Now the Empire State’s dazed-and-confused approach to legalizing weed is producing another crime wave — this one deadly.

The first wave was the explosion of unlicensed pot stores, roughly 1,400 in the city alone — all exploiting the way lawmakers reduced penalties without making effective plans for legal shops to open.

While Albany dithers about fixing that issue, criminals are making hay robbing the illegal shops — and the bodies are starting to pile up.

On Sunday, a gunman executed a guy at a Harlem smoke shop that sources say was raided and shut down just last month for illegally peddling pot, only to flout the law and reopen again.

That follows last month’s botched Queens smoke shop robbery that left a worker shot dead.

Overall, smoke-shop robberies rose from 251 in 2021 to 599 last year, and continue to soar. The cash from illegal marijuana-product sales makes them tempting targets, while crooks figure the stores won’t want to cooperate much with police under the circumstances.

When it comes to closing the illegal outlets, cops and other authorities are hampered by lax state laws and paltry fines on illegal-pot shops.

Gov. Kathy Hochul has offered legislation to tighten up on that front, but the Legislature seems in no rush.

Meanwhile, the process to license legal shops is still at a crawl, complicated by the failure to raise the funds that were supposed to help disadvantaged would-be operators get in them came.

And now disabled military vets are complaining that their applications have been neglected as the state’s favors one single group (of the several who were to be favored), namely convicted drug felons, for the first 300 or so licenses.

The other groups the law prioritized were women and minority-owned businesses and “distressed farmers.”

The saddest thing here is that they (probably) weren’t actually stoned when they drew up these “plans,” but simply high on social-justice dreams.