With possession legalized, weed trucks and pop-ups are everywhere. But that could all change when the state swoops in
For the past few months, anyone visiting Katz’s Deli in the Lower East Side of Manhattan – as famous for its role in When Harry Met Sally as it is for pastrami – has queued near a green-painted food truck, strategically parked on Houston Street to capture Katz’s foot traffic, adorned with multi-colored LED signage advertising the city’s latest hot delicacy: cannabis.
Passersby can stroll up to the truck’s sales window and peek at a menu written in marker on a white dry-erase board and ask to see and smell a sample before forking over $60 cash for 3.5 grams, the cannabis industry’s standard serving size.
Business is so good that in addition to the truck here and the others outside a Trader Joe’s in Brooklyn and a major subway transfer in the Upper West Side, the Green Truck recently opened an eighth location, a block away from Grand Central. Though none of this is technically legal – even if the $60 is legally a “donation”, as the bored-looking man running the truck explains – nobody cares enough to intervene. On a recent visit to Katz’s, an NYPD police car was parked behind the Green Truck, where “donations” or sales, whichever, continued as if police did not exist.
Marijuana possession and consumption is legal in New York state for adults 21 and over and has been for almost a year. But the way New York has gone about legalization has been very different from states like California. There are strong social-justice provisions and guarantees to reserve cannabis retail opportunities for minorities and others most harmed by the country’s decades-long drug war.
New York’s legalization law, the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act, or MRTA, is one of the most progressive legalization laws in the country. New York is also considered the next big prize for the country’s fledgling cannabis industry, which recorded $40bn in legal sales in 2021, according to BofA Securities research. Projections vary, but New York’s appetite for cannabis is projected to be worth between $3.7bn and $5.8bn within five years.
Since New Yorkers are allowed to smoke cannabis anywhere tobacco can be smoked – a privilege not enjoyed by Californians, who risk a ticket for that act – it’s also the most permissive legalization law in the country. This all adds up to a nearly unthinkable transformation for New York, a city that under Mayor Rudy Giuliani became the worldwide capital for petty marijuana arrests.
The state won’t issue the first sales licenses until this fall but in the meantime, an enormous, unregulated, and technically illegal “gray market” has emerged to fulfill demand.
In short, it’s never been easier to find and purchase weed in New York City – and it has never been less risky to sell it.
“It’s crazy. It’s a dream,” said Milton Washington, who has sold cannabis for most of the past 15 years and lives in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan, where he plans to transition his current “if you know, you know”-style cannabis speakeasy to a legal, licensed consumption lounge. Along with sommelier-level curation, the lounge will host a cannabis-centric and “unapologetically Black” fitness-and-wellness exercise he calls “Rokmil”.
But, for the…
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