NYC Wants Landlords to Police Illegal Weed Shops

Memo to the 30 or so states that have yet to legalize recreational marijuana: if you want to know the worst possible way to do it, take a trip to Times Square and take a deep breath.

Manhattan is literally reeking of weed these days, a stench so powerful that it actually conceals the smell of the garbage bags piled up on city sidewalks on hot summer mornings before the trucks roll through to cart them away.

Yes, the city knows there’s a problem and they’re moving decisively to rectify it: NYC is considering a new law that will require the denizens of the Big Apple to compost all of their food waste instead of dumping it in the garbage.

What, you thought we were talking about the smell from the thick cannabis haze that hangs over NYC like a Canadian brush fire that never ends? No, that problem needs a bit more work.

When weed was legalized in New York two years ago, the Empire State was in such a hurry to catch up with New Jersey—which legalized pot a year earlier—the lawmakers in Albany didn’t bother to emulate the Garden State’s ultra-careful approach to implementing its new law.

NJ took a year to decide where its weed dispensaries would be located, who would get a license to run them, and to develop a strict enforcement hierarchy. The folks in Albany legalized retail weed licenses—and began handing them out like cotton candy—without any enforcement mechanism.

What resulted was a proliferation of dozens—perhaps hundreds, there are numerous city blocks that each have multiple outlets—of illegal “smoke shops” in Manhattan that have turned the island into an open-air weed bazaar—rolling their own while the bonanza of tax revenue NY thought it would reap from legalization goes up in smoke.

Last month, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a new law as part of the state budget that allows illegal weed shops to be fined $20,000 a day for unlicensed sales but leaves it up to municipalities to enforce the penalty.

The NYPD, which is making slow but steady progress in its battle against a pandemic-era wave of violent crime—Mayor Eric Adams, a former police officer, has made it his top priority—does not have the resources to mount a quality-of-life crackdown like they did in the 1990s.

So, the city is preparing to force landlords to police this problem.

In February, Manhattan’s district attorney asked NYC landlords to evict retail tenants that are operating illegal smoke shops. This week, a bill was introduced in NYC’s City Council—sponsored by more than half of the council members—that will hit landlords with financial penalties if they “knowingly” lease a property to an unlicensed weed seller.

“We acknowledge that Albany dropped the ball here when they legalized these retail licenses without any clear enforcement,” Councilmember Justin Brannan, a sponsor of the bill, said at a recent hearing. “Unfortunately, in the city, we’re the ones that have to deal with their mess.”

According to the proposed bill, landlords who knowingly lease a property to an unlicensed weed purveyor will face a $1,000 fine the first time they’re found noncompliant and $2,000 for each violation thereafter, Gothamist reported.

[Memo to landlords: unless you lost your sense of smell from Long Covid, nobody is going to believe you didn’t know what they were selling in the ground-floor retail space.]

The City Council’s bill requires the Sheriff’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation to submit a “monthly enforcement report” to the mayor and council. Maureen Kokeas, the commanding officer of the bureau, said at the hearing that she supports the bill and would like to see it extended to unlicensed e-cigarettes as well as unlicensed weed.

However, Kokeas also delivered a bit of a buzz kill on the proposed monthly enforcement report. She said the requirement “would present operational and staffing challenges.”

Translation: long after a hurricane extinguishes the wildfires in Quebec, a different kind of haze will continue to hang over the Big Apple.