Hundreds of people impacted by cannabis-related criminal charges will finally be allowed to move forward with the pot-shops they had already been granted licenses for — if the terms of a settlement agreement filed Tuesday are approved. With marijuana legalization in 2021, the state created a special class of license called the Conditional Adult-Use Retail […]
Marijuana
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Adams Announces New Crackdown on Illegal Pot Shops’ Landlords
Mayor Eric Adams took another swing at taking down the city’s thousands of illegal marijuana shops Monday by threatening landlords and building owners who rent to them, in what City Hall said was ”a new front in the Adams administration’s efforts to combat the proliferation of illegal, unlicensed smoke shops.” To do that, the city’s […]
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NY Promised Pot Store Loans Would Build Wealth and Create Equity. Instead, They’re Loading Businesses With Steep Costs.
In January 2022, Gov. Kathy Hochul outlined a bold vision to support the ambitious social-equity goals of New York’s new cannabis law: The state would create a $200 million fund to build out ready-to-open dispensaries in prime locations for retail licensees with past cannabis-related convictions. This, lawmakers and regulators agreed, was a chance for those […]
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Legal Budtender Is Home After Three Weeks in Rikers on Pot Charges
Jumal George, a budtender at Housing Works’ dispensary, was released from a Pennsylvania jail on Thursday evening. He had spent more than three weeks imprisoned on Rikers Island, in part because of an arrest warrant for out-of-state cannabis charges. George, 33, was arrested during a traffic stop on October 11 while driving home from his […]
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‘Social Equity’ Legal Weed Dealers Prepare to Bail on Stagnant Funding Program
Berkay Sebat has been edging toward becoming the owner and operator of one of the state’s first cannabis dispensaries. But it’s been four months since the Office of Cannabis Management informed him that he’d been matched with a storefront in SoHo, and he’s not sure he’ll ever get his site. A court injunction on the […]
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Pot Boss: $20K-a-Day Fines Not Enough to Deter Illegal Shops
State senators grilled top officials of the Office of Cannabis Management at a joint subcommittee hearing in Albany on Monday, honing in on the agency’s efforts to manage the proliferation of thousands of unlicensed shops across the state since legalization. OCM executive director Chris Alexander acknowledged the severity of the problem in his opening remarks, […]
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State Cannabis Agency Pauses Trials for Unlicensed Shops
The state Office of Cannabis Management has stopped holding trials where judges may recommend fines and other penalties for illegal sales — pausing consequences following its raids on unlicensed smoke shops. The state cannabis agency made that admission to THE CITY after repeated requests from a reporter to observe one of OCM’s enforcement hearings. The […]
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A Budtender at NYC’s First Legal Pot Shop Is in Rikers on Pot Charges
An employee of the city’s first legal marijuana dispensary is being held on Rikers Island on a cannabis-related felony charge in a striking example of how pot, despite being legal in New York state, can still drag people into the criminal justice system as it remains illegal under federal law and those of several states. […]
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Deluge of Pot Shop Proposals Leaves Community Boards Dazed and Confused
One week after New York state opened the permit process for legal cannabis shops to the general public, community boards across the city have been bombarded by submissions that they are struggling to review. Under the state’s 2021 law, a retail applicant must notify their local community board at least 30 days before submitting their […]
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Criticisms of Office of Cannabis Management Scrubbed from Public Video
Dozens of New Yorkers pilloried the state agency’s handling of weed’s rollout but the Office of Cannabis Management posted video of the meeting without their remarks, claiming that was a way “not to amplify the threats of self harm.”