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Now, under the initiative “Operation Padlock to Protect” — which kicked off last month and allows the sheriff’s office to inspect possible unlicensed cannabis retailers without first obtaining a court order — hundreds of shops without a license to sell pot have been shut down, and many more civil summonses issued against retailers are in the pipeline.

But given both popular opinion and vocal dissent from local officials, how did these shops seemingly sprout like weeds across the boroughs in the first place?

“The free market just allows for it”

Retailers looking to get in on the commercial bud boom in New York City since adult-use recreational marijuana became legal in 2021 are circumventing the cannabis dispensary application process by opening as regular shops, like smoke or vape shops, according to the representative from Brewer’s office.

The retailers “would have not been allowed to open if they had gone through the process of applying for a license,” the spokesperson told Patch. “The answer is, they weren’t approved. They did it anyway, of course.”

Max Vandervliet, the district manager for Manhattan Community Board 7 on the Upper West Side, told Patch that businesses like vape shops are relatively easy to open without bureaucratic hurdles: standard retailers are not mandated to go before community boards before opening and don’t have to clear the city and state approvals process that legal cannabis dispensaries undergo.

To him, the reason behind the proliferation of unlicensed cannabis shops around the city is “capitalism … the free market just allows for it.”

“I’m frustrated that cannabis applicants are bypassing the community board, and not just ours: I’ve been in touch with district managers throughout Manhattan,” Vandervliet said. “In many instances, we’re finding out they opened after they’ve opened, and then we are trying to make contact with them and be a good partner — because there’s nothing we could really do at that point.”

Even when new smoke shops do approach community boards, boards can’t issue approvals or denials — they are, rather, advisory groups that gather community input and write recommendations to city agencies.

Celeste Leon, district manager of Brooklyn’s Community Board 4 representing Bushwick, told Patch that community board members in New York City are volunteers, and don’t always ask questions like how many smoke shops already exist nearby and how the shops will impact residents’ quality of life.

Illegal cannabis retailers particularly gained momentum during the six-month period between then-Governor Andrew Cuomo signing the Marihuana Regulation and Taxation Act (which legalized adult-use cannabis) and Governor Kathy Hochul establishing the Office of Cannabis Management and the Cannabis Control Board, Brewer said during her testimony to the state Senate last year.

Furthermore, given the pandemic-era storefront closures en mass around New York City, landlords have been more inclined to lease space to smaller operations like smoke shops due to their typical high profit margins and low upkeep costs, according to The Atlantic.

The compounded result: smoke shops on seemingly every block of some communities, even multiple within a few hundred feet of each other. While not every smoke shop sells unlicensed cannabis, the sheer number of smoke shops near or even next to each other can be nothing short of comical.

On the Upper West Side, one strip around Broadway is littered with over a dozen smoke shops from 72nd to West 110th Street; and in downtown Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood, three smoke shops occupy one short block, while another pair of smoke shops sandwich a residential building.

On a single block of Wyckoff Avenue in Bushwick, two smoke shops sit next to each other at 44 and 48 Wyckoff Ave. The pair operate as two separate retailers and aren’t under the same ownership, a store representative told Patch.

Neither address is listed on New York State’s dispensary verification website, despite employees at both stores offering “pre-rolls” for sale; the store at 48 Wyckoff Ave. also touts a full menu with a deal: 5 pre-rolls for $20.

Some retailers have taken advantage of neighborhoods like Bushwick, Leon said, given its reputation in recent years as a bohemian hub for artists and partygoers alike.

“That’s one of the main questions that’s always asked [at community board meetings], why Bushwick?” Leon said. “Let’s not be fake about why: you know you’re here to make money, and the way you’re choosing to go about this proposal may have an impact right on this community. We want to be realistic about what that impact might be.”

Moreover, Vandervliet notes that the abundance of illegal cannabis retailers are taking away from city revenue in the form of sales tax. “The money’s going somewhere to help serve some city or state purpose [from legal sales], whereas with the illegal ones, there’s no way for the city or state to profit off those,” he said.

