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By: Jared Evan
While many legitimate businesses have suffered and closed due to the pandemic, one industry has blossomed. A New York Post exclusive report reveals that New York City is not actively doing anything to stop or control the excessive number of weed stores that have illegally opened around the city.
NY has fumbled the marijuana licensing guidelines, an wokeness is at the heart of the catastrophe
Lax laws and paltry fines have turned shutting down the Big Apple’s illegal pot shops into nothing more than an endless game of whack a mole, according to Matthew Sedacca and Rich Calder of The New York Post. There’s no laws on the books to penalize unlicensed vendors for displaying rolled joints and other cannabis products, according to the NYPD.
Former Governor Cuomo hastily legalized marijuana in what many feel was a deflection from the sexual harassment and nursing home death scandals which were dominating the headlines at the time, shortly before the governor had to resign.
Shortly after the extremist woke faction of the NY government decided to make obtaining a marijuana sales license next to impossible, creating a ludicrous woke checklist, where in order to get into the legal business, the applicant gets top priority if they are a person of color and have been charged in the past with a serious marijuana offense.
The woke virtue signaling rule have resulted in less than 5 legal stores being licensed, so it should be no shock illegal shops have opened up. Woke, extremist, race vengeance ideologies have been a disaster for any area they are applied to.
“It seems like it would be easy for the city to close stores that are illegally selling unregulated cannabis, but under current laws it really isn’t,” Councilwoman Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan) told The New York Post, whose employees randomly visited 61 Upper West Side smoke shops last December and found 26 of them illegally carrying pot products.
City Sheriff Anthony Miranda and NYPD brass testified at a City Council hearing last month that there
were roughly 1,400 illegal cannabis shops citywide. Authorities typically issue meager $250 fines, in addition to seizing illicit products, but most shops almost immediately re-open reports The New York Post. State legislators are looking to beef up enforcement through new laws and put a stop to unlicensed dispensaries. It’s similar to a previous bill drafted by Krueger that stalled last year. That legislation would also have allowed both state agencies to seize pot from illegal smoke shops and yank stores’ certificates of registration over “illicit cannabis” sales.
Bob McManus, of The New York Post, writes “there might be more illegal weed shops than pigeons in Manhattan these days — including a glitzy storefront just 278 steps from City Hall. This probably wasn’t what Albany had in mind when it got into pot-pushing two years ago — but there you have it. Truth to tell, New York’s plan to legalize weed, turn its distribution over to ex-cons and then scoop up sales taxes while making no serious effort to combat illegal competition always seemed weird.”
McManus goes on to say That’s easy: Progressive Albany deems drug-law enforcement generally, and marijuana prosecution in particular, to be an affront to social justice. So in 2021 it effectively decriminalized pot possession while legalizing licensed sale — giving first dibs on permits to convicted former dealers (or, in contemporary Orwell-speak, “justice-involved individuals.”) Again, no one seems to have anticipated illegal competition.
