Legal cannabis shop’s nearly 3-year opening process highlights hurdles in NY

INWOOD, Manhattan (PIX11) — A two-and-a-half-year process of certifications, documentation, site approvals and meeting other requirements resulted in an event that was as lighthearted as the name of the business at the heart of the occasion.

Happy Munkey Cannabis boutique opened on Monday afternoon as the first legal cannabis shop in Upper Manhattan above the George Washington Bridge. Its odyssey from concept to reality underscores how daunting the process to open legally can be, and is also a reminder of how illegal shops remain a challenge to the legitimate ones.

The ribbon cutting on Monday afternoon was the end of a journey that’s lasted far longer than the three years in which cannabis has been legal in New York State.

Happy Munkey’s co-founders, Vladimir Bautista and Ramon Reyes, said that the opening of their custom-designed boutique is validation for all they’ve endured. They’d sold marijuana on Uptown streets in the 2000s and 2010s, and now that it’s legal, they said that their long-standing entrepreneurship is paying off.

“Being told that I’m a pariah that will never be an upstanding citizen,” is how Bautista described the way he’d been depicted to other people when he was selling cannabis on the street. He said that the state’s licensing program enabled a true transformation.

“To be able to see that through,” he said, “and turn that pain into power” was invaluable to him.

Bautista was talking about how New York State has prioritized giving cannabis licenses to people who were arrested and incarcerated when cannabis was illegal in New York before 2021. Between him and his co-founder, Reyes, they’d been arrested some three dozen times, and had been behind bars multiple times.

After the state legalized marijuana, it also expunged the criminal records of Reyes and Bautista, and other former cannabis dealers. Now, the two said, they’re free to build wealth by running their business.

However, they added, there remain some challenges to their financial prospects.

“You get these smoke shops,” said Reyes, describing unlicensed stores, “that they’re able to put a bunch of marijuana signs and neons, and all this stuff, where it’s like, you know, people don’t know the difference, right, because that’s all they see.”

He said that illegal cannabis stores can promote themselves in ways that licensed ones like his cannot.

“All they can see in the legal shop is maybe like the license on your door,” Reyes said.

He and Bautista, who also have two other partners in the business, pointed out that there are many advantages to people only purchasing cannabis from licensed shops like theirs. Among them, is that their product is inspected and tested by state authorities to ensure it’s not tainted with harmful substances such as fentanyl and E. coli.

Also, taxes on the legal weed go toward funding programs from which communities benefit. In fact, 4% of the profit is earmarked, through taxes, to benefit the neighborhood in which each legal shop is located. In the case of Happy Munkey, that means Inwood and Washington Heights.

The business partners said that the city’s efforts to shut down illegal shops have been important for ensuring that people have access to high quality cannabis. The city has shuttered more than a thousand illegal shops since the summer began and destroyed much of the shops’ inventories.

In fact, three illegal smoke shops within two blocks of the newly opened store have been shut down this year. Still, some illegal shops remain in the city.

Bautista and Reyes said that it might help their business and others like theirs if some of the regulations imposed by the state were relaxed, particular when it came to advertising.

“This should be like any other thing, like as far as 21 and over,” Bautista said.

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