The Real Problem With Legal Weed

When New York legalized recreational marijuana in 2021, the future seemed bright. “It has been a long road to get here, but it will be worth the wait,” State Senator Liz Krueger, a sponsor of the legislation, told New Yorkers. Legalization, she and others said, meant a wave of new jobs and new tax revenue. It meant an end to racist policing of marijuana and the start of equity, with rules that put those harmed by prohibition at the front of the line for licenses. And it meant easy-to-buy weed for the 1.6 million adult New Yorkers who already partook.

Three years later, things are not going to plan. Gov. Kathy Hochul has called New York’s legalization rollout “a disaster.” Mayor Eric Adams has spent months demanding that Albany fix the current system. “What happened?” The New Yorker recently asked in a feature on the collapse of the state’s marijuana “revolution.” Many New Yorkers are asking the same thing.

There are around 140 recreational dispensaries operating statewide — about one for every 148,000 New Yorkers. Instead of shopping legally, New Yorkers tend to get their weed from the illegal shops that now blanket the state. Estimates suggest that there are anywhere from 2,000 to 8,000 in New York City alone, with uncounted more from Ithaca to Oneonta. Recent crackdowns have temporarily sealed more than 400 stores — only a small fraction of the total in the city.

These shops undercut the legal stores, offering the same high at a fraction of the price. And they attract crime: There were 736 robbery complaints at unlicensed shops last year, according to the New York Police Department. Shootings are not uncommon, including the killing of a 36-year-old man captured on video last April.

They also sell to teenagers, as The Times has reported. Teachers, prevention experts and pediatricians have raised the alarm about high schoolers smoking or vaping marijuana at school. “Kids will do it in the bathrooms,” one student in Westchester says, “and it’s become a pretty normal occurrence for you to walk into a bathroom and you can smell it.” Disciplinary incidents involving drugs and paraphernalia rose 17 percent in the 2022-23 school year, according to New York City officials.