New York officials are starting to put the kibosh on unlicensed pot shops — with around 1,500 of them sprouting up around the city in recent years.
Governor Kathy Hochul announced Thursday that inspectors from the Cannabis Management and Department of Taxation and Finance issued violations to 31 stores across the state, and seized nearly $11 million worth of weed since the crackdown began in early June.
Some of the unregulated product was found to be marketed to kids and contain toxic chemicals, E. coli, and other contaminants, according to Hochul.
Twenty-two of the illicit shops busted were in Manhattan below 31st Street, with the rest in upstate Binghamton, Endicott and Conklin.
Under new enforcement powers granted to the department, fines for unlicensed stores start at $10,000 per day — and can rise to up to $20,000 a day for the most “egregious conduct,” officials said.
Repeated violators would see their businesses shut down.
The governor said the state’s “aggressive” new enforcement plan would continue — now that 37 new full-time staff members had been added to the department to aid in the crackdown.
“I want to send a message loud and clear across the state that if you’re operating illegally, you will be caught and you will be stopped. It is just not worth it,” Hochul said at a morning press conference at the Department of Taxation and Finance in Brooklyn.
“We’re going to work together to enforce the law quickly and aggressively and shut these bad actors down because too much time has passed.”
New York City has been especially overrun with an estimated 1,500 unlicensed cannabis stores since the state legalized recreational weed just over two years ago.
In addition to selling products of questionable origin, many of the stores have been targeted in robberies, several of which have turned deadly.
“We saw the proliferation, we saw the arrogance associated with this, no one is going to stop me, and for us to be centering on social and economic equity we knew we had to take some strong steps, we had to do it the right way,” added Hochul.
“This means aggressively enforcing the law for those who are hiding behind their operations.”
Albany, however, has been criticized for the slow rollout of its social equity-focused regulated recreational dispensaries, with only 15 now open statewide.
Huge geographic regions of the state — like Long Island and western New York — have no access to a licensed dispenser.
“Sometimes it takes a while to get it right, and the process has not been easy. Not the pace we want to see, but sometimes things worth doing are not an easy path,” Hochul said.
“This can still be a national model of how we focus on social equity, righting the wrongs of the past, opening up a whole new industry, a dynamic industry to help farmers, small businesses, and people who have the dream of having their own place, and also the customers who also know, this is a legitimate and safe product for them.”
