A recent story (February 26) in The New Yorker magazine that describes the woes of the legal cannabis industry in the Empire State might prompt California marijuana growers, dealers, sellers and users to declare, “I told you so.” The story titled, “In the Weeds” by Jia Tolentino, a long time staff writer, offers blistering quotations, staggering facts and amusing anecdotes.
What it doesn’t say and ought to say is that no government or government agency, no matter how savvy, can take an industry that has been illegal and underground for decades and transform it quickly and smoothly into a legal entity that provides good quality weed to consumers, well-paying jobs to employees and profits to investors. You can’t end slavery, capitalism or patriarchy with a stroke of the pen, and you can’t abolish the long running cannabis industry with a law and the best of intentions.
An employee with The Office of Cannabis Management (OCM)—the agency created to oversee the legalization of marijuana in the Empire State York— said, “New York isn’t basing this [its program} on any existing model. They're basing it on trying to do the right thing.”
How stupid can you be? You’d think that a fledgling program would aim to learn from existing programs and try to improve on them. No such luck. In all its hubris, the Empire State has wanted to reinvent the marijuana wheel. Instead of looking at the legalization and decriminalization experiences in California and elsewhere, proud and idiotic New Yorkers have turned their backs on what other states have done for the last few decades.
So, they have duplicated errors and mistakes, taken the money of wanna be legal operators and ran with it, creating a bureaucratic nightmare. They have hired people like Chris Webber, a former NBA all-star, to run the program, though they have little or any experience with the cannabis industry. Makes no sense. I'm speaking and writing here as a longtime marijuana journalist who has observed the weed world in California and New York.
New York has seized 250,000 pounds of marijuana and held it in warehouses where the quality is rapidly deteriorating while the issues remain unresolved. New York has boasted that it’s the only state in the US to have a crop that’s totally grown under the sun and not in greenhouses. Tolentino quotes a longtime Bronx cultivator who says, “The quality is so bad.” I believe him.
A woman who is unnamed and identified only by her pink skirt is quoted as saying, “I don't think the government made this confusing on accident. I think they did that shit on purpose.” I have heard cannabis connoisseurs all over California come to the very same conclusion. Perhaps New York didn’t intend to create a mess, but it has created a mess.
The Empire State has created much the same marijuana mess that California created, one in which, as Tolentino writes, taxes were exorbitantly high, and “regulatory struggles were sandbagging the legal market.” He added that “small businesses were going bankrupt, corporations moving to less restrictive markets and the majority of weed purchases were still made illegally.”
Welcome to the marijuana madhouse. It might be funny, but peoples’ lives are at stake. “I’m Black,” a shafted weed dealer named Sirvon says. “I’m from the hood. I was promised forty acres and a mule, and I ain’t seen that shit yet. It’s always a Catch-22 when it comes to Black people.” To which I would add, it’s almost always a Catch-22 when it comes to legacy growers and dealers.
Martin Lee, the author of one of the best books about cannabis, once said to me, “Marijuana seems to have a mind of its own.” Indeed it seems that way, though I know that comment doesn’t sound rational. But very little about the marijuana story has been rational. Sorry, New York, I wish you’d done it differently and created a cannabis program for the people, by the people, and of the people.
(Jonah Raskin is the author of ‘Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War.’)
Be First to Comment