Blunting profiteers: Increased enforcement on unlicensed cannabis protects legal market

Regulation often gets a bad rap, and it can be a real impediment to progress when it comes to things like onerous zoning codes that stop housing construction in its tracks, but it’s also the reason we’re not all breathing leaded exhaust in our asbestos-filled apartments while we gulp down unproven medicine.

When it comes to consumer items, regulation protects us, and that’s particularly desirable when it comes to the products we put into our bodies, like cannabis. It’s a good thing that the New York took the plunge in making the substance recreationally legal, because it truly is not a dangerous drug; our longtime legal vices of nicotine and alcohol are arguably much more damaging, and it never really made sense to criminalize a drug you can’t overdose from and which helps with everything from anxiety to pain.

That doesn’t mean the stuff can’t be dangerous. Anything can be if you can’t control what’s in it, and that uncertainty is precisely what New Yorkers get when they purchase weed at the unlicensed dispensaries, smoke shops and delis that have tried to cash in on the legal marijuana craze ahead of the rollout of the actual regulated market. That the state has been slow to get businesses licensed and set up does not open the door for profiteers to jump the line and sell, well, anything they can call weed, untaxed and unexamined.

The speed and breadth with which these unlicensed sellers have established themselves seems to have taken law enforcement and the state Office of Cannabis Management off guard, which is why it’s necessary to take aggressive corrective action like the mass seizure of $4 million worth of product after the NYPD, sheriff’s office, and OCM inspected 53 locations across the city.

The confiscation and hundreds of civil summonses and criminal charges will act as a strong deterrent to a proliferating gray market that threatens to derail the burgeoning legal industry. If we want a safe and robust local cannabis sector, we must first clean house.