Why are there so many illegal weed stores in New York City? (Part 1)

Hi, I'm PJ Vote.

This is Search Engine.

Each week we try to answer a question we have about the world.

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Okay, check, check, check, check.

Noah, where are we?

We're on Delancey Street and

neither resonate with the intersection.

Delancey, two search engine reporters, myself and Noah John, were outside in Manhattan the other day on, it turned out, Delancey and Orchard Street.

What, Lower East Side, Manhattan?

We were taking a short walk around the neighborhood.

If you haven't been to New York since the pandemic, one thing has changed.

One thing that, when you just walk around and notice it, can be kind of staggering.

It is everywhere.

Okay, let's go.

Let's walk around.

A new kind of business that sometimes feels like it's driving out every other business.

Retail's version of an invasive species.

Okay, so technically we haven't even moved and I can see one.

There's a smoke shop called Flame Zone Convenience.

Stores selling weed.

The green signage.

You're like Deadly sells weed.

I think that one's a new one.

I've actually never seen that one.

They're like popping up like mushrooms.

A few steps away from Flame Zone Convenience, another weed spot.

This, we're passing a store called the Commission.

They've got like the red velvet rope outside, which is very good.

They have a nice green couch.

Looks like a nice felt.

Some guys smoking inside.

The commission had a sign outside advertising cannabis-infused food, hoagies, and other snacks.

Noah and I paused for a moment to appreciate the concept.

You can get a cheeseburger that will get you high from cannabis while you're eating it.

Yeah, that looks pretty sick.

Oh, and now we got another one.

All right, Empire Cannabis.

Just a couple stores down from the commission, Empire Cannabis.

A big store, but today their steel gates were down.

They actually had a fire, which shut them down for a little while.

Hi, Tricia.

Hi.

We stopped for a moment to greet Tricia, one of Noah's yoga instructors.

Oh, hi.

What's your name?

And I asked her the question that had brought us here.

Have you noticed there's a lot of cannabis shops on the street in New York City?

Do I see a lot of cannabis shops?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Everywhere.

See ya.

That's your yoga teacher?

Yeah.

Tricia moved on, perhaps to instruct yogis.

On our walk, on any given block, we'd usually at least see one weed store, sometimes as many as four.

Callie Plug across the street.

Most of them little fly-by-night operations that sell flour and edibles, some more high-end.

But the sheer density.

We were out there because I wanted to communicate it to you.

Blue cookie right across the street from its competitor, Callie Plugged each with a very similar product selection.

Munchy, sizzy, crazy man.

What's crazy man?

On another block, three shops in a row.

Oh.

Bought in pre-rolls.

How were they?

They were pretty good.

The guy in there was nice, too.

We were passing another one.

Exotic Cloud Smoke Shop.

I am struggling to convey to you the absurd density of all these stores.

In our 15-minute walk, we passed one pharmacy, two pizza places, and 10 weed spots.

And the thing that most people I've talked to don't understand is that all the stores we're looking at on this street are operating illegally.

Weed was legalized in New York City in 2021, but it's like liquor.

You need a license to sell it.

These shops are all unlicensed.

There's thousands of them.

Who's behind these stores?

We walk inside one.

It's just like a big open weed store.

The walls are decorated with spray-painted images of a stoned Chester the Cheetah and an even more stoned Captain Crunch.

Looks like a slightly dingy candy store, except almost all the products are junk food or weed.

A cool place for kids to hang out because it's like lots of candy.

I walk over to the guy behind the counter, a stylish young dude dressed in all black with a black baseball hat.

So wait, tell me, tell me.

You started working at the cannabis store two weeks ago.

Two weeks ago, yes, correct.

And how did you get the job?

Through a family friend.

And have you are you like a smoker?

I don't smoke, no.

Are you like a do you have cannabis expertise?

Not really, no.

Why did you take the job?

You know, rent in New York, expensive.

I just, I'm originally from Mississippi, just moved here.

Got it.

Yeah.

Are you worried at all about like the legality of selling weed?

No, not really.

I mean, what's the worst?

Is this store a legal store or not a legal store?

I'm not sure, honestly.

They don't disclose all with us employees.

What do they say to do if something happens?

They're reliable for everything, so pretty much if anything happens, they come and take care of everything.

And you don't feel stressed out.

No, not really.

Not at all.

We walked back out onto the street, where suddenly I felt hyper-conscious of how, despite all its mess and noise, most of New York is, to me, a cacophony of rules.

Cops who put tickets on windshields and into the hands of the cyclists running stop signs.

fire inspectors and building inspectors and restaurant inspectors terrorizing every business we have here.

