison in early 2022 and followed up on the tip from
Weiner. It led him to the Bronx Cannabis Hub, an incubator set up by the Bronx
Defenders and run by a public defender in his thirties named Eli Northrup. That
August, Northrup held his first meeting for potential CAURD applicants. Forty or
so people, most of them Black or Latino, gathered in the reception area of the
Bronx Defenders office. Northrup and his colleagues had previously defended
several of the attendees in court, and he dapped them up as they walked in. A
twentysomething man named Sirvon, wearing a Louis Vuitton shower cap, told me
that he used to call Northrup from Rikers on weekends, just to catch up. “That’s
my bro,” Sirvon said. “That’s really gang.”

The Hub brought together a scrappy and profoundly New York City collection of
people. The prospective applicants included a bricklayer, a harm-reduction
trainer, and the owner of a local grocery store. There were also cabdrivers and
restaurant managers, an accountant, and an electrician. (Sirvon’s day job was
still weed dealer; he soon learned that, without tax records showing he’d run a
profitable business, he wasn’t eligible for CAURD.) Among the few women was
Naiomy Guerrero, an art historian in her early thirties doing a Ph.D. at the
City University of New York. (Her brother had the weed conviction.) Among the
many men was Coss Marte, who got busted on a major trafficking charge at the age
of twenty-three and then, after serving time, opened a “prison style” fitness
boot camp called Conbody. He had the vibe of a young Vin Diesel and a telegenic
smile; he’d already done a spot on “Ellen.” He was going to call his dispensary
Conbud.



Legal weed entrepreneurship is typically a sport for the well capitalized. It
can cost millions of dollars to open a dispensary, and, because marijuana is
still illegal at the federal level, dispensary owners can’t write off many of
their business expenses—they pay effective tax rates of up to eighty per cent.
CAURD promised a package that would help licensees leapfrog these barriers,
providing renovated dispensary spaces and access to a loan fund of two hundred
million dollars. New York’s cannabis law mostly prohibited vertical integration;
it was designed to stave off corporate capture and give opportunities to people
without venture-capital funding or Goldman Sachs on their résumés. In several
states, companies that already dominated the medical-marijuana market got the
first shot at the recreational market. New York required those companies to wait
three years. “There are a lot of white dudes who are pissed, who think we’re
giving the industry away,” Fagon told me.



If they were, it wasn’t easy. At the Hub meeting, Northrup began taking
questions, and hands kept going up. It was still illegal to transport marijuana
across state lines—how would retailers get their inventories? Farmers upstate
were growing fields of licit marijuana! What were the state’s loan terms going
to be? No one knew, exactly. How much was the application going to cost? Two
thousand dollars. Also, it was nonrefundable. “Jesus Christ,” one man said.

What about the weed-selling bodegas and trucks that had been sprouting up across
the city throughout the summer? Weren’t they cornering the market? “All of that
is illegal,” Northrup said. “You’re not behind the ball.” The city, he assumed,
would shut those shops down, eventually. Kathy Hochul, who had replaced Cuomo as
governor, insisted that legal dispensaries would be open by the end of 2022.
O.C.M. employees likened their task to building a plane while trying to fly it.
“New York isn’t basing this on any existing model,” Northrup said. “They’re
basing it on trying to do the right thing.”

By the end of the meeting, a preëmptive weariness had cut through the mood of
buzzing optimism. A woman in a pink skirt sighed. “I don’t think the government
made this confusing on accident,” she said. “I think they did that shit on
purpose.”

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Equity programs elsewhere had flopped. Illinois had a carve-out for
social-equity applicants, but by 2022 only one per cent of legal weed businesses
in that state had Black majority ownership. Ohio mandated that fifteen per cent
of medical-marijuana licenses go to people of color; after a lawsuit, the
mandate was ruled unconstitutional. But a fluky political moment had created the
chance for something radical in New York. If the O.C.M. built a profitable
marijuana industry on a foundation of social equity, it could change the
trajectory of national legalization. If it failed, people might see it as a
death knell for social justice having anything to do with legal weed.

Around nine hundred people applied for CAURD licenses. When the O.C.M. announced
the first approvals, in November, 2022, only thirty-six applicants had got
through. Miller was not among them. Neither was Marte, who told me that he’d
done a timed practice run uploading his documents, and had been applicant No.
13.

