Welcome, New York City, to the legal cannabis scene, and all of its new trials and tribulations. Your 36 test pilot businesses are hitting the ground in the next few weeks amid a proliferation of illegal bodegas taking advantage of a temporary gray area in enforcement. As of December 15, more than 100,000 cannabis products were seized — somewhere around $4 million worth. Within two weeks, agencies issued 66 criminal charges and 500 civil summonses as part of a crackdown.
Let’s see: In a city of 9 million people, I’m going to say that’s less than a tiny drop in a huge bucket. I’m going to say that unless you’re part of the industry, you didn’t notice it at all. Or give a tinker’s damn. I’m going to say, too, that if you’re a consumer of weed, you don’t give a tinker’s damn where you get it or where it came from. All that matters is that it’s available, finally, without sneaking around.
SPEAKING FROM EXPERIENCE
I live out here on the West Coast, or as we like to call it, the Best Coast. Right in the Emerald Triangle of Northern California and Southern Oregon, where our legacy of weed culture runs deep. Generations of Emerald Triangle families have provided for themselves by growing and selling the best marijuana in the US. (That’s not bragging.) Conditions are perfect for the plant, and the sparseness of both jobs and population created a thriving underground market. I’ll leave it to someone else to blog about the changes that have happened to those homegrown enterprises over the course of legalization. I’d prefer to say it’s fine, everybody’s fine, but once the government sticks its nose into anything, stuff gets messy. Anyway, out here, we are far from bystanders where weed is concerned. That’s why I feel both qualified and obligated to speak up about the NYC situation.
First of all, the initial cannabis products that pop up for legal sale are what we call the “immaculate conception” crop. Plants take time to grow. Gummies take time to make. They don’t just — poof — materialize when the legislation goes through. Crop time frames don’t always match up to legalization time frames, so where does that first batch come from? Or you can think of it this way: You were at their wedding; how did the baby arrive only 6 months later? See what I’m saying? That’s the gray area the illegal bodegas are playing in. Where did that pot come from? City people are used to being surrounded by things to buy, not giving much thought to where they came from or how they got there. Go into the store, pay, open the package, consume, repeat. You get what you want at that moment and go on to the next morsel without even a nod to the systems in place that provide for at least a modicum of safety.
I had never thought about weed safety until my husband worked at a cannabis testing lab. The things that turned up! Pesticides, molds, solvents, “foreign matter” (think hairs, feces, ew). I got to thinking one day about all of the weed I had seen over the course of more than a half-century, and this image came to my mind: A hairy, sweaty guy in a wife-beater dropping cigarette ash on his fat stomach, tossing weed out of a galvanized washtub into a black garbage bag to sell to the guy who tosses it into the trunk of a one-lighted Ford Escort with an exhaust leak to take into the city, dump out on his kitchen table next to the cat and the dried up bowl of Cap’n Crunch to divide into baggies that he licks to seal and that he will hit the rounds to sell to you. Honestly. I can not only imagine it — I’ve seen some of it.
And that was the good old days.
NOT YOUR GRANDMA’S MARIJUANA
Enter extracts and concentrates and isomers and what have you. These are the bases of your gummies and drinks and brownies and dabs and oils and tinctures. This is where your Delta-8 comes from. This is where your regular green bud becomes what the guy who owns one of our oldest local headshops calls “herojuana.” As in “heroin” only with “juana” at the end. When taken down to its base compound, a single molecule, it’s white powder. Tasteless, colorless, and STRONG. A whole bunch of chemical processes are involved to get to where you want to go, some of which have been known to blow up with houses where they’re being prepared. Butane. You know? Lighter fluid? Now you have a sweaty guy in a wife-beater who eats microwaved Pop-Tarts for breakfast and microwaved Hot Pockets for dinner and is trying to act like a chemist.
I don’t know the recipe — don’t want to know the recipe. Never touch the stuff, legal or not. At least if it’s legal, it’s lab tested. You can be sure there are no residual solvents or other badness in legally manufactured products. If I lived in New York City, I’d give it a few more weeks until the legal weed shows up, especially if you want to consume your cannabis in a way that has no resemblance to bud.
How can you tell if you’re buying a legal product? I mean, provided you care. It’d be nice if educating the public was a requirement that came along with dispensaries opening their doors. Budtenders are the closest you’re probably ever going to come to teachers, and their job is to sell, not to inform. You could read the legislation. Yawn. I gave a cursory glance, because at most, that’s what a curious consumer might do, at New York State’s Office of Cannabis Management website and saw NO mention of labeling guidelines or requirements. Really?! I did click and click and click to find the information here.