New York, despite its chaos, is the most regulated, rule-bound, fine-administering place I've ever witnessed.

Unless you want to sell weed.

How is it that these weed stores are our sole concession to anarchy?

How did the city get overtaken by thousands of illegal smoke shops?

That was the question we started with.

But the answer to that question, it's bigger than New York.

It's part of a story that goes back almost 100 years.

This week, we're trying to understand this funny pattern that keeps happening in states that legalize weed.

They keep screwing it up.

We're going to look at California, we're going to look at New York, which tried to learn from California.

It's a fascinating story of very good intentions with very strange outcomes.

We are now living in a world where in much of America, You can buy and smoke weed freely, but many of the activists who fought for that reality are heartbroken at what it actually looks like.

That story of heartbreak and of people still trying to imagine a different kind of world, we'll tell it across two episodes.

Chapter 1, Reefer Madness

About a year ago, I developed this habit of slightly ruining dinner parties by only wanting to talk about New York's illegal weed stores.

People liked to theorize about what was going on here, but they just didn't have any answers to my questions.

Until at one of those dinners, I'd ended up sitting next to Willie.

Can you introduce yourself?

Yes.

Hi, my name is Willie Mack.

I am the co-founder and CEO of a company called Frank White.

I'm also a member of the board of directors of the Minority Cannabis Business Association, which is the largest trade association in the U.S.

looking to bring more minorities into the cannabis space as owners and operators and make sure we have patient care.

Willie had had a strange journey with cannabis and possessed strong feelings about the meaning of those stores.

They deeply, deeply upset him.

So I brought him into the studio to ask him about it.

So you're not like a professional political lobbyist.

I just wanted the story of like how you ended up in this role.

What is even your backstory with like weed?

Like what is your history with weed in your life?

My history with cannabis, and I choose the word cannabis.

Should I not use the word weed?

You can use the word weed.

I would not use marijuana because marijuana has supposedly is a history of racial connotation with that word.

What is a racial connotation with that?

So if you go back to the 1920s, there's a couple of sort of things that were happening in in culture and the world that kind of converged at the same time.

And it all came to a head in New Orleans and New York because of jazz music.

So this all goes back to music.

It's all tied to the culture of music.

Because what was happening was you had all this beautiful music being made by the most amazing people.

You know, I call cannabis the ultimate ghostwriter because it's uncredited for most of the music that's been created in the U.S.

for the last hundred years.

Truly.

And it's sometimes credited.

Sometimes credited, but not really from a cultural standpoint credited.

Like cannabis was there from jazz, every genre of music helping sort of fuel the creativity of it.

So you had white people going to these jazz clubs and smoking pot and getting pot and having fun and having white women around black and brown people and mexican people and this sort of cross-cultural thing but you know america doesn't really like that black and brown people mixing with the pretty white girls and one way to stop this is to go after this plant people are smoking and using to have fun and go dance in harlem and new orleans so they created this sort of scare we knew that it was called cannabis we rename it marijuana to make it sound more mexican and scary there's this you know drug coming across the border from the Mexicans, this thing that the blacks, the Mexicans are using to take our women and make people go crazy and jump off buildings.

So, all of that sort of reefer madness stems from that history in the early 1900s.

So, you refer to it as cannabis rather than marijuana because, for you, what's baked into that word marijuana is it's like racist connotation to like make it sound scary and foreign, yeah, Mexican.

That's fascinating.

So, but you know, weed, pot, like smoke, gas, za, that stuff, I don't mind.

Attacking cannabis to attack some of the people who smoke it has been a long-standing American tradition.

In the early 1900s, Mexican refugees fleeing a dictatorship brought both cannabis and the practice of smoking it with them to America.

A 1917 federal report noted with alarm that in Texas, the practice was spreading, even reaching, quote, lower-class whites.

Over the next century, a series of increasingly severe anti-cannabis laws would pass, but the drug would only become more popular.

Americans smoked through the Harrison Act, the Boggs Act, and despite Nixon's Controlled Substances Act, the 1970s still occurred.

You really can't understand anything that's happening with legalized cannabis today in New York, in California, anywhere in America, without understanding the 1970s, the moment when cannabis prohibition went into overdrive.

In New York, near the beginning of that decade, Governor Nelson Rockefeller unveiled some of the most severe drug laws this country has ever seen.

Drug laws which would become a kind of national model.

Under the Rockefeller drug laws, a person who possessed just one ounce of weed could receive a maximum of 15 years in prison.

That meant a 19-year-old high school kid caught holding enough pot to share with his friends could go to prison at least until he was 34.

For weed.

From the vantage point of the present, you can't help but wonder, how were people talked into this?

