By: Stephon Johnson – The City.nyc
Nearly two years after New York legalized the recreational use of marijuana, the first Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary licensee opened in the Village on Thursday, finally completing the state’s seed-to-sale marketplace.
The 4,400 square-foot dispensary, run by Housing Works and located in a former Gap store at the corner of Broadway and Astor Place, drew a crowd of New York politicians to celebrate the moment last Thursday morning.
Later that day, at 4:20 p.m, the store had its “official opening,” when a crowd of several hundred enthusiastic New Yorkers including hip-hop legend Fab 5 Freddy waited for a doorman to let people in and out of the store from a line outside that felt its own nightclub.
As people outside blew big clouds of smoke and Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg tunes played, a 70-year-old who identified himself only as “Joe Pipe” and who kept yelling out “Merry Cannabis!” told THE CITY that he’d been smoking since attending Catholic school in Brooklyn back in the day. “It was love at first high,” he recalled, and now it’s a legal and licensed love.
Housing Works CEO Charles King told THE CITY on Thursday morning that the dispensary’s proceeds will go to the non-profit operation’s existing work, and that it will not only give employment preference to those formerly incarcerated due to possession but also help them become entrepreneurs in the industry themselves.
“We have an affirmative action policy here,” said King. “Hiring affirmatively people who have been criminalized due to possession. We intend to provide our folks with training programs to allow them to move up in the cannabis industry and even to obtain licenses of their own. And we intend to use the proceeds from hopefully what will not just be one retail outlet, but more than one to ameliorate circumstances for other people who have been incarcerated due to the possession of drugs.”
As THE CITY has reported, licensees with previous pot convictions who had been promised a head start in the licensed marketplace and support from the state are still waiting for approval to open their own locations. Those justice-involved people were also supposed to receive support from a $200 million New York Social Equity Cannabis Investment Fund managed by a group including former NBA star Chris Webber, but that fund has yet to disclose any investments past the $50 million the state has vowed to directly contribute from licensing fees and revenue.
At Thursday’s press conference, Office of Cannabis Management Executive Director Chris Alexander stressed that “Legalization for us has never been about just freedom,” and the need to “make sure we’re creating opportunity in the way that we’re prioritizing (and) repairing harm that’s been done even by the state’s own policy.”
Alexander made the first official purchase (of gummies), along with Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine and New York City Councilperson Carlina Rivera, who told the spirited crowd that “I’ve been waiting since I was a teenager” for this moment.
Jen Nessel, 56, said that she was thrilled to have a licensed establishment here, selling products made and tested in the state that she can be confident aren’t laced with anything.
“There’s so many illegal ones proliferating, and you don’t know what you’re getting,” said Nessel, a longtime East Village resident.
