City can’t wait to gure out who’s responsible for smoke shop crackdown

When Mayor Eric Adams announced in November that his o ce would convene a task force to crack down on the proliferation of smoke shops illegally selling marijuana in the ve boroughs, it seemed like a boon for both the city and the burgeoning legal market for recreational cannabis. Residents might get some respite from pot dealers with storefronts who have taken over block after block, and the city would have a clearer message about which shops are sanctioned to sell weed, with the tax money bene tting the state, and which are not.

Currently, as Olivia Bensimon pointed out in a recent Crain’s article, there are three licensed cannabis dispensaries in the city. But there are more than 1,200 so-called smoke shops selling unregulated marijuana locally. During a two-week pilot program in the fall, inspectors from the task

OP-ED force, which includes members of the sheri ’s o ce, the city Police Department, the city O ce of Consumer and Worker Protection and the state’s O ce of Cannabis Management, visited 53 shops and seized more than 100,000 illegal products worth an estimated $4 million.

At last week’s Crain’s Power Breakfast, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell described the Police Department's e orts to shut down the in ux of unlicensed pot shops as “Whac-A Mole” and said better regulation would likely be needed. “We’ll still keep whacking those moles,” she said.

“ ey are absolutely a nuisance to the city, and they are also victims of robberies as well, so they bring crimes to those locations.” e sheri ’s o ce, a division of the Department of Finance, is authorized to inspect a storefront that has a cigarette or tobacco license on display, the city’s administrative code says. A sheri ’s deputy can conduct an inspection if a shop is promoting the sale of these products without a license. But because the code doesn’t mention marijuana, and because the task force primarily seeks to seize such products, these inspections should require a warrant, Department of Finance employees told Crain’s. e employees basically compared the inspections to a style of stop-andfrisk.

So it’s distressing to note that, with so much work still to be done on this front, the union representing the city’s deputy sheri s has questioned its members’ authority to carry out these inspections.

Ingrid Simonovic, president of the Deputy Sheri s’ Benevolent Association, said, “My members and the union are concerned that we are crossing those lines and violating people’s rights.” e best time for the city to underscore that it will not tolerate a legal-looking illegal industry as the legitimate industry ramps up is now. Waiting will only allow more of these illegal dealers to pop up without fear of reprisal, becoming a blight on neighborhoods and a detriment to the economy. ■

Although those concerns are valid, the Finance Department and deputy sheri s union must remember that the city’s legal cannabis industry is brand-new, and the kinks are being ironed out with the opening of each dispensary. It’s unreasonable to think the administrative code would be updated before the government has the complete lay of the land.