A Neighborhood Battles Illegal Weed Shops: ‘We’ve Been Begging for Help’

NEW YORK — Just before 11 p.m. on a recent Saturday, a young woman was buzzed into Flame Zone Convenience, an unlicensed weed store on Manhattan’s Lower East Side displaying bags of potent gummies and multiple strains of marijuana, including one called Gunpowder.

It was four days after New York City Mayor Eric Adams had announced a crackdown on unlicensed shops. But the woman paid $20 for a joint, and then began smoking it on the sidewalk.

A few minutes later, at Dubai Cannabis Supply, an unlicensed shop nearby, a visitor asked: “Do you have shroom chocolate bars, by any chance?”

A glass display case inside included Diamond Shruumz bars in fruity cereal and cookie butter flavors, which are marketed as containing psilocybin, a psychedelic compound found in over 200 types of mushrooms that is illegal to possess in New York.

Multiple other unlicensed shops were open for business within a few blocks, offering cannabis-based intoxicants including joints, vape cartridges, rosin, THC-infused gummies, chocolates and tinctures.

Nearly 3,000 unlicensed cannabis stores are estimated to have opened across New York City since 2021, when a state bill was passed legalizing recreational marijuana and allowing for the distribution of retail cannabis licenses. There are 132 licensed adult-use dispensaries in the state, according to the Office of Cannabis Management, with 62 in New York City.

Few neighborhoods in the city may have been better equipped to fight the crush of renegade shops than the Lower East Side, which has a long history of activism and civic engagement.

In 2022, with local authorities and the Office of Cannabis Management doing little to shut down the shops, some neighborhood residents created a spreadsheet listing the locations of nearly three dozen unlicensed sellers. They distributed the spreadsheet to government officials, they said, hoping to prompt enforcement.

That DIY ethos was consistent with previous actions on the Lower East Side and in the neighboring East Village, including a picket in the 1980s against drug dealers, rallies in the 1990s against the destruction of community gardens, and protests in the 2000s over an influx of bars.

But residents say the unlicensed weed shops have seemed impervious to their efforts.

“We’ve been begging for help,” said Diem Boyd, a longtime resident who has organized neighborhood efforts against bars, among other causes, and helped coordinate the spreadsheet effort.

That effort was born of sidewalk conversations among neighbors who were struck by the sight of illegal establishments operating openly. Eight people, including Boyd, a public-school teacher, a landscape architect, a dance instructor and a television sound engineer, worked on the project.

They gathered information from others in the neighborhood, they said, researched city records, communicated through a shared Google document and monitored the unlicensed shops on nights and weekends, observing them from the sidewalk and sometimes venturing inside to corroborate details.

Most of the residents who helped gather information declined to speak publicly about the process because of fears for their safety. The teacher, a 22-year Lower East Side resident, said he helped compile the list in part because men connected to shops that had opened in his building regularly gathered outside, making noise and sometimes harassing residents. The teacher said he had been threatened on one occasion and recorded with a phone during another incident by men linked to an unlicensed shop.

The question of how to handle illegal shops has inevitably become intertwined with questions of social justice. Part of the aim of the 2021 law was to address decades in which Black and Latino people were arrested on marijuana charges in disproportionate numbers. New York’s nascent cannabis program began by prioritizing licenses for people who had been harmed by the war on drugs.

But the rollout of the licensed shops has stumbled, tripped up by lawsuits, bureaucratic delays and a lack of financial assistance for retailers. At one point policymakers promised to provide turnkey storefronts for new business owners. Those promises never came through.

Jeffrey Hoffman, a cannabis lawyer and legalization advocate who supports closing the unlicensed shops, said authorities in New York had rightly avoided arresting people of color when shuttering the stores, adding: “The whole purpose of the law was to stop that.”

In a statement, the mayor’s office said Adams was committed to closing illegal shops that threatened the “health and safety” of New Yorkers.

“Both the mayor and the sheriff have a long history of fighting against the criminalization of cannabis,” the statement added. “And we have been clear that these operations allow us to strike a balance between shutting down illegal shops that are unlawfully selling potentially deadly products and supporting justice-impacted cannabis business owners.”

The spreadsheet, which was updated most recently in April, listed 34 unlicensed shops — ranging from open emporiums to convenience stores said to sell secretly — within a 22-square-block area, outnumbering bodegas, laundromats and cafes. In addition to selling weed, the sheet says, some shops have sold tobacco, e-cigarettes or beer without the required permits.