Ladies and gentlemen, this is an unusual press conference.

Well, this is the press conference where it all began.

January 23rd, 1973, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller unveiled his new package of drug laws.

I have one goal, one objective, and that is to stop the pushing of drugs

and to protect the innocent victim.

He's at the podium, a grandfatherly looking man in a pinstripe suit with a vintage New York accent.

Next, I'd like to call on Reverend Earl Moore, who is...

In the press conference, he's joined by a string of speakers, mostly black community leaders who are there to support him.

We come today believing

that our governor, our chieftain, bears the mark of a hero.

They're commending Rockefeller for taking responsibility for a city that had been collapsing.

New York then, with five times more homicides per capita as today.

One after another, they draw scenes of life in a city under siege from drugs, chiefly heroin.

I have seen the nation's number one state, New York, become a state of fear for more than 18 million law-abiding citizens.

Finally, Rockefeller himself retakes the stage.

He explains that before things got this bad, he himself was a bleeding heart type of guy.

That's right.

I was on this kick of trying to get the

addict off the street into treatment.

and on the theory that if we got them all off the street into treatment, there'd be nobody to buy the drugs and therefore the pushers would go away.

Now, this was a beautiful concept.

Except it just didn't happen to relate to the realities because the pushers keep finding new people.

Rockefeller is saying, you can't treat drug addiction by helping people get sober.

You actually have to target dealers because otherwise the dealers, or pushers, as he calls them, will keep finding new people to hook on drugs.

So Rockefeller's bold new plan.

Life sentence for pushers.

Get rid of all of the drug dealers.

In his eyes, a pusher was a pusher, whether they sold heroin or weed.

At the same time Rockefeller was passing these laws, the Nixon White House was pushing for similar laws with similar ideas on a federal level.

Years later, a former member of that administration, John Ehrlichman, would tell reporter Dan Baum that the drug war hadn't just been about crime or addiction, but had come from an understanding that certain drugs, particularly cannabis, were associated with Nixon's political enemies.

Here's Willie.

The war on drugs became a way for the government to say we can't criminalize and say we're going to go after black people and brown people and people who are counterculture to the capitalist system we live in.

So hippies, all of those things, but we can criminalize it by the fact that you're using this plant that's been grown for thousands of years and used all of the world for centuries as a tool for healing and medicine.

Okay, wait.

So hold on.

I asked you a totally different question, though.

Not that everything you're saying is fascinating, but you, like, what is your history with

a sorry that I would not call marijuana?

Thank you.

Calling it weed actually makes me

call it dad a little bit, but we're older now.

Cannabis.

My history is I first consumed cannabis in college.

And the first time I smoked, I didn't get high.

The second time I did, and I was like, oh, this feels

what it feels like.

I can't smoke weed.

Like it makes me think about all my personality defects, but I love the smell of other people's weed so much.

Like New York right now, where it's just like there's everywhere.

I am enjoying it so much.

A lot of people hate it.

And I'm like, hey, you know, I get it, but

it is is what it is.

And the funny thing is, I was afraid of weed.

I was actually a really good kid in high school because I grew up doing the Nancy Reagan, you know, drugs that make your brain turn into eggs and maybe an omelette with like a side of bacon.

So I was just like.

That all worked on you.

Like that idea that like.

It worked on me in the sense that I grew up in DC during the 80s during the crack epidemic.

So drugs were definitely something that were like bad.

Cracking drugs and heroin and all that stuff was just all grouped together as one sort of like drugs are bad.

I grew up in the church and I was the youngest kid and I was a good boy.

I was a smart kid, like three, like to study.

I knew I was a gay kid, but I wasn't out.

So I was kind of just sort of, you know, trying to be a good kid.

And it was kind of like, I don't want to go down that path.

So that was the one part of it.

The second part was I had a cousin when I was probably like 13 or 14 who was diagnosed with HIV.

And she, she, straight woman, was 17 at the time.

So that was a whole big thing that ran through the family and the church.

We was kind of like, whoa, like, how do we deal with this?

She started to use some of the early onsets of the HIV medications.

And one of the side effects was nausea.

And I remember that my friends and other people were helping her get weed to smoke to help her eat.

And I saw that, but I also knew that this was like something that was supposed to be bad.

And I was like, well, I don't really understand, but it was just like confusion and confluence of different ideas.

I know it's helping my cousin and helping people who need it.

I know the gay community is fighting for it.

questioning all the information I've been getting from the public and the press and my parents about, you know, drugs are bad.

This one seems to sit outside of the heroin crack, you know, the crazy ones.

