New York’s disastrous rollout of legal weed is costing money and lives

The Sunday night murder inside a Harlem “smoke shop” near the corner of 125th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard — the second shooting in the neighborhood in the last year — is a savage reminder of the state’s stupendously disastrous legalization of marijuana.

It’s hard to identify another policy rollout — even in the era of bail reform — that was so misconceived and poorly executed.

However you feel about the repeal of marijuana-prohibition laws, New York went about it in an asinine manner. Instead of timing possession decriminalization to the licensed legalization of sales, the state embraced a Wild West approach, virtually eliminating the entire criminal code pertaining to marijuana overnight.

Instead of building in a speedy protocol to license the legal sale of pot, progressive state lawmakers, besotted by a woke vision of the pursuit of equity, decided to reserve the first retail licenses for felons and other “justice-involved” individuals.

Legal marijuana would be, first and foremost, a vehicle for reparations.

Brooklyn Beep Antonio Reynoso complained in the City Council that “communities of color have long endured unjust hardships as a result of the criminalization of marijuana”; Donovan Richards, his Queens counterpart, remarked that “the push to legalize marijuana must be driven by the need to replace arrests with economic and social opportunity and not a desire for revenue.”

Meanwhile, entrepreneurs decided to get ahead of the state’s molasses-slow licensing rollout. Hundreds of unlicensed smoke shops have sprung up around the city, illegally selling marijuana and even stronger drugs.

Less-capitalized individuals just set up card tables on the sidewalks and in city parks, selling roll-ups and handmade marijuana edibles, in full view of the police, who evidently were told not to bother with arrests.

Albany’s hastily passed, shortsighted legislation hamstrung the NYPD from shutting down these proscribed purveyors of pot because having weed on open display isn’t against the law — the cops have to be present to witness a sale in order to issue a violation.

Even then, it can take months to close one of these establishments, and that’s no guarantee they will stay closed.

The Harlem smoke shop where a customer was murdered Sunday night was evidently shut down by the NYPD just last month but was soon back in business.

One of the most lavish claims of the marijuana-legalization movement, aside from curing the horrors of so-called “mass incarceration,” has always been that the state treasury would get fat on all the taxes levied on pot sales. But with more than a thousand stores operating illegally, versus just a handful of licensed facilities, how much of this tax is even being collected?

What we are actually seeing, owing to the fact most of the industry is strictly cash-and-carry, is a sharp rise in robberies targeting illegal smoke shops around the city.

There were 251 violent robberies in 2021, and more than double that number in 2022. This year, robberies are up another 10%.

In March, 20-year-old clerk Daryus Clarke was murdered during a daylight robbery at the Plug Smoke Shop on Jamaica Avenue in Richmond Hill, Queens. This followed a fatal shooting in February at Harlem’s Level Up Exotics smoke shop and other shootings and beatings at stores in Brooklyn and the East Village.

City leadership seems powerless to do anything to stop the proliferation of illegal weed stores, much less the violence and criminality they appear to attract. The Sunday murder in Harlem wasn’t even part of a robbery of the store, which was evidently just a convenient place for an execution.

Mayor Adams has shrugged his shoulders and demanded action from Albany. “This cannabis stuff is a real problem!” he fumed in February, complaining that $250 fines for selling illegal smoke is laughed off by store owners as a cost of doing business.

But this is the same dodge Adams employs when he insists only the federal government can deal with Gotham’s gun-crime problem.

But New York’s problems are so entrenched that it’s not clear restoring the anti-crime squad as a plainclothes force would even make much difference anymore. The forces of disorder and acolytes of chaos occupy the halls of power and are in charge of making law and prosecuting its violation. This is who we have elected, and until we decide we’ve had enough, they will keep doing what they have promised they would do.

It’s true the state marijuana law is terrible, but investigating and taking down the gangs and crews that target smoke shops is the job of the NYPD, which is under Adams’ command. The Finest know how to identify and go after the violent thugs who tote guns and rob and kill hapless smoke-shop clerks. It’s a matter of civilian leadership having the will to let the NYPD off the leash.

Seth Barron is managing editor of The American Mind and author of “The Last Days of New York.”