<\/p>\nAdd Preferred Source<\/p>\n
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Haughney recently invited the Times Union to do a ride-along with his enforcement unit. It began in the city of Troy, where the inspection of a bodega that had been the subject of community complaints for allegedly selling marijuana to people under 21 turned out to be a dead end. Although the investigators found four marijuana cigarettes behind the counter of the corner store, that was arguably a \u201cpersonal use\u201d quantity and not enough to justify an enforcement action, Haughney said.<\/p>\n
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Jars of cannabis buds are displayed inside Green Essentials health and wellness dispensary during an inspection by state Office of Cannabis Management investigators. Investigators said the store was selling unlicensed cannabis products containing THC. (Will Waldron\/Times Union)<\/p>\n
Will Waldron\/Times Union<\/p>\n
But the next stop, at a purported hemp store on the outskirts of Amsterdam in Montgomery County, yielded a bigger return for the unit. The unlicensed cannabis shop in a small strip mall along Route 30 was openly selling products infused with unlawful amounts of THC, including marijuana buds packed in mason jars on a display counter in a side room.<\/p>\n
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As his investigators sifted the store\u2019s products and examined its paperwork, two of them set up a portable table outside to begin testing the seized products with high-performance liquid chromatography equipment that they use to quickly\u00a0measure the levels of cannabinoids like THC. The results yielded bad news for the shop\u2019s owners: Their cannabis inventory was seized and the state enforcement unit left the scene that afternoon after padlocking the business and posting two conspicuous \u201cIllegal Cannabis Seized\u201d signs on the front of the store.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we\u2019re on the right side of the pendulum with the cannabis industry,\u201d Haughney said. \u201cThat (search) was a good one, that\u2019s a good location to close down, but I\u2019m also not upset that the first place (in Troy) that we went to didn\u2019t have anything, because \u2026 if they fix it on their own, that saves us work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Haughney said that the cannabis enforcement unit had just two investigators when he arrived in February 2022, roughly 10 months after marijuana was legalized in New York. Today, there are nearly 45 investigators in the unit, which conducts inspections and has padlocked hundreds of unlicensed shops from Long Island to Buffalo.<\/p>\n
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Equipment used to test of THC in cannabis products is used by state Office of Cannabis Management investigators during a June raid of an unlicensed cannabis store in Mayfield. (Will Waldron\/Times Union)<\/p>\n
Will Waldron\/Times Union<\/p>\n
During the initial rollout of New York\u2019s retail marijuana market, the effort to make it profitable for licensed operators was greatly impeded by the explosion of illicit marijuana shops across the state. The money being made in the underground market was fueled, in part, by state lawmakers’ decision to immediately legalize marijuana possession when the law was passed in April 2021\u00a0\u2014 long before the retail market would begin taking shape.<\/p>\n
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The boom in illegal shops also was exacerbated by the fact that many law enforcement agencies have been reluctant to target the underground shops or street sales because of the decriminalization of the drug, as well as decades of criticism that marijuana arrests had disproportionately impacted minority communities.<\/p>\n
But New York lawmakers who now have embraced a legal cannabis market are pushing for law enforcement agencies to crack down on the industry\u2019s illegal competitors.<\/p>\n
‘I could have cried’<\/p>\n
Since April 2024, the Office of Cannabis Management has conducted nearly 1,600 inspections, issued nearly 1,200 violation notices and sealed 638 storefronts. By the end of last year, they had seized 32,300 pounds of illicit cannabis that they estimated had a \u201cstreet value\u201d of more than $143 million.<\/p>\n
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But challenges remain, and more than 40% of licensed cannabis retailers are not making a profit, including many who invested their life\u2019s savings into setting up a business.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Along bustling Arthur Avenue in the\u00a0Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx, David Nicponski has struggled to compete with roughly seven unlicensed cannabis shops that have brazenly operated within three blocks of his store, Freshly Baked NYC.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere had been very sporadic raids by the New York City Sheriff\u2019s (Office), but honestly, that only matters if they\u2019re done consistently,\u201d Nicponski said. \u201cIf you do it one time and slap a poster (up) saying, ‘cannabis seized,’ and then you don\u2019t come back, the shops just left the poster in the window\u00a0\u2014 because that\u2019s great advertising saying, ‘We have pot.’ And, like, that\u2019s so disheartening.\u201d<\/p>\n
But he was recently surprised by an unexpected visitor. The Office of Cannabis Management enforcement unit rolled into the neighborhood and began inspecting the unlicensed stores and seizing their cannabis products.<\/p>\n
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Daniel G. Haughney, director of enforcement and investigations at the state\u00a0Office of Cannabis Management, talks about his agency’s efforts to shut down illegal marijuana shops.\u00a0(Will Waldron\/Times Union)<\/p>\n
Will Waldron\/Times Union<\/p>\n
Nicponski said\u00a0Haughney had \u201ctold me once they had eliminated the legal and operational hurdles to New York City enforcement, that he was going to basically make Belmont Bronx the epicenter of state enforcement in the New York City area.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI could have cried, because you know that Arthur Avenue business (I own) is \u2026 always on the brink due to the (illegal) competition,\u201d\u00a0Nicponski said. \u201cSo seeing that made me like think there\u2019s some hope.\u201d<\/p>\n
But his optimism was short-lived. In an interview last week, Nicponski said six of the seven illicit cannabis stores in the neighborhood have already reopened.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIt\u2019s hard to see how a legal shop can survive under those conditions,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Nicponski\u2019s second cannabis shop is located in the heart of midtown Manhattan, in the district of state Sen. Liz Krueger, an architect of the 2021 law that legalized marijuana in New York.<\/p>\n
He said the illicit competitors in the neighborhood have largely been wiped out because\u00a0\u2014 with the senator\u2019s intervention\u00a0\u2014 supervisors in that particular NYPD precinct have made it a point to use their authority to target any unlicensed marijuana shops.<\/p>\n