This belief Willie was arriving at that weed might be different from the more hardcore drugs, that it might even be a good drug or that good drugs might exist, that belief was reaching him in part because it was being broadcast through the culture by a powerful cannabis activism movement.

But even as culturally many Americans' views on cannabis softened, the government kept going harder and harder with enforcement.

And nowhere more than here in New York, the cannabis arrest capital of the country.

From the late 90s to the mid-2000s, there were more than 350,000 arrests here for cannabis possession, an increase of more than a thousand percent from the 10 years prior.

I talked to one of the people swept up in all this, a man named Alex Norman.

He's in his 50s, the son of Cuban immigrants.

He lives in Ped Stai.

Back in the day, he was what you'd call a weed dealer, or what today we would call a former operator from the legacy market.

Can you tell me about your background in the legacy market as an operator?

Yeah, I managed to ran a delivery service for a long time.

How do you start a delivery service in the legacy days?

You just go to everybody that you know that smokes weed and say, hey, if you need weed, just give me a call.

And you show up, show up on time and have good quality product and, you know, and have it priced well and be consistent.

Alex had had a white collar job in finance.

He left it with plans to go to business school, but he'd always smoked weed.

And he thought, maybe just for a little while that he'd try selling it.

It was supposed to be very temporary.

Instead, it turned out to be very profitable.

So it was just like one of those things.

I'm like, well, I'm going to keep doing this until I figure out how I can transition one way or another, but I can't just let it go.

So it was just one of those things that I just kept doing.

At the height of prohibition, stories in the press about weed dealers tended to portray them as ruthless criminals, pushers.

In our current legalization era, stories in the press usually describe former weed dealers as desperate victims of circumstance.

It was refreshing to meet Alex, a person who identified as neither.

Just a guy with an eye for an opportunity.

Back in the day, Alex says he ran his service tight.

When he did his deliveries, he only went to his regulars, he never smoked in the car, product in the trunk, car under the speed limit.

But in 2005, he got caught.

So everybody thinks that I got arrested doing my delivery service.

My delivery service never got popped.

Ever.

Not even, it never even came close.

Because I had a delivery service.

I became more ambitious and I wanted to start my own full vertical operation.

So I wanted to start growing.

It's just like the most natural thing.

It's like growing up in New York City and you want to learn how to play basketball.

Same thing with weed.

Like if you smoke weed, you're around weed.

Everyone's just wants to grow with weed.

And so I was no different.

And basically,

I got busted because the door got kicked in at my grow.

So I wasn't there.

I had, I was cutting.

Without getting into much of the details, the guy that was working for me that day

doing deliveries, because I worked, you know, I had, I worked Monday through Fridays, weekends.

I had a delivery guy that worked on the weekend.

The guy that was working, I didn't know, had gone on an all-night bender and he wasn't answering my calls.

So Alex is in the basement of an apartment building, trimming cannabis off of his cannabis plans.

His driver is supposed to be delivering weed to clients, except he just isn't.

The orders are piling up.

And around 5 p.m.

that day, Alex mutters to himself the cursed phrase of middle managers everywhere.

I guess I'm going to have to do this myself.

So I was like, I got to fucking, I got to stop.

I got to get, this guy's full of shit.

He's not, he's not, he's done.

Like, he's not waking up.

So I basically left my apartment.

Plants were everywhere.

I didn't really even get a chance to like spray down, kill the smell, burn the candles, air stuff out.

And so I basically just left the whole apartment, just with imagine just fucking weed hanging everywhere and nothing bagged up.

It was just, I rushed out of there and I came back that night.

It was probably like 12 o'clock that night.

I was coming back to clean up.

The cops had kicked in the door at the basement and there was like four cops downstairs and they were like, hey, Sarge, I got him.

And I was like, fuck.

And they got me.

So then you stopped doing the service.

No.

No.

No, I got me.

I couldn't live without it.

It was my job.

I just had to be even more careful.

Alex fought the case, managed to bargain down to a few years probation.

He continued to sell weed in New York throughout throughout the 2010s, and he never got caught again.

By this point, though, there's a real shift happening, not in New York, but in other parts of the country.

New York State still considered Alex a criminal, but elsewhere, other states were legalizing weed and even trying to make amends with the people they'd arrested.

After the break, California.

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Chapter 2, California.

Well, as of this morning, recreational marijuana is now legal in California.

California joined seven other states and the District of Columbia where recreational marijuana is legal.

In November 2016, California officially and to much fanfare fully legalized recreational weed.

California is the largest market in the nation and that has many other states watching closely.

Other states were watching California not just because it was the largest legal market, but because its legalization plan contained an audacious idea, an experiment.