Other retailers, like corner stores and bodegas, have also been reported to authorities as selling unlicensed cannabis, making it even more difficult to recognize where illegal weed could be hiding, sources told Patch.

Those known to be selling illegal cannabis can also pose an increased safety issue to some neighborhoods: according to NYPD estimates, there were 593 robberies at smoke shops in 2022, a 137 percent increase over 2021 — the first year of recreational cannabis legalization in the state.

A matter of quality control

One way that Vandervliet says he is working to improve conditions on the Upper West Side is by calling attention to the neighborhood’s legal cannabis retailers via Manhattan Community Board 7’s email newsletter to direct Upper West Side consumers to regulated pot.

“I genuinely think that most of the people that are procuring cannabis … would prefer to buy it from a legal shop, even though it may be a little more expensive, because it speaks to the quality control issue,” he said.

“It’s gonna do exactly what it says it’s gonna do, whether it’s a mellow high or an aggressive high, and first and foremost it’s not like laced with anything bad,” Vandervliet added. “So I think most of the constituents in our district, knowing the demographics of our district, they’re very interested in frequenting the legal ones.”

Despite being sold behind a storefront counter and not a dimly-lit street corner, weed sold at unlicensed shops can still be dangerous: earlier this year, fentanyl-laced cocaine was found at an illegal smoke shop in Midtown, according to a PIX11 report.

“I’ve had customers myself tell me that they went to an illegal shop near their house,” Diesel Cummings, head of security at Housing Works, told the New York Post this year. “And after they smoked something that made their head hurt really much and then I had to go in to show them — what is illegal dispensing and what is not illegal dispensary.”

Earlier this month, the Instagram account @2lenas issued a warning to those seeking weed from unlicensed stores:

“NYC do not buy pre rolls from random smoke shops I know someone who just overdosed because their joint had fent[anyl] in it (they survived thank god),” the post read. “Please pass this info onto your community it’s not a joke.”

Where do we go from here?

Under “Operation Padlock to Protect” and newly-granted power from the state, the Adams administration continues to shut down unlicensed cannabis retailers, has seized $13.3 million in illegal products, and has imposed more than $30 million in fines and penalties, the mayor said Tuesday.

During her testimony before the state Senate, Brewer noted she herself has watched “thousands of products” from three stores, including one across the street from her district office, be confiscated by OCM investigators.

But enforcement isn’t coming fast enough, Brewer said separately in a letter to the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings. While state and city law require the office to hear civil summonses to operators of the unlicensed cannabis sites within five days, Brewer questioned if the office has enough manpower to handle the influx of summonses OATH received (about 26 percent more than usual) in the first four months of the current fiscal year.

“There are an estimated 2,800 unlicensed cannabis businesses in New York City, and Mayor Adams vowed to close all of them within 30 days,” Brewer wrote in May. “While I believe his timeline is hyperbole, 20 unlicensed cannabis businesses citywide were targeted by the New York City Sheriff’s Office in the first day of enforcement. There is an expectation that unlicensed cannabis enforcement will be a daily occurrence and that the quantity of daily actions will increase to as many as 100.”

To challenge matters further, a group of unlicensed cannabis storefront operators filed a class action lawsuit against the city this month, claiming the store shutdowns are unconstitutional.

“There are a couple of problems [with Operation Padlock to Protect],” attorney Lance Lazzaro told News12 New York. “No. 1, the allowing of the sheriff to just unilaterally go into a store and do a search without having court approval and secondly giving a hearing after the fact at a place … which is really a complete denial of due process because it’s not a fair hearing,” “We’ve had cases at OATH where judges have ruled in our favor and a day later that judge has reversed her decision. So, who is getting to that judge and telling that judge to reverse a decision?”
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In response to Brewer’s inquiry, OATH Commissioner & Chief Administrative Law Judge Asim Rehman noted that OATH has been planning internally to prepare for “this new workflow” and has been training and hiring additional staff to keep up.

“OATH began hearing these new matters on Friday, May 10, 2024,” Rehman noted. “At this stage, it is too early to assess the impact that cannabis-related cases will have on other work at OATH. As this work proceeds, we will continue to review internally and engage externally if there are resource or logistical issues.”

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