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This guest column is from Hal McCabe, mayor of the Village of Homer, interim executive director & director of government relations for the Cannabis Association of New York. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of NY Cannabis Insider.
Talk is cheap. We need action.
New York has our state cannabis rollout barely treading water, and after last Friday’s court hearing and this new injunction, Gov. Kathy Hochul needs to call for an extraordinary session of the New York State legislature this week to codify the Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary (CAURD) license into law.
And I can hear them say already – “That will never happen,” “They can’t do that,” “We know what we are doing.”
It can happen, and it needs to happen now. Why? Because Wall Street Big Cannabis is about to run the table and get everything they want, leaving our small farms and Main Street small businesses to wither on the vine.
There is precedent. On Aug. 24, 2021, Gov. Hochul was sworn in as governor. A week later, she called for an extraordinary session so the legislature could confirm the Cannabis Control Board and Office of Cannabis Management appointments of Chris Alexander and Assemblymember Tremaine Wright, which took place on Sept. 1, 2021. Two years later, we write as the leading cannabis advocacy organization in New York State, built of 550+ members, desperately begging for intervention into the Seeding Opportunity Initiative from the governor and the legislature before the OCM hits the iceberg that is painfully visible to the rest of us.
Our members and every New Yorker were delivered a bold declaration by Gov. Hochul – that 20 CAURD dispensaries would be open by the end of 2022, and twenty would open every month thereafter. That would have been 160 dispensaries. There are only 24 in operation, making the original promise feel like false hope. Not only is this a travesty in terms of getting a new market up and running, but it is a stark failing of those whom New York promised to promote: individuals disproportionately impacted by cannabis prohibition.
The way we see it, this is a clear identity issue for members of the legislature: Do you stand with the folks most disproportionately impacted by drug laws that targeted Black, brown, and low-income communities for decades? Will you now stand up for the underrepresented groups you claim you want to make whole through social and economic equity initiatives?
The OCM is speeding up the entrance of corporate cannabis companies into the New York State legal cannabis market. Behemoth billion-dollar corporations that operate in 10-20 other states are on the doorstep of operating here. That will just create another economic disadvantage for those who played by the state’s rules, those who were supposed to be prioritized, those who are true social equity operators, and New York-based small business owners in the legal cannabis market.
We need champions who will stand up for underrepresented communities. Sen. Jeremy Cooney had the right idea of codifying the CAURD license into law like Adult-Use Conditional Cultivators (AUCCs) and Adult-Use Conditional Processors (AUCPs). There is more to be done. We at CANY urge our state leaders to act on these two steps to rectify the situation immediately.
First, we need to press pause on the entrance of Wall Street Big Cannabis companies into New York until further notice, and if this means the regulations need to be revised, then revise them. The Cannabis Control Board should have its own emergency meeting and pass the emergency regulations. They gave the ROs an inch by moving up their entry into the market, and naturally, these giant corporate cannabis operations are trying to take a mile, suing New York State twice at the same time, to ensure they get their way and block entry into the market for everyone but themselves, while our legislators and governor sit back and do nothing.
Second, leadership must call for an extraordinary session of the legislature to codify the CAURD license as they did with the conditional cultivator and conditional processor licenses. In this way, the OCM must invest in and prioritize the small and New York-based businesses in the industry: locally owned, based, and propagated means better outcomes for our local economy. Our elected officials must be loyal to the people of New York State, not rich Wall Street Big Cannabis companies chomping at the bit to stomp all over our social and economic equity owners.
If the governor and legislature fail to do so, they will once again fail the Black and brown communities this law was supposed to help. For this reason, we call on the leadership of the New York State Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic & Asian Legislative Caucus to weigh in with state leadership and let them know that this is a top priority.
CANY is offering solutions to avoid any further nationwide embarrassment to this program. We need to stop pretending like this is a friendly state or industry for small businesses or a socially or economically equitable process. Wall Street Big Cannabis companies only answer to their shareholders, which unfortunately doesn’t align with promoting an equitable market. Our state must be the check on their market power. Our leaders must protect us. There is enormous demand for cannabis in New York State, and we cannot allow all that demand to go into the illegal market and the Wall Street Big Cannabis corporations, especially after creating all this hope for these conditional cultivators, processors, and dispensaries – all backed with grand talks of correcting the harms, reinvesting in the community, and standing behind underrepresented groups.
This is a hill we will happily die on, fighting for our members.