NYC Mayor Adams defends weed truck seizures despite pledge to go easy on pot sellers: ‘We didn’t walk in with SWAT teams’

The mayor has lost his mellow.

Mayor Adams offered full-throated support Thursday for the NYPD’s seizure of 19 marijuana-selling trucks, seemingly walking back a previous pledge to not be “heavy-handed” against illicit pot peddlers while waiting on the state to roll out the legal recreational sales system.

The cops cleared out the brightly-colored trucks Wednesday from the Times Square area where they’ve been slinging ganja-laced products for months without proper permits, and Adams said the NYPD sting was all good with him.

[ High times in Times Square — Marijuana sellers inundate NYC’s Crossroads of the World, peddling joints and edibles freely ]

“This is not going to be a city where we openly snub our noses and break the law. That is not acceptable,” he said at an unrelated press conference in Manhattan on Thursday afternoon.

Adams struck a more lenient tone when asked by the Daily News about unlicensed weed distributors while attending a cannabis expo at the Javits Center in June.

“There needs to be a system of not heavy-handedness, but going in and explaining to that store that, ‘Listen, you can’t do this,’ give them a warning,” Adams said then, adding he would rather see the city steer illicit sellers toward the soon-to-launch legal market, as opposed to fining or arresting them.

Wednesday’s truck seizure came along with summons for the drivers, who will likely need to cough up a fine before returning their vehicles to them. The NYPD operation came one day after the truck company, Weed World, paid off more than $200,000 in parking fines that its vehicles had racked up.

At Thursday’s event, Adams maintained the truck seizures didn’t contradict his June promise to go easy on retail reefer because no one was arrested.

“We didn’t walk in with SWAT teams. We came in with tow trucks,” he said. “You can’t sell weed on our streets, I mean, there’s a law that’s in place. You can’t have an illegal market while you have a legal market, and people coming from out of town thinking that New York is open season on any and everything goes — no! They better read the memo.”

While New York legalized recreational weed use last year, the licensing system that’s supposed to regulate cannabis sales isn’t expected to launch until late 2022 at the earliest. Still, in the interim, the recreational usage of weed is legal, allowing a black market to flourish, with trucks, bodegas and other establishments openly selling cannabis products.

Adams said it’s critical to root out the illegal dealers in order to ensure that the legal market is successful once it gets off the ground.

“We have to now identify where people are reporting illegal weed being sold, which is far more stores than we realized, and then there are steps to going in and confiscating those items,” he said.

“We have to go in with a warning. There are layers to it, and we are implementing those steps. We have to educate folks to understand that next to the canned soda can’t be cannabis.”