But \u201cthere are plenty of places in Manhattan where there are still lots of (unlicensed) smoke shops,\u201d Nicponski said. \u201cIt really seems to depend on a precinct-by-precinct basis whether people have been able to get the precinct captain to make it a priority to assist, and that seems to be really hit-or-miss and inconsistent.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Krueger said that when it comes to enforcement efforts against unlicensed cannabis shops, \u201cWhat happens outside of New York City and what happens in New York City appears to be quite different.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said the problem was especially difficult during the administration of former Mayor Eric Adams, who she said did not want the NYPD involved in enforcement efforts against unlicensed cannabis shops.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo matter how many times you would document illegal stores and you would beg them to go do something about it, it either never happened or it happened where they immediately reopened 10 minutes later, and no one did anything about it,\u201d Krueger said.<\/p>\n
The senator said Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s six-month-old administration appears to be making \u201cmuch more of a commitment to actually going after these guys: getting them closed and then trying to keep them closed.\u201d<\/p>\n
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But Krueger added that legal challenges remain, including loopholes and arguably insufficient civil penalties that enable unlicensed operators to quickly reopen after they have been shut down, often at the same location. In some instances, the shops may be accepting the risk of additional law enforcement scrutiny because the civil penalties they face are dwarfed by the profits they are reaping selling unlicensed cannabis.<\/p>\n
Krueger said she also intervened in the Bronx neighborhood, where Nicponski and at least one other licensed business on Arthur Avenue had reached out for assistance.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was approached by some folks who said, ‘Help\u00a0\u2014 we have licenses, we\u2019re doing everything we\u2019re supposed to be doing, and we can\u2019t compete with all the illegal stores right around us,’\u201d she said. \u201cI set them up in meetings with the\u00a0NYPD. \u2026 I feel like they had a plan to try to go forward to do something, so it sounds like they are doing something; but it\u2019s not enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
Haughney, who previously worked in investigative positions at other state agencies, including the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Gaming Commission, said the key may be more\u00a0aggressively pursuing civil penalties against landlords who rent spaces to illegal marijuana shops and turn a blind eye to what\u2019s unfolding.<\/p>\n
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\u201cI think that word has begun to spread within the real estate community, that if you want to take the money from an illicit shop, we\u2019re going to come after you for that as well, so it\u2019s certainly not cost-effective for landlords to rent to an illicit operator,\u201d he said. \u201cI think we\u2019re on the right side of the pendulum within the cannabis industry. And with the illicit side, our focus and enforcement actions that we take will continue.\u201d<\/p>\n
He noted that last week, the NYPD arrested a person \u201cin the process of cutting off locks to a sealed illegal dispensary.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was based on great proactive police work,\u201d he said. \u201cFor there to be a safe and successful legal cannabis industry in New York, those that choose to operate outside of the legalized market must be shut down.\u201d<\/p>\n
And in the Bronx, \u201cFor the locations that illegally cut locks and reopen without authorization, we are working with the attorney general to force evictions and hold landlords responsible for allowing illegal conduct on their property.\u201d<\/p>\n
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‘Take a deep breath’<\/p>\n
There have been other initiatives undertaken by the state to battle the illicit cannabis market, including legislation passed this year that would increase penalties for bad actors.<\/p>\n
The state also has begun implementing a statewide \u201cseed-to-sale\u201d tracking system <\/a>that\u2019s intended to prevent illicit products from infiltrating the licensed market. State lawmakers and Hochul included $10 million in the recently adopted budget to help offset the costs of that system for cultivators, processors and retailers.<\/p>\nEight months ago, the New York Medical Cannabis Industry Association filed a lawsuit seeking a court order compelling state regulators to \u201cfulfill their legal responsibility to thwart the influx of illicit cannabis product \u2026 and to identify and sanction the companies responsible for the illegal ‘inversion’ of out-of-state cannabis products into New York.\u201d (Inversion is the term for introduction of\u00a0illicit cannabis into the regulated supply chain.)<\/p>\n
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The lawsuit was filed in state Supreme Court in November against the Office of Cannabis Management and Jessica Garcia, chairwoman of the state Cannabis Control Board.<\/p>\n
It alleged the board and Office of Cannabis Management had disregarded their statutory mandates and \u201cabdicated their responsibility to create a safe, regulated and insular intrastate adult-use cannabis market.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last week, in part due to the implementation of the new marijuana tracking system, that lawsuit was discontinued, although the association reserved its right to re-file the case in the future.<\/p>\n
The uptick in enforcement, including more coordination with local law enforcement agencies, as well as the proposal to increase penalties and crack down on the inversion of out-of-state cannabis in New York are elements of the state\u2019s larger attempt to recover from the well-documented botched\u00a0rollout of New York\u2019s legal marketplace\u00a0\u2014 a process plagued with regulatory and administrative missteps, poor decision-making and lackluster communication.<\/p>\n
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Krueger, who doesn\u2019t use cannabis but said she didn\u2019t want people who do use it put in jail, said she\u2019s \u201copen to changing the state law to make it work better.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce you dig into cannabis, you just start to take a deep breath: Are we ever going to get it to work?\u201d she said. \u201cI spent five years trying to get the (legalization) bill passed, and now I\u2019ve spent five years trying to make it work correctly.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jars of cannabis from Green Essentials health and wellness dispensary are tested for THC during a June inspection…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":929640,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,1749,275397,3344,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,37348,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-929639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-america","tag-cannabis","tag-latestnews","tag-marijuana","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkcity","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-state-politics","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116906472797587336","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=929639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929639\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/929640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=929639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=929639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=929639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}