Guerrero, the art historian, did get a license. A careful woman with a fluency
in institutional critique, she appeared warier of CAURD’s promises—and of the
narrative of criminal grit and economic redemption that seemed to be expected of
licensees—than some of the other applicants did. Even so, she said that she’d
wept as she watched the announcement. “The term ‘justice-involved’ describes all
of us in my family,” she told me. “I was just swaying back and forth, thinking,
We did it. We really did this thing.”

“Ain’t nobody gonna end a meeting faster than me.”
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There were some large asterisks, however. The state had been hit with the first
of many lawsuits arguing that CAURD, in giving exclusive priority to people with
convictions and their families, violated the law. The state-renovated dispensary
locations weren’t ready, and no one knew when they would be, or where they’d be
situated. And the two hundred million dollars didn’t exist yet, either.



That money was meant to be the fruit of a partnership: fifty million from the
state, a hundred and fifty million from investment in a private fund. Management
of the fund was entrusted to a team consisting of the former N.B.A. star Chris
Webber, an entrepreneur named Lavetta Willis, and Siebert Williams Shank, a
financial firm certified as both women-owned and minority-owned. A week after
the first licenses were announced, the online publication NY Cannabis Insider
reported that, by all indications, no private money had been raised. What’s
more, Webber and Willis had undisclosed ties to a huge national weed brand,
Cookies, and their major alleged accomplishments in the field—raising a hundred
million dollars for nonwhite entrepreneurs and launching a fifty-million-dollar
cannabis facility in Detroit—had not come to fruition.

The author of that report was Brad Racino, a journalist based in Syracuse.
Starting in 2021, he’d published one story after another highlighting oversights
and complications in the legal-weed rollout. “You throw a rock and you hit an
accountability investigation,” he told me. (When I asked Willis and Webber for
comment, they pointed out that no one has ever achieved what they’re trying to
do.)



CAURD applicants started getting antsy. Marte and a couple of friends set up a
group text for gossiping, brainstorming, and sharing resources. It turned into a
WhatsApp chat, then a Discord group, and it ballooned with members—including
Racino, who said that he began to receive a “steady stream of phone calls,
Twitter D.M.s, and LinkedIn messages from people asking basic questions.” Some
people were close enough to Alexander and Fagon to text them when issues came
up; others couldn’t get information out of anyone. The O.C.M. was staffed with
people from the hands-on world of social-justice work. Now, as regulators, they
were required to keep their distance—even if they didn’t always do so.

Marte, talking on Zoom with his bright-eyed toddler in a Pack ’n Play behind
him, obsessed over the scoring system used to approve applications. “Give me
this license and I’ll be popping off deliveries in three weeks,” he told me.
Guerrero was growing skeptical and overwhelmed. So many people were calling her
with weird and seemingly predatory financial offers that she’d told her dad to
disconnect the home phone. Most of the CAURD licensees were vulnerable to this
sort of thing: the monetary value of a license was likely well into seven
figures, but without financing or real estate they couldn’t get their operations
started. “Social equity is not about plucking an opportunity out of the sky and
giving it to someone who hasn’t had it,” Guerrero told me. “It’s about
supporting that entity and setting them up for success. The real work is that
in-between.”

In her view, New York’s lawmakers had created a situation where the licensees
with the most resources would open stores first—“the total opposite,” she noted,
“of what they said they wanted to do.” The most resourced licensees, for now,
were nonprofits: eight licenses had gone to organizations that served the
currently or formerly incarcerated. They generally had fund-raising lists and
boards of directors. On December 29, 2022, Housing Works, which supports people
with H.I.V./AIDS through the sale of clothing and books, débuted the first legal
weed store in New York City, near Washington Square Park. The doors opened at
4:20 P.M., and the line was around the block. Chris Alexander was the first
customer. He bought a pack of watermelon gummies and a sativa strain called
Banana Runtz. “I’ve said it often and I’ll say it again,” he told the crowd.
“Equity is not a thing. It’s the thing. It is what we are doing.”

When 2023 began, New York City had one legal weed store and about fourteen
hundred illegal ones. Some of these shops had an Apple Store look—minimalist
merchandising, counters of blond wood and glass—and seemed well capitalized. A
big illicit chain called Empire Cannabis Clubs had opened its first New York
outlet in early 2021, insisting that its business model, in which customers pay
for membership to a “private club,” was legal. (A co-owner of the chain has said
that every man in her family served time for marijuana, and that the stores were
a way to “take back the years lost.”) A lot of the unlicensed shops looked like
bodegas, sat in storefronts that previously were bodegas, and seemed to be run
by bodega guys who had found a way to make better money. At a City Council
meeting, representatives for the Yemeni American Merchants Association—nearly
half of N.Y.C. bodegas are run by Yemenis—said that many of its members wanted
weed licenses but knew that, as “immigrant owners,” they “tend to be the last in
line when it comes to these new regulations, like the cannabis law.”