Oregon is known for its legacy cannabis but also has been an early adopter of decriminalization and medical, so the state is considered a “mature” or “evolved” legal market.
To sell cannabis and hemp products in a dispensary in Oregon, here are some of what your product must be labeled with:
· The name of the testing lab
· The potency/dosage
· The ingredients
· The adult use symbol
· The date of harvest/manufacture
· The name and registration number of the grower/producer
· The caution statement
Additionally, no legal cannabis or hemp product can be sold in a form (gummy bears), packaging (candy wrapper), or with a name (Girl Scout Cookies, Candyland) that would be enticing to children.
Here are pictures of the amount of label information Oregon requires. This little tin is 1-1/4”.
Here is a picture of what is being confiscated from the illegal bodegas in NYC.
Photographer: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office/Bloomberg
Here’s what an illegal product might also look like. (I redacted their name because this isn’t snitching.)
(Yes, that's the back!)
How about the claims made on the label? What exactly are you ingesting? What’s the potency? How can you even be sure if what you’re buying is cannabis? Even the green stuff can be THC or CBD or a combination. Has it been adulterated with, say, pesticides? How do you know? The pop-up weed bodega is a far cry from the neighborhood weed guy. You got to know him over time. He didn’t dare burn anyone because people talk. But the bodega could be here today and gone tomorrow once they sell out. Who were they? Where did they go?
TIP OF THE PROVERBIAL ICEBERG
Illegal dispensaries are simply low-hanging fruit. They’re on the street. They’re findable. Mitch Kulick, a New York cannabis attorney, suspects the next step will be to fine landlords who rent to them. (It happened here in Oregon, where cartels have been renting farmland.) Going after landlords really starts to shake the tree.
The source of illegal cannabis products is the real bugaboo. In state? Out of state? Cartel? Vladimir Bautista, a co-founder of Happy Munkey, trying to get a NY dispensary license, wonders if we’re on the path to “Prohibition 2.0” as regulations are piled on regulations and continually rewritten so that there’s no way to keep up and run a successful, legit business as well. That goes for the current cannabis scene in every state that legalized. States make up their own sets of regulations, resulting in a crazy patchwork of rules that has the industry, law enforcement, and medical and adult use consumers confounded and frustrated. I’m going to pull up my soapbox here and shout to the moon and stars AGAIN that until the federal government deschedules cannabis (a Schedule 1 intoxicant) so everyone can work together from the same page, there will be no let-up to our current ill-informed regulatory environment.
Open meetings are rarities. It’s either industry or regulators, seldom both. Advice from growers and producers, the folks who actually know cannabis inside and out — historically and with an eye to the future — so far counts for nothing. Lack of communication and a startling lack of education keeps the hamster wheel of ineffective legislation and enforcement spinning at top speed. Legitimate, responsible producers and processors are left to chase ever-changing rules which leaves them at a severe disadvantage to bad actors. NYC mayor Eric Adams states that the goal for dealing with the city’s illegal cannabis trade is to “[e]ducate, confiscate and not incarcerate.” Bravo! He wants to “give warnings and get unlicensed vendors into legal businesses.” Good idea!
THE NEW SAME-OLD
There will always be shady characters looking for juicy loopholes in any business you can name. Legal cannabis is simply the newest arrival on the doing-dirt scene, not any more wrong than liquor or cigarettes (think tax stamps), just different. Just a new set of rules to a new human game. Fines and confiscations are all well and good. Everyone expects punishments for coloring outside the lines. But how to make the other side of the lines less tempting is the real issue. Legalization was supposed to accomplish that, and we have to admit it’s taken a great deal of pressure off cannabis. Unfortunately, it also has ushered in Prohibition 2.0.
Our best option for dealing with the new scenario? Education. Education is a hands-down better option than more regulation. And I don’t mean one-sided, governmental do-as-we-say, finger-pointing commandments handed down from on high. Growers, talk to legislators. Dispensary owners, talk to law enforcement. Community leaders, talk to your neighborhoods. And – and this is the Big And – everybody needs to get used to not knowing it all. Everybody needs to listen. Everybody needs to feel heard and involved.
The best work is done by teams, and there is absolutely no reason to assume book-smarts are a better substitute for experience where legalization is concerned. There is simply not enough data to go by. The cannabis sphere is a new social structure as well as a business opportunity. We’re all essentially improvising at this point. It sounds corny, but one mouth, two ears. Let’s listen.
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