A review by The New York Times found that 28 of the 34 shops on the spreadsheet were open in early June. Two were not open. Two appeared to have permanently shuttered, and two had recently been closed by the New York City Sheriff’s Office, which had posted large white stickers on their facades saying each had engaged in “the unlicensed sale of cannabis and/or cannabis products.”

In response to a question about whether the Police Department sees unlicensed shops on the Lower East Side as a particular problem, a representative said in an email: “The New York City Sheriff’s Joint Compliance Task Force will address all unlicensed and unregulated smoke shops which are affecting multiple neighborhoods throughout New York City.”

“I hear so many complaints, constantly,” said Susan Stetzer, district manager of Community Board 3, which covers the East Village and the Lower East Side, adding that residents had accused shops of blaring loud music late at night and selling to minors. “It’s very frustrating.”

Unlicensed shops on the Lower East Side have also been the sites of robberies and attempted robberies. In 2022, a group of men reportedly stole roughly $12,000 in merchandise and $300 in cash from a smoke shop before shooting one of the workers. In 2023, a worker at a different shop was shot during an attempted robbery.

Bradley Tusk, a venture capitalist and former adviser to Mayor Michael Bloomberg who has opened a bookstore on Orchard Street, said the unlicensed shops nearby contributed to an “atmosphere of lawlessness,” adding that he thought the city should approach the stores “visibly and aggressively.” He was not involved with the spreadsheet.

Adams announced the crackdown on unlicensed shops, known as Operation Padlock to Protect, on May 7. The mayor’s office said Wednesday that the city had closed more than 310 shops, 75 of them in Manhattan, prioritizing those near faith centers and schools and those with documented sales to minors.

Written requests for interviews with the owners of several unlicensed shops did not yield responses.

The first version of the spreadsheet, compiled in late 2022, included 13 shops. Updated in January 2023, it included 30. By July of that year the number had climbed to 35.

Ned Shalanski, a landscape architect and artist on the Lower East Side who helped compile the sheet, said he wanted to bring attention to the spread of unlicensed shops. Eight of them, including the one on Clinton Street where an employee was shot in 2023, opened within a short walk of his apartment, Shalanski said.

“It did feel like a collective, local response was necessary,” he added.

The residents who contributed to the spreadsheet coordinated with Boyd, who said the group had sent copies to the Office of Cannabis Management, the governor, the mayor, officials with the Police Department and the Sheriff’s Office, and members of the City Council and state Legislature.

Boyd said that effort had helped to gain the attention of local officials, including council member Christopher Marte and Assembly member Grace Lee.

In 2023, Marte contacted the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, which cited some of the illegal Lower East Side weed shops for unauthorized “tobacco retail dealer activity,” among other offenses. Lee wrote to landlords renting to the unlicensed shops and contacted the Sheriff’s Office about them. In December, the office seized marijuana from shops on Clinton Street and Rivington Street.

Lee also met with more than two dozen residents to tour spots in the neighborhood that they thought needed greater attention from law enforcement, including the corner of Ludlow and Stanton streets, where three unlicensed shops operated.

Police officers wrote in affidavits that in 2022 and 2023 a confidential informant and an undercover officer bought psilocybin bars inside two of the stores: Exotic Clouds Vape Shop and Dubai Cannabis Supply, where the Shruumz bars were displayed for sale last month.

The city initiated civil proceedings against the two shops, calling each a public nuisance and asking that they be shut down for a year. Those cases ended in settlements with no admission of wrongdoing. Both stores were enjoined from possessing controlled substances and from storing or selling cannabis products without a state license. During visits in May, however, both had marijuana and THC gummies for sale.

Lance Lazzaro, a lawyer representing Dubai Cannabis Supply and Exotic Clouds, said the shops had adhered to the terms of their settlements, adding that it was “hard to comment on” what the Times had seen for sale.

Criminal cases have been connected to another unlicensed shop in the neighborhood. A man accused of selling crack in and near a store on Clinton Street pleaded guilty to the sale of a controlled substance. A second man faces charges of selling crack in and near the shop and of possessing a firearm.

Last year, Adams suggested that all illegal shops in the city could be closed within 30 days. Just before announcing the crackdown last month, the mayor said it would take longer, an acknowledgment of the difficulty and complexity of the task.

Hoffman, the cannabis lawyer, predicted it would take months or longer to shut down all the unlicensed shops, given their numbers and that many owners would likely adapt by carrying out clandestine sales.

“The cat-and-mouse game is on,” Hoffman said, adding: “You used to be able to do it with impunity, and now they just have to be more careful.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .