Get moving on cannabis
If New York’s government for some reason wanted to perpetuate the perception that its bureaucracies move at the pace of molasses, the state’s endless rollout of legal cannabis sales would certainly prove the point.
Here we are two years into the legalization process and the Capital Region still does not have a licensed retail shop authorized to sell marijuana. Frustration is building among potential store owners who hoped to have their businesses up and running by now.
As the Times Union’s Rebekah Ward reported, a coalition of medical marijuana license holders and recreational market hopefuls recently filed a lawsuit in state Supreme Court hoping to force New York’s Office of Cannabis Management to open the retail licensing process “for all applicants immediately.” They argue that “overzealous regulators” have severely limited the potential pool of license applicants, needlessly delaying the process.
Overzealous regulators? In New York? Could that possibly be right? Of course it could, because this is a state with the unfortunate habit of layering bureaucracy upon bureaucracy — with a little extra bureaucracy on top for good measure. The end result is a state government that’s as nimble as a hippo.
Part of the issue is OCM’S desire to give early licenses to applicants with a documented marijuana conviction in their family. The legal challengers believe that preference essentially violates the state’s 2021 cannabis law, which specifies that the dispensary license application period should be open to all applicants at the same time.
While the merits of that case presumably will be decided in court, even the people granted initial licenses have waited longer than expected to open their doors, meaning, of course, that entrepreneurs-to-be are losing money waiting for their chance at opening a business. Meanwhile, the number of unlicensed shops selling weed across the state has ballooned, raising alarms about sales to minors and making it more difficult for legal operators to compete once they ’re finally open.
To the point, a recent study commissioned by a major medical marijuana operator argues that New York’s glacial rollout of authorized marijuana sales means the illicit market will benefit from more than $7 billion in additional revenue if the current pace of licensing continues. That would cost the state an estimated $1.6 billion in lost tax revenue, the report says.
Sure, those numbers might be exaggerated, but there’s little arguing that the state’s labyrinthine process is seriously costing potential legal retailers and the state. Worse, the validity and authority of New York’s cannabis program are being undermined, providing new fodder for those who argue that government is hopelessly inept when compared to the private business world.
There is, of course, enormous complexity involved in establishing a regulatory and retail framework for an entirely new industry, so some amount of patience was always going to be necessary. But with patience justifiably running out, it’s time for the Office of Cannabis Management to just, well, hurry up already.