For the first time in state history legal recreational marijuana sales are underway in New York.
“Today’s the day: Legal, adult-use cannabis is now for sale in New York State!”, said Governor Kathy Hochul in a statement. “This is a historic milestone for New York’s budding cannabis industry, and I look forward to solidifying our state as a national model for building an industry that’s equitable and inclusive.”
The first legal sale of cannabis occurred at Housing Works Cannabis Co, a dispensary in Manhattan, one of 36 licensed dispensaries that opened recently – there are 139 licenses yet to be issued by the state (as well as over 900 applicants).
The dispensary is owned by Housing Works, the nation’s largest minority-controlled and community-based service agency that serves people HIV and AIDS as well as the unhoused and formerly incarcerated.
“We’re absolutely thrilled to be the first and hopefully setting a model that other folks will have to follow,” said Charles King, the chief executive officer of Housing Works
The first customer was New York’s Office of Cannabis Management Executive Director Chris Alexander, a former advocate who spent years fighting for the legalization of cannabis and helped craft the bill that legalized the substance in New York.
“This is a significant part of the battle to end cannabis prohibition that we can say has finally been won,” Alexander said. “Thank you to all our farmers and CAURD [Conditional Adult-Use Recreational Dispensary] licensees for believing in this vision and working with our agency to build what will be the most equitable cannabis market in the nation.
Housing Works is the first Conditional Adult-Use Recreational Dispensary (CAURD) licensee in the state to open its location for business.
Thursday’s sale serves as both the official opening of New York’s legal cannabis market and a critical milestone in fulfilling the goals of New York’s Cannabis Law.
The law, enacted on March 31, 2021, focuses on building an adult-use cannabis industry that works to offset the harms resulting from the disproportionate impact of cannabis prohibition on marginalized communities.
The Cannabis Law is working to put an end to approaching cannabis from a law enforcement perspective and shifting to a focus on public health and social justice.
“Today, as laid out in the Cannabis Law, we begin collecting revenue that will be reinvested in communities all around the state that were devastated by unequal enforcement of drug laws and mass incarceration,” Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes said.
The state said the new stream of tax revenue from the cannabis market will benefit communities across New York through the support of public schools, addiction and mental health services, housing, and other community-based programs.
“Their decades of work with marginalized communities make them a perfect partner in the effort to ensure that New York’s Cannabis market provides meaningful opportunities to those most impacted by the failed cannabis criminalization policies of the past,” State Senator Liz Krueger said.
Lino Pastrana was among those waiting his turn after the Housing Work’s store opened to the public at 4:20 Thursday afternoon.
“This is historical. It’s really important for us who buy and smoke weed because we can buy quality, instead of buying random weed that you don’t what it’s mixed with,” Pastrana said.
That’s something he risked, he said. “You can buy weed anywhere in New York,” he said, saying that he expects to buy his merchandise from legal dispensaries from now on.
That’s exactly the hope of New York marijuana regulators, who say that a supervised industry will help ensure that cannabis users are buying safe products.