Gale Brewer, a former Manhattan borough president who’s now a City Council
member on the Upper West Side, has been pushing New York to do something about
these stores. I met her at her office, on Columbus Avenue, on a rainy afternoon.
Brewer is in her early seventies, with blond hair graying at the roots and the
unflappable bearing of a lifelong city dweller. She’d agreed to take me on a
tour of illicit shops in her district—there were sixty-five at last count, she
said, on about a hundred and sixty city blocks. She laid out our itinerary:
“Should we start with, what’s it called, Wazoo Zazoo?”

In nearly every state where marijuana has been decriminalized, legalization has
been followed by an upswing in illegal activity. Many entrepreneurs keep a hand
in each world: legal growers in California often divert half their product to
the illegal market as a safeguard against industry volatility (and to pad their
bottom line). Officials in that state recently accused a founder of a well-known
legal brand of being the landlord for a string of illegal dispensaries in Los
Angeles. Yelp-like Web sites that list local dispensaries frequently display
legal and illegal businesses alike, without differentiating.

But the explosion of unlicensed weed stores in New York City is unparalleled.
This is due to, among other things, the sheer number of storefronts and the
hypercharged culture of entrepreneurship in the city, where pop-up vending is
perpetually in bloom. It’s also because the N.Y.P.D., no longer able to search
cars or suspicious persons under the pretext of “marijuana odor,” seems
uninterested in policing for weed at all. One of Brewer’s staffers suggested to
me that the police were being obstinate—that they didn’t want to be on the hook
for a problem that the state had created. Enforcement, in any case, has fallen
on the entirely unequipped O.C.M. Alexander compared the situation to a group
project in grade school. “Let’s say Jessica is tasked with drawing, but she
can’t draw,” he told me. “I wasn’t expecting to draw, but I’ll take on the
drawing for her. But don’t come back and say the group project is a mistake
because I’m drawing slow.”

In the year and a half that elapsed between the legalization of marijuana and
the arrival of legal stores, the illegal shops were allowed to flourish.
Consumers were waiting for weed stores, and look—here they were! For months, I
walked into random smoke shops whenever I passed them and asked employees if
this was one of the new legal dispensaries I’d been hearing so much about.
“Sure,” they usually told me. “Absolutely.”

The name of the weed bodega a block from Brewer’s office was Zaza Waza. It
featured a velvet rope and a red carpet and the standard inventory for such
places: pre-rolled joints, neon bud grinders, elaborate bongs, candy-flavored
nicotine vapes (which are illegal to sell in New York), cans of nitrous oxide,
weed-infused gummies and chocolate bars from out-of-state brands. Several
products advertised a truly terrifying potency: one bag of peach gummy rings
from the California brand Smashed supposedly contained two hundred and fifty
milligrams of THC per gummy, enough to send a devoted stoner like myself to the
emergency room, if not to the grave. (These purported amounts are not always
accurate. Also, no one has ever actually died from too much weed.)



“When’s it gonna be legal?,” the guy behind the counter asked Brewer,
unprompted, as we perused the merchandise. “I want to apply for a license.” He
told me that he hadn’t been interested in marijuana until he started working at
the store, a month before, but now he thought it was a great and fascinating
product. He handed me a copy of Cannabis Magazine in case I wanted to learn
more.

Plenty of penalties, both civil and criminal, can be deployed against these
sellers, at least in theory. Churros are thoroughly legal—and a
thirteen-year-old can consume them incautiously without having a very memorable
panic attack—but cops still occasionally find the motivation to bust ladies who
sell them in the subway. At the end of 2022, Brewer released a survey about weed
shops in her district, asking the sheriff’s office and the O.C.M. for better
enforcement. The sheriff sent police to sweep a few shops and confiscate illegal
products. Zaza Waza’s shelves were emptied. Two days later, the store was open
again, fully restocked. (The owners of Zaza Waza could not be reached for
comment.)



Back on Columbus Avenue, Brewer and I passed weed bodegas every few blocks. She
had a grim sense of humor about their invincibility. The Mayor, Eric Adams, had
launched an interagency task force to inspect stores and seize illegal products;
the state legislature granted the O.C.M. authority to issue up to twenty
thousand dollars in fines a day. But the fines could be levied only through
scattershot administrative hearings, and the O.C.M. had reportedly collected
just two hundred and twenty thousand dollars in total before suspending
proceedings entirely.

“I’m frustrated!” Brewer announced. The bottoms of her camel pants were soaked
from walking through puddles. We passed a bar called Prohibition. “The city
blames the state, the state blames the city,” she continued. “The D.A. says, ‘I
don’t get any coöperation from the police or the sheriff.’ I keep saying, ‘Why
can’t we just get everyone in a room?’ ” I asked Brewer which agencies would
need to be present. “The D.A., the sheriff, the P.D., the O.C.M., Tax and
Finance, Consumer Protection, Health,” she said. “Oh, and the schools.” Some of
the shops made a point of opening early, she told me, to catch high-school kids
on their way to first period. Selling cannabis to minors is a felony.

I thought about a conversation I’d had a few days earlier with a talkative
cannabis attorney named Jeffrey Hoffman. “The best way to fight the illegal
stores is to open a bunch of legal stores and have them delight their
customers,” he said. “The next one is no tax on the legal stores for three
years, and then we tax when we have a seven-billion-dollar cannabis industry.”
But the quick path, he went on, would be to levy huge, escalating fines on the
landlords who own the properties that house the illegal businesses. In his
political dreams, the city might seize the property after a landlord’s third
violation, then open a legal cannabis store on the first floor and put
affordable housing above it. “Thank you very much—I’m now the mayor,” he said.

Brewer snorted when I recounted the conversation. “That’s a great idea if you
don’t have to actually do it,” she said.

New York didn’t just have to license the people who were going to sell
marijuana—it also had to license, among others, the people who were going to
grow it. Here, too, regulators tried to create an industry that was equitable,
and environmentally friendly. The state gave its first round of recreational
cultivator licenses to farmers who’d already been authorized to grow hemp—i.e.,
low-THC cannabis—which has been legal since 2017. New York is the only state in
the country to have its first crop of legal marijuana grown entirely under the
sun, Alexander told me. Farmers were allowed an acre of outdoor canopy, or about
half that if they wanted to grow in a greenhouse. Alexander said that these
restrictions were “driven by principle.”

Not everyone agreed that this was a good thing. “The quality is so bad,” a
longtime pot grower in the Bronx who calls himself the Kolektor and has a cult
following, told me. “You need equatorial conditions to grow—heat and humidity.”
Classic New York weed, he said, was “obnoxious, pungent, super-loud. Never a
sweet smell. You’ll be walking down the block and smelling it, like, ‘God
damn.’ ” You can’t grow weed like that outdoors here.

The Kolektor, a former U.S. infantryman who wears a ski mask when he showcases
his weed at public events, started growing marijuana to alleviate his own
symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. He prided himself on fresh product,
never treated with pesticides, touched by only a few hands: “grown, not flown.”
He wanted to go legal, he told me, but the new law didn’t lay out a pathway to
get licenses for people who were still involved in the black market. Only those
with convictions were eligible for CAURD; plenty of longtime dealers and growers
had never been caught. The Kolektor sent me an elaborate amnesty proposal,
drafted by a prominent cannabis lawyer. It involved a double-blind application
system, a truth-and-reconciliation tribunal, locked hearings. Anything like that
would take a lot of time. But the Kolektor wasn’t too pressed—his business was
flourishing. He posted closeup shots of his dense, crystalline flower on
Instagram and sold huge amounts of weed through Discord every week.



Most of the hemp farmers were white, and lived upstate. Brittany Carbone, who
grew up on Long Island, runs a farm with her husband, Erik. Her past involvement
with marijuana includes a run-in with law enforcement: as an undergrad at Penn
State, in 2010, she was arrested for smoking weed in her dorm room. Her parents
paid a three-thousand-dollar fine, and she did a day of community service; a
year later, her record was automatically expunged. Her passion for marijuana was
undiminished. After college, she worked as a personal trainer for Equinox, and
started making her own CBD blends, mixing hemp extract into ashwagandha root and
lemon balm in her kitchen. When New York announced that farmers could get
licensed to grow hemp for CBD, she thought of a property her family owned, which
had a lot of unused acreage. There was even a barn—it’s where she and Erik had
had their wedding reception.

