New York’s legal-pot disaster just keeps on getting more disastrous: The state’s Cannabis Control Board, a chief regulatory overseer in the sector, is considering relaxing the ban on legal pot shops being closer to each other than 1,000 feet.
What are they smoking?
Gov. Hochul was supposed to have cleaned house over at the Office of Cannabis Management, CCB’s parent agency, with a desperately needed probe.
But judging by this latest brainstorm, OCM is still a dysfunctional madhouse.
No shocker, really: The progressive goofballs in charge there completely bungled the state’s legal weed rollout by favoring former crooks for licenses, which resulted in serious litigation, along with myriad other shenanigans.
Legal pot-shop owners — still just a fraction of all Empire State pot-shop owners — are up in arms over the idea.
OK, fair enough.
They followed the law and went through a Byzantine process to get the state’s stamp of approval on their biz.
But let’s be honest: Their concerns are vastly secondary to the main issue.
Namely, that the real reason for a minimum-distance rule isn’t to help legal stores succeed but because everyone — including the OCM goofs, no matter how hard they pretend otherwise — knows that any pot shop, legal or otherwise, is a seed for wider neighborhood blight.
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Weed is bad.
It makes you crazy and serves as a gateway drug.
And where it’s easy to access, social decay follows.
Buying from a state-sanctioned vendor has, literally, zero effect on that — which New York’s progressive legislators ignored when passing the 2021 law that started this catastrophe.
The bad execution, which resulted in lawsuits by would-be licensed sellers, and the specious, pie-in-the-sky hope that somehow legalizing pot would increase “equity” were insults added to the injury.
It’s likely impossible to hope for a full repeal of legal weed here (barring a political sea change).
But what New York must have is real enforcement against the illegal shops and strict controls on the legal ones.
So how about bumping up the distance between legal shops, instead of pondering a cut, and letting the NYPD and other local law enforcement do their job and get illegal vendors shut down for good?
Legal weed isn’t helping anyone, and it’s been a disaster for the state and city — as Gov. Hochul has admitted.
It’s time the rest of our pro-weed electeds and policymakers admitted it, too, and thought about correcting course.