In some counties, the government was trying to build the weed market so that it would be led by the same people who'd been arrested during Prohibition.

Those efforts would go awry.

The California experiment would be considered by many a disaster.

By the time New York legalized, California would be a warning, a lesson in what not to do.

But that would come later.

In the beginning, things seemed miraculous.

Willie Mack, at that point not yet a cannabis activist, just a marketing guru with an abiding love for weed, moved to California on the very cusp of recreational legalization.

He got to watch as the old underground market prepared to step into the light.

Moved to LA.

I was tired of the cold in New York and wanted a bit of a change and, you know, the sunshine.

And then I fell into someone was like, hey, California is going to become legal.

There's a law firm that has a bunch of cannabis clients that are now looking to build more brands.

His name is Eric Shevin, awesome guy, great friend.

And he was like, my business as a defense attorney will some point start to go down because cannabis.

Oh, so he was defending people who at the time were selling.

My brain keeps me like, don't say weed, but it's so weird.

You can say weed.

Yeah, yeah.

It's just like my firmware is updating.

So he was defending clients who were getting arrested for selling pot weed cannabis.

But he's like, oh, I can see over the next hill, which is that if legalization is coming to California, I'm going to be out of business.

Yeah.

He was helping them get dispensary licenses, helping them.

Oh, he was helping them transition.

Yeah.

And one of them was my clients who have transitioned.

They're asking me for, I need a cannabis accountant.

I need a cannabis graphic designer.

I want to build a brand.

Like, do you know anyone that might help us be able to do this?

Because it was a new market and it's a whole new industry that was being built.

Oh, that's fascinating.

Because a person selling weed in pre-legalization did not have to, right?

No, nothing.

The packaging is a bad thing.

I don't need an accountant.

I don't have to tell anybody how much money I'm making.

I'm not paying taxes, so why do I need an accountant?

I don't want to show that I made any money.

I want to make this money and hide it.

Maybe we have a lawyer in case I do get popped, but I don't want to have books because this is illegal.

I'm not having QuickBooks manage my you know, sales of weed, so they don't need one.

The scenes Willie describes of the old market joining the new one, to me, they're funny, but also a little bit beautiful.

People who'd had to hide their businesses their whole lives were now joining the rest of the corporate world with all of its inefficiencies and annoyances.

They were getting looped in.

They were circling back.

Willie's cell phone rang off the hook.

Why we get random phone calls.

Hi, my lawyer Eric told me to call you.

I don't like talking on the phone.

we meet face to face um when can you meet me i'm like sure were these guys like unused to just participating in modern capitalism like was it strange working with them yes yes like they did not understand what an i cow was or a zoom like a night zoom phone call like a conference call like right you're trying to calendar stuff oh yeah i'm trying to i'm trying to get them to use email

i'm trying to get them from like not texting me and being like can we only meet in person and talk in person because i don't like talking over the phone right like i'm trying to get them to just sit down and like review notes from a meeting.

You know, they're tracking money and doing stuff.

And I mean, they're making millions of dollars.

Some of them, they built the whole industry for decades.

So it wasn't like it wasn't working.

It's just it was working under the shadows and underground and the legacy side.

You can tell these were heady days, right?

The potential was so clear, intoxicating.

Even today, there are wealthy families who got their start generations ago as alcohol bootleggers.

Maybe this, people hoped, could be like that.

Generational wealth.

But that dream would melt pretty quickly.

What went wrong in California?

I've heard a lot of different versions of the story.

It's complicated.

It's probably its own podcast.

But let me tell you about the parts you need to know.

Problem number one was access to cash.

Picture the legacy dealers that Willie was talking to.

They told weed, but maybe they'd never run a traditional business.

Once the state gave them their official license, now what?

To start an illegal weed company, you might need $10,000, a car, and the name of a guy with a grow in the Emerald Triangle.

To start a legal weed company, you need access to a lot more money, mainly because weed is still federally illegal.

It's crazy.

I mean, even banking.

You can't use credit cards.

You can't use banks.

You can't deduct taxes.

Cannabis businesses cannot deduct anything besides the cost of goods of manufacturing the product.

So you don't have the opportunity to deduct any of the normal operating expenses running your business.

So every cannabis business in this country still has to pay federal taxes, but you cannot deduct payroll, rent, insurance, any of those like marketing, all that stuff.

Nothing.

Nothing besides the cost of goods for the product that you're making.

If you're a cultivator, you can deduct the dirt and cultivation facility and the flowers and all that stuff that goes to the product, but nothing else that does not tie to the cost of goods.

It's just it's crazy to imagine a business that can't deduct expenses.

Yeah, it's crazy.

I mean, it's hard.

It's it's it's extraordinarily hard because you're now now starting at what, negative 60 cents for every dollar that you make?

So these are expensive businesses to run, very cash intensive with no access to traditional bank loans.

The state gives you a license to sell weed?

Cool.

But if you want to succeed, you now need to find a ton of capital.

I was talking about this problem with a corporate and regulatory attorney in the cannabis industry in New York named Jeff Schultz.

Jeff, like everybody else here, is a student of the California story.

He said one of the issues there was that the state was giving legacy dealers licenses, but often without any real business support.

You can give a license to somebody, but if they don't have money to operationalize it,

it's a license to lose.

It's a license to do nothing.

It's a piece of paper without the money.

These legacy dealers with licenses needed money, and typically they had to go to private investors to find that money.

In California, that was problem number two: opportunistic investors.

You have sophisticated investors coming in who are negotiating partnerships with relatively unsophisticated, financially unsophisticated, operationally unsophisticated operators.

Those licenses aren't also necessarily going to people who have participated in the legacy market, who understand the cannabis industry really well.

They may just be people who have otherwise been harmed by the war on drugs, but may not be actively engaged in the illicit market.

According to Jeff, these newbies with licenses ended up making deals that were often good for investors and not so good for them.

California created a situation where sophisticated investors often took advantage of the people entering the legit weed market as newbies.

Jeff said, if politicians are going to try to create an equity market like this, somebody also needs to make sure the deals are fair.

And we haven't really seen that.

We've actually seen a lot of the opposite.

We've seen in California, generally speaking, people taking advantage of social equity licensees.

And it starts with the lack of financial sophistication.

I'm going to give you X amount of dollars and we're going to put it into a contract that you may not understand.

And the state allowed for that.

So California broke down because legal weed businesses are expensive to run.

And these rookie business owners did not have the experience or access to capital to succeed.

That's a version of the story.

But there's at least one other enormous obstacle that helped sink a lot of those people.

It actually came up when I was talking to Alex Norman, the New Yorker who used to run a weed delivery service.

Alex Norman, of course, another student of California.

I was always watching what was happening in California.

And I had a lot of friends that were in New York that moved to California that were potheads too and, you know, used to hustle and were always telling me stories about like what was happening in LA with the illicit shops there and how the black market there was evolving.

And they're like, people don't buy at dispensaries.

They still buy in the black market.

And this is why, if because, like, a lot of people for people who believe that there should be like a legal market that tries to repair the mistakes that the state made with prohibition, they look at California and they say, like, yeah, it's good that people can buy weed without being afraid, but it's also a failure, you know, that the people in the legacy market were not set up to succeed.

What was an example of that?

Because people say that,

like, they say that as a talking point, but where exactly, like, what's the example of that?

You mean of it?

Where was the legacy market not set up to succeed?

And how many actual legacy operators wanted to actually transition?

You're skeptical of it.

No, I'm not scared.

I'm just skeptical of that premise because I think it's just a talking point.

Because I talk about this all the time with people.

And I know a lot of legacy operators that don't want to transition.

Alex's theory is simple.

Problem number three:

the black market.

The people who sold weed during Prohibition, many of them just didn't stop.

And why would they?

They already had profitable businesses.

Now they could operate more freely than ever before.

The new legal stores couldn't outcompete them because regulated weed is more expensive.

And crucially, California counties could opt out of having weed stores, which a majority did.

That left a ton of customers for the legacy dealers.

What happened in Cali built over time because it wasn't like Cali legalized, dispensaries open, black market exploded.

It was a slow buildup, right?

So when the shop started opening, everybody was reading all the news articles about like how they were making millions of dollars.

This was a new gold rush and kind of just

not recognizing like what was happening underground.

So to recap, competition from the black market, lack of access to capital, opportunistic or perhaps even predatory investors, those obstacles helped sink California's ambitious plan for the new weed market to address the wrongs of the recent past.

It turned out though, the wrongs of the recent past made really good promotional copy in this slick video made by MedMen, the venture capital-backed cannabis company that would end up being California weed's earliest visible success story.

The point is, these punishments have been harsh.

Like 25 years in a prison, harsh.

That's madness.

The video is telling the same story Willie told us earlier about the war on drugs, but here it's a commercial.

Marketing for a high-end California cannabis brand aimed essentially at convincing wine moms that weed is now compatible with mainstream culture.

Every day, good people are using it to calm their pain, their stress, their

anxieties.

And a product that drove people to the black market is now creating a new global market.

That's a lot.

If you've got a couple hours and don't feel like talking much, ask a cannabis activist their feelings about MedMen, a company with two white founders that dominated the nascent recreational industry for a spell.