I visited the farm, called Tricolla, on a biting-cold day. Carbone wore fleece,
Erik wore lined denim, and their dogs ran underfoot. Carbone drove me around in
a utility vehicle, passing acres of four-foot-tall marijuana plants, a million
nugs waving gently in the wind. The barns were strung with wire cages for drying
the harvest. Plastic tubs were stuffed with bags of weed.

Carbone speaks with the wonkish vigor of a policy nerd and the can-do
restlessness of an athlete at a press conference. She told me she understood
that people were skeptical about the quality of outdoor-grow marijuana. She
believed, she said, “that this opportunity should be going to legacy growers, to
the people who’ve been cultivating marijuana in New York for years.” Still, the
opportunity was a mixed blessing. She and her husband had taught themselves how
to grow hemp just as the federal government removed it from the
controlled-substances list: supply skyrocketed, prices plummeted, and they ended
up with their crop mostly composted and an unsustainable load of debt. Legal
cannabis had arrived as a lifeline, but the Carbones had upended everything to
grow their first weed crop, and then found themselves with almost nowhere to
sell it.

In the early months of 2023, licensed dispensaries began to dot New York.
Smacked Village, the first shop run by an individual CAURD licensee, Roland
Conner, opened as a pop-up on Bleecker Street in January. Union Square Travel
Agency, a luxe store operated by the Doe Fund, a nonprofit, arrived soon
afterward. The O.C.M. expanded CAURD beyond the planned hundred and fifty
licenses, in the hope of getting more legal stores open. In April, Coss Marte
finally got his license. Howell Miller got his in July. Then, in August, the
entire program was halted by litigation.

A group of military veterans had sued the O.C.M., arguing that CAURD
discriminated against people who’d been designated as social-equity applicants,
including them. Soon, a coalition of medical-marijuana suppliers was allowed to
join the suit as plaintiffs, giving rise to a popular theory that it had
orchestrated the case. Brad Racino, the Cannabis Insider journalist, wasn’t
surprised. “We ran so many stories from so many attorneys saying that CAURD is a
lawsuit magnet,” he told me. Jeffrey Hoffman, the cannabis lawyer, said the same
thing: “I absolutely love the folks at O.C.M., I commend them till the cows come
home, but their regulations don’t match the law.”

“Professor Jenkins, the world must never know of this discovery. Our findings
die with us.”
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The judge presiding over the suit issued an injunction, freezing the CAURD
program. By that point, only about twenty licensees were doing business. Many
people had signed leases and were paying rent, losing money they’d barely
scraped together in the first place. Webber and Willis had finally secured a
lender, Chicago Atlantic, for the two-hundred-million-dollar loan fund. The
loans required no collateral, but the licensees couldn’t renegotiate the terms,
couldn’t pay off the loans early without penalties, and couldn’t set their own
profit margins or staffing costs. The interest rate was thirteen per cent. The
O.C.M., needing more stores on the streets, waived the waiting period for
medical-marijuana companies, allowing each one entry into the market for a
twenty-million-dollar fee.



Carbone told me that farming was “the most humbling experience you could go
through,” and said that it had taught her to let go of many expectations. To
raise money and get help with operations, she’d partnered with a company in
California, but it hadn’t worked out. Things weren’t going great in that state,
either—high taxes and regulatory struggles were sandbagging the legal market.
Small businesses were going bankrupt, corporations were moving to less
restrictive territory, and the majority of weed purchases were still made
illegally. “California is drowning,” Carbone said. “And people are grabbing on
to New York as a lifeboat. And now the lifeboat is sinking.”

In the fall of 2023, the O.C.M. convinced a judge that a few licensees should be
allowed to proceed. Marte, who’d put hundreds of thousands of dollars into
building out his location and was beginning to fear that he had made a
life-altering mistake, was one of them. He opened Conbud ten days later, on the
corner of Orchard and Delancey, just three blocks from the park where he’d first
been arrested for weed. He threw a huge party—Funkmaster Flex d.j.’d, budtenders
wore shirts that said “Come Back with a Warrant,” and a camera crew filmed
everything for a documentary.

Marte, a natural salesman armed with social connections and a P.R. agent, was
about as well equipped as someone in the CAURD program could be. Still, he
immediately ran into obstacles. If you searched Google for “weed stores” in his
neighborhood, only the illegal ones came up. The law required that cannabis
products not be visible from the street, and limited the text a store could
print on its signs. (Many weed bodegas, in contrast, had a flamboyant, illegal
tackiness.) Marte hustled like old times on the sidewalk, telling people about
his store in Spanish and in very basic Chinese.



In October, applications for licenses opened to the general public. Unsure of
how the lawsuit would turn out, the O.C.M. urged CAURD licensees to apply again.
I took the train back to the Bronx, where the Hub was helping people navigate
the process. Northrup sorted through paperwork; the licensees, used to getting
worked over by the government, sat by patiently. One of them had given up a
restaurant to focus on his dispensary, and was fretting about yet another pivot.
On the phone with a business partner, he said, “What if O.C.M. fucks us two
times?”

The plaintiffs suing the O.C.M. reached a settlement in late November: the
veterans were awarded dispensary licenses, and each medical supplier was given
permission to open three dispensaries. CAURD could now proceed. I called Carbone
and caught her in a “trim trance,” manicuring her marijuana crop by hand. She
and Erik had downsized, on account of the delayed rollout, and were now tending
to a half-acre crop mostly on their own. Their pre-rolled joints and gummies
were selling at Housing Works and Conbud. But the cost of doing business was
punitively high, she said, and the market was fluctuating, with farmers lowering
prices to impossible levels just to get their products on the shelves.

“This isn’t an easy state to do business in,” she said. As she saw it, the
O.C.M. wasn’t equipped to regulate the legal shops, let alone the unlicensed
ones: “Out-of-state indoor flower is on the shelves in legal dispensaries, being
sold as ‘greenhouse.’ Growers know this—we know what greenhouse grow looks
like—but no one wants to snitch on the dispensaries.” She said that some
dispensaries weren’t paying their bills, perhaps in some cases “because they’re
saddled with an insane monthly nut” from the state on their storefronts. “And
what are we supposed to do about that?”

At the end of the year, I waded through holiday shoppers in Tribeca on my way to
the law offices of Cleary Gottlieb, thirty stories up in a high-rise, where
Northrup had invited CAURD holders to plan their next steps. People clapped one
another on the back as they walked in. Most of them were struggling to find
financing. One man, a cabdriver, was still miffed about having to apply for a
license twice. For CAURD, he’d needed to show that he had run a successful
business, but to get priority in the general round he’d needed to show that he
was low-income. “Do you want social equity or do you want to humiliate me?” he
said.

Naiomy Guerrero was biding her time, turning down a succession of predatory
offers. The language of social equity had come to seem like a cloak for a more
brutal capitalist reality. “Many of us want a world that operates on radical
principles, but that’s not what we are living,” she said.

Northrup had decided that the best way for him to help was to join the
legislature: he was now running for State Assembly. Several licensees lived in
his campaign district, in Morningside Heights and West Harlem, and they joked
about getting out the vote. He suggested that the licensees organize a trip to
Albany to advocate for themselves. “Even if it was just the people in this room,
we have power,” he said. The talk continued, and ideas flew alongside grievances
and hopes. Could they form a CAURD franchise, and get investors interested in
multiple stores? Could they crowdfund? Was it all too late? “If we wait on
O.C.M., we’re gonna get screwed,” a man who runs a Jamaican restaurant upstate
said. “This is how poor people, like all of us in the room, get marginalized.”
Weed bodegas kept opening with crappy product at low prices, and the
corporations were right around the corner. “It’s not fair,” Northrup
acknowledged, trying to quiet the room. “This is America, and it’s playing out
like America.”

In January, I sat down at a bar near Fort Greene Park and looked around for
Sirvon, the weed dealer I’d met at the Hub a year and a half before. We’d agreed
to have lunch together, at 1 P.M., and he had generously insisted on coming all
the way to Brooklyn from Eastchester, in the Bronx. But now snow was falling,
for the first time in ages, and at three o’clock I found myself eating shrimp
cocktail while engaging in a deeply familiar, almost old-fashioned activity:
texting a weed guy to ask his E.T.A.

Sirvon arrived in a hoodie, which he kept pulled up over his head, and wearing a
nameplate ring that said “NEW MONEY.” He grew up in the Edenwald Houses, and got
locked up for the first time when he was eleven, he said, on a robbery charge.
(“My mom’s got seven fucking kids, and she’s taking care of all of us by
herself? Nah, I can’t be asking her for money to buy me my little pair of
pants.”) He started selling weed not long afterward. He made a business out of
it when he was nineteen and expecting his first kid; his supplier got barrels
shipped in from Jamaica. “You had Piff, you had Sour, you had Kush,” he said.
“None of this Afghanistan Blueberry Sunshine shit.” He started doing deliveries;
he expanded and staffed up. “You got people that’s ambitious and hungry, you put
them to work together. Then you got people who just like to have a gun and
shit—‘O.K., you can be the security guard,’ you feel me?” He was moving half a
pound daily, touching a grand in cash a night.

Ineligible for CAURD, he’d continued dealing, but the unlicensed stores had
messed up his business—partly by emboldening sellers who were new to the trade.
“If you’re coming to Edenwald,” he said, “and you see me and thirteen other
niggas standing right there, you’re going to be, like, ‘Fuck that, I’m going to
go to the smoke shop.’ And the smoke shop’s got a dusty bag of chips near the
counter, so they be taking E.B.T.!” E.B.T. cards cannot be legally used for
alcohol, tobacco, or even prepared foods, let alone marijuana, but the
unlicensed stores are already operating outside a number of regulatory
boundaries, and so might be willing to cross a few more. (A spokesperson at
Brewer’s office told me that he’d also heard rumors about shops accepting E.B.T.
for weed.) Sirvon’s profits were way down. He would work past midnight and
barely clear two hundred dollars.



“It’s not that we know the perfect way to design or implement a cannabis
market,” Chris Alexander, of the O.C.M., told me. “Who do we turn to to know the
way to do this? It’s just us.” The agency now has around a hundred and fifty
employees. “We are not close to where we need to be to handle all that we’re
trying to do,” Alexander said. Despite the agency’s missteps, there were
victories to claim. Housing Works had done twenty-four million dollars in sales
in 2023. A year ago, according to an O.C.M. report, there were only twenty
Black-owned dispensaries in the country; by January, New York had added a dozen
more. Marte said that sales at Conbud were increasing by five per cent every
week. Naiomy Guerrero got a state-issued site for her family’s dispensary,
called Nube, and hopes to open it later this year. Howell Miller signed a lease
for a dispensary in the Bronx—Two Buds, which he will run with his brother, and
which has a grand opening planned for the spring. I e-mailed Anthony Weiner to
ask if he remembered his conversation with Miller on the prison track. “Holy
shit,” he replied. “Totally remember that dude. So glad to hear he is doing
well. Send him my best.”



More than a hundred thousand marijuana convictions have been expunged, and
sellers in the black market continue to cross over, if slowly. Misha, formerly
the weed dealer of choice for the O.C.M.’s Damian Fagon, got a CAURD license and
the keys to a store in Bushwick: Misha’s Flower Shop. A handful of legacy
growers, including the Kolektor, were in line for micro-licenses, allowing
small, craft-beer-esque cultivation. “I told Damian, ‘Bro, you give me a license
or not, there’s a lot of us who are going to be doing our thing. It behooves you
to find a way to get us in,’ ” the Kolektor said.

Still, there were two hundred and fifty thousand pounds of legal weed
deteriorating in storage, and patience was ebbing in Albany. At the end of
January, Hochul called the legal rollout a “disaster” and said that “the
legislation was crafted in a way that was not poised for success.” Brad Racino
has come to believe that staffing the O.C.M. with advocates doomed the program.
“When you start using this law in your own ways, and you’re not an elected
official, that’s when things start to go wrong,” he said. He feared that a lot
of CAURD licensees would end up worse off than when they began. “You have all
these people who have already been targeted by the government, and you’re taking
that vulnerable population and experimenting with them.”

Sirvon still wanted to go legal, but he couldn’t put together a strong
application. He didn’t have the capital to secure a storefront, legal or
otherwise, and corporations were no longer hunting around for people with
marijuana convictions to invest in, even predatorily. “I’m Black,” he told me.
“Period. I’m from the hood. I was promised forty acres and a mule, and I ain’t
seen that shit yet. It’s always a Catch-22 when it comes to Black people. It’s
always something in the fine print.” I told him that I hoped he’d have a weed
store of his own someday. “Yeah,” he said. “At some point. That’s what I’m
definitely doing. Facts.” ♦



Published in the print edition of the February 26, 2024, issue, with the
headline “In the Weeds.”


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Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2023, she won a National
Magazine Award for Columns and Essays. Her first book, the essay collection
“Trick Mirror,” was published in 2019.




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