Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul trumpeted on Wednesday that the crackdown on illegal, unlicensed pot shops has shuttered 400 of the flagrant threats to public safety in the Big Apple.
It’s a start, but it’s no time for them to take their feet off the gas. There are still more than an estimated 2,500 rogue pod peddlers doing business in the five boroughs. They still outnumber state-approved legal dispensaries by seven to one.
Ominously, some lawless marijuana merchants went to Federal Court last week hoping to stall the crackdown on bogus “constitutional” grounds.
The legal counterattack should be a warning to Adams: Padlock purveyors of dangerous weed — like the cookie that almost sent me to the ER — as fast as Sheriff Anthony Miranda and the NYPD can break out the padlocks, before woke-minded judges let them off the hook and before mayhem-loving New York Times columnists celebrate them as harmless, colorful additions to street life.
Put greedy landlords on notice that renting storefronts to illegal dope peddlers is more trouble than it’s worth. Those who wink at unlicensed dope dens can be fined $50,000 — but only if the lockdowns stick.
Unlicensed pot shops breed crime and endanger buyers with possibly contaminated weed. They also sell to underage users and make a mockery of the state’s bureaucratically hobbled rollout of legal dispensaries.
But the city was powerless to rein them in until April, when the state legislature, prodded by Gov. Kathy Hochul, finally allowed municipalities to take action against them without Albany’s blessing.
Since then, the crackdown has seized over $10.4 million in unregulated products and issued over $23 million in fines.
That’s good news — but only a start. My Upper Cheap Side neighborhood (east of Lexington Avenue from 59th to 86th street) already smells better now that at least ten illegal pot shops are gone.
One shutdown took out notorious Smile Smoke on Third Avenue, formerly a Bright Smile teeth-shine clinic that was next door to celebrity restaurant Scalintalla and a stoner’s throw from Bloomingdale’s.
A clerk shot a 15-year-old customer in the leg during what cops termed a “purchase dispute” in December. The perp fled and remains in the wind.
Given such incidents, my friend, a mom with two young teens who lives across the street, cheered the padlocks.
But it’s too early to declare victory.
Dangerous “edibles,” including a bag of several dozen candies infused with a total of 1,000 mg of THC — enough to put down a buffalo — are still for sale behind windows full of stuffed animals and other harmless products. The snacks are psychoactive cluster bombs compared with the pop-gun “dope brownies” of my long-ago college days.
Half of a single small chocolate chip cookie, which I bought at an illegal shop downtown while researching for a recent column, brought on knee-knocking heart palpitations that pinned me to a chair for an hour.
That shop remains open two months later. A few days ago, I watched a burly employee boot a blunt-smoking homeless woman from its stoop. The two exchanged n-words that could be heard a block away.
Perpetrators won’t be eradicated by playing by Marquess of Queensbury Rules. What’s needed is to carpet-bomb them out of existence.
Even now, Miranda and the NYPD can’t mount a raid until complaints are filed with the city, followed by painstaking investigations that don’t trample on shop workers’ “rights” or “due process.”
What’s to process when the contraband is there in plain sight?
Some places, cowed by the crackdown, now claim to sell only CBD, the legal, non-psychoactive hemp plant derivative, as well as pipes, hookahs and tobacco products. But, when I popped into several shops in my neighborhood last week, all were openly selling some forms of marijuana.
The window of Sunny’s Quick Shop at 1666 First Ave. between East 86th-87th streets, displays such everyday needs as “novelty synthetic urine.” Ha, ha! The clerk insisted they sold no weed despite a sign with a marijuana leaf and an arrow pointing to the “smoke shop” inside.
If a deep, narrow storefront looks like a pot shop and smells like a pot shop — with employees huddled furtively behind a glass wall in the back, marijuana leaf images up the wazoo, exotic-shaped pipes, rolling paper and other paraphernalia — it isn’t a place to shop for toaster ovens.
Just shut ‘em down and lock ‘em up.