A great place to shop.

the Apple store for weed, everyone says the same phrase, but nobody's idea of reparations for anything, really.

Medmen does not even dominate California's weed industry anymore, but their name is where everyone always ends the story.

The punchline at the end of a joke, no one found particularly funny.

And so, when word got out that New York was finally about to legalize weed,

everybody agreed this time things were going to be different.

They had to be

After the break, New York

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Chapter 3, New York.

In 2018, Willie Mack decides he's going to help start a cannabis lifestyle brand.

His business partner, C.J.

Wallace, son of Christopher Wallace, the late notorious BIJ,

one of Brooklyn's most beloved former operators in the legacy market.

C.J.

and Willie didn't just want to start a business, they wanted to be activists too.

Because over the past years, Willie had been disappointed and politically inspired by what he'd seen in California.

With New York on the verge of legalization, CJ and Willie decided they wanted to try to shape things there.

I was watching California and all these companies get legal.

I'm like, well, one, I don't see a lot of people look like me.

And because I was CMO of a startup in California, I'm like, not a lot of black people in C-level roles and not a lot of gay people.

And I was like, okay, so this is a problem.

And as we see legalization happening and watching all of the straight white men take ownership of the industry and make a bunch of money and have this sort of, you know, the med men's and all this massive run and turn into Apple stores, but yet leaving black people, queer people, women behind, I'm like, well, fuck that.

A lot of people felt like, fuck that.

They'd been promised not just a legal weed industry, but a legal weed industry that would be equity forward.

And in California, they hadn't gotten it.

In New York, activists would get another run at the goal.

And in New York, due mainly to several accidents of history, they would have way more political power than the California activists ever had.

New York's activists were about to benefit from a very strange series of events.

In February 2020, the governor of New York is Andrew Cuomo.

This was pre-COVID.

And Cuomo was in not a fight, but a political dispute about how New York's forthcoming wheat legalization should go.

An assemblywoman named Crystal Peoples Stokes, the Assembly Majority Leader from Buffalo, had sponsored her bill, which, if passed, would be the most social equity-focused cannabis law in the entire country.

Crystal People Stokes, thanks for joining us on New York Now.

We're really glad to have you here.

Thank you for inviting me.

It's my pleasure.

This is a clip of Stokes appearing on New York Now in February 2020, explaining her vision.

Stokes was convinced that her bill could actually fix the problems of California.

If you look at every other state or country that has legalized the use of marijuana, there have not been specific resources provided to invest in those communities that have received the most harm as a result of the mass incarceration.

In New York, we like to do that differently.

I've never drafted a bill, but even I can admire the elegance of Stokes's.

In her plan, a big pile of weed licenses would go to people who'd been arrested or who had family members who had.

But unlike in California, these licenses were set up so that an investor couldn't just come in and immediately take it away from the licensee.

The licensee had to be a 51% owner in their own business, at least for the first four years.

And they had to have a proven, legitimate business track record.

They couldn't be totally inexperienced.

And the state would even provide a fund of money so these licensees would not be without capital.

Take that, California.

There were a few things Stokes and Governor Cuomo were betting heads over, though.

Mainly, what would happen with the tax money the state would raise from cannabis?

Stokes wanted 40% of it to go into a dedicated fund to rebuild over-policed neighborhoods.

Cuomo wasn't into that.

And at the time, Cuomo was extremely powerful.

So is that dedicated fund kind of a deal breaker?

You won't agree to

if we can't fix the problems that mass incarceration created,

what would be the value of adding resources to the state's budget?

New roads?

It's kind of amazing to hear a politician reference money for new roads and then just fit off.

Politicians typically love to brag about building more roads.

Voters across the aisle love love infrastructure.

But Crystal People's Stokes is saying something you just would not hear outside of New York.

The state getting more money from cannabis taxes and using that money for roads?

Not good enough.

The state needed to fix its mistakes.

Governor Cuomo's plan, again, was more modest, although he was smart enough to talk the same talk.

For decades, communities of color were disproportionately affected by the unequal enforcement of marijuana laws.

This is Cuomo in 2020, 2020 discussing his modest vision for cannabis reform, the one that honestly seemed likely to pass.

This year, let's work with our neighbors, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, to coordinate a safe and fair system and let's legalize adult use of marijuana.

In Cuomo's bill, the money that legalization raised would go to a general fund.

Governors like him could then spend it however they wanted.

It was hard to imagine what could break the deadlock.

New tonight, a bombshell revelation from another former aide of Governor Cuomo's.

In a published report, she claims he sexually harassed her.

And then in December of 2020, a sexual harassment scandal, plus a whole separate scandal involving the deaths of people from COVID in nursing homes.

Now, these accusations follow recent revelations that the governor and his team withheld data about the actual number of people who died of coronavirus in nursing homes.

So far, several Republicans and even a couple of Democrats have called on the governor to to resign.

We're live in Midtown.

On to leave that bill.

Willie Mack was one of the activists supporting the Crystal People's Stokes version of the bill.

He'd been frustrated by Cuomo's resistance, but now he got the pressure put on him and the legislature had unified.

So now they're like, we have a bill we want to pass.

We have the votes to pass it.

You know, perfect storm of COVID and, you know, all of the things that were going on, including his scandal.

made it so that he's like, all right, I guess I got to sign this now.

All of a sudden, it's like, I'm going to be voting soon, that we have the votes.

I think we're gonna get this passed.

And it was like, oh, really?

Yeah.

Is this gonna actually happen?

It's like, oh, yeah.

Well, it is official today.

Marijuana is legal in New York.

Breaking news this noon, Governor Cuomo has signed a bill legalizing recreational marijuana in New York.

Recreational marijuana now legal in New York after an historic vote in Albany and the governor's signature.

The Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act passed on March 31st, 2021.

The version that Crystal Peoples Stokes had championed was now law.

We this legal way we in New York City with AI!

That shit empty, bro.

It's empty.

It's empty.

And you know, my bot, we couldn't do this without Chromo Psycho.

As you can hear in this side talk video, New Yorkers felt pretty good about this.

It was a good day for smokers.

I talked to Alex Norman, the guy with the delivery service in Bedstey, about that day.

Do you remember when New York State legalized cannabis?

I do, because everybody on my block was outside of their front porch smoking weed.

It was beautiful watching so many people do something they'd always done.

But now, for the first time, without fear.

Here's Willie Mac.

Did you celebrate?

Yeah.

I'm assuming by starting weed.

Smoking some weed, having some champagne.

I think we probably did a little dance, just like the team was just like, wow.

And I remember the first time I smoked a joint outside, I was like, whoa, this feels so weird.

All my life, I've dreamt of being able to smoke a joint in New York and not be afraid of getting arrested.

And now I can do that without getting afraid of being arrested.

Everything was set up to go perfectly.

The state just needed a little time, a little time to iron out the particulars, the details of how the new legal market would work.

The politicians seemed confident if they did this right, they could avoid the mess of California.

There would be no med men's in New York.

That was March 2021.

What the state failed to predict was the unique New York-specific mess that would be created here.

It is now March of 2024.

It has become clear to New Yorkers that something is amiss.

The local news can tell.

There are around 2,500 illegal weed shops across the five boroughs.

The state says the tax loss is staggering.

It seems like it's the only business you see opening up nowadays, honestly.

The people on TikTok can tell.

Why is there a smoke shop on every block now in New York?

New York really said, let's put a smoke shop here.

Let's put a smoke shop here.

I'm not trying to be fucking dramatic, but I don't know what happened to my city that all the fucking delis turns into smoke shops.

Noah and I wandering around outside on the street can tell.

If we walked maybe a five-minute walk, we have passed, I've lost count now, but like eight or nine stores?

A lot of options.

In New York State, there are 90 legal weed stores serving our population of 19 million people and thousands of illegal ones.

The shops Noah and I saw outside that day, choking the legal market before it really has a chance to begin.

What happened?

And

is there a chance it could all still be fixed?

Next week, we have the story of the mess and the people trying to solve it.

Recordings from the meetings where it all happened.

Truly an extraordinary story where we go deep into the bowels of the tragedy and comedy of a very ambitious project of reparations.

Don't miss this one.

That is next week on Search Engine.

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Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions.

If you enjoyed this episode, or any episode, please consider paying for the premium version of the show.

Incognito mode, you can sign up at searchengine.show.

I said earlier that a ton of people signed up this past week.

The best part was just hearing where listeners are listening from.

Australia, Japan, New Jersey, and who these people are.

Doctors, farmers, public defenders.

A former corrections officer who also confirmed a question we had from our scammy text episode.

They said, quote, it's 100% true that inmates smuggle phones in their butts and charge them by wiring them into lights.

What a world.

If you would like to join Incognito Mode or learn more, visit us at searchengine.show.

Search Engine was created by me, PJ Vote, and Shruthi Pinamanani and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John.

Fact-checking this week by Mary Mathis.

Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian.

Special thanks this week to Amanda Chicago Lewis and Eric Shevin.

Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese Dennis.

Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Pirello, and John Schmidt.

And to the team at Odyssey, J.D.

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Thank you for listening.

We will have the rest of this story next week.