A group of military veterans had sued the O.C.M., arguing that CAURD discriminated against people who’d been designated as social-equity applicants, including them. Soon, a coalition of medical-marijuana suppliers was allowed to join the suit as plaintiffs, giving rise to a popular theory that it had orchestrated the case. Brad Racino, the Cannabis Insider journalist, wasn’t surprised. “We ran so many stories from so many attorneys saying that CAURD is a lawsuit magnet,” he told me. Jeffrey Hoffman, the cannabis lawyer, said the same thing: “I absolutely love the folks at O.C.M., I commend them till the cows come home, but their regulations don’t match the law.”
“Professor Jenkins, the world must never know of this discovery. Our findings die with us.” Cartoon by E. S. Glenn Link copied
The judge presiding over the suit issued an injunction, freezing the CAURD program. By that point, only about twenty licensees were doing business. Many people had signed leases and were paying rent, losing money they’d barely scraped together in the first place. Webber and Willis had finally secured a lender, Chicago Atlantic, for the two-hundred-million-dollar loan fund. The loans required no collateral, but the licensees couldn’t renegotiate the terms, couldn’t pay off the loans early without penalties, and couldn’t set their own profit margins or staffing costs. The interest rate was thirteen per cent. The O.C.M., needing more stores on the streets, waived the waiting period for medical-marijuana companies, allowing each one entry into the market for a twenty-million-dollar fee.
Carbone told me that farming was “the most humbling experience you could go through,” and said that it had taught her to let go of many expectations. To raise money and get help with operations, she’d partnered with a company in California, but it hadn’t worked out. Things weren’t going great in that state, either—high taxes and regulatory struggles were sandbagging the legal market. Small businesses were going bankrupt, corporations were moving to less restrictive territory, and the majority of weed purchases were still made illegally. “California is drowning,” Carbone said. “And people are grabbing on to New York as a lifeboat. And now the lifeboat is sinking.”
In the fall of 2023, the O.C.M. convinced a judge that a few licensees should be allowed to proceed. Marte, who’d put hundreds of thousands of dollars into building out his location and was beginning to fear that he had made a life-altering mistake, was one of them. He opened Conbud ten days later, on the corner of Orchard and Delancey, just three blocks from the park where he’d first been arrested for weed. He threw a huge party—Funkmaster Flex d.j.’d, budtenders wore shirts that said “Come Back with a Warrant,” and a camera crew filmed everything for a documentary.
Marte, a natural salesman armed with social connections and a P.R. agent, was about as well equipped as someone in the CAURD program could be. Still, he immediately ran into obstacles. If you searched Google for “weed stores” in his neighborhood, only the illegal ones came up. The law required that cannabis products not be visible from the street, and limited the text a store could print on its signs. (Many weed bodegas, in contrast, had a flamboyant, illegal tackiness.) Marte hustled like old times on the sidewalk, telling people about his store in Spanish and in very basic Chinese.
In October, applications for licenses opened to the general public. Unsure of how the lawsuit would turn out, the O.C.M. urged CAURD licensees to apply again. I took the train back to the Bronx, where the Hub was helping people navigate the process. Northrup sorted through paperwork; the licensees, used to getting worked over by the government, sat by patiently. One of them had given up a restaurant to focus on his dispensary, and was fretting about yet another pivot. On the phone with a business partner, he said, “What if O.C.M. f*cks us two times?”
The plaintiffs suing the O.C.M. reached a settlement in late November: the veterans were awarded dispensary licenses, and each medical supplier was given permission to open three dispensaries. CAURD could now proceed. I called Carbone and caught her in a “trim trance,” manicuring her marijuana crop by hand. She and Erik had downsized, on account of the delayed rollout, and were now tending to a half-acre crop mostly on their own. Their pre-rolled joints and gummies were selling at Housing Works and Conbud. But the cost of doing business was punitively high, she said, and the market was fluctuating, with farmers lowering prices to impossible levels just to get their products on the shelves.
“This isn’t an easy state to do business in,” she said. As she saw it, the O.C.M. wasn’t equipped to regulate the legal shops, let alone the unlicensed ones: “Out-of-state indoor flower is on the shelves in legal dispensaries, being sold as ‘greenhouse.’ Growers know this—we know what greenhouse grow looks like—but no one wants to snitch on the dispensaries.” She said that some dispensaries weren’t paying their bills, perhaps in some cases “because they’re saddled with an insane monthly nut” from the state on their storefronts. “And what are we supposed to do about that?”
At the end of the year, I waded through holiday shoppers in Tribeca on my way to the law offices of Cleary Gottlieb, thirty stories up in a high-rise, where Northrup had invited CAURD holders to plan their next steps. People clapped one another on the back as they walked in. Most of them were struggling to find financing. One man, a cabdriver, was still miffed about having to apply for a license twice. For CAURD, he’d needed to show that he had run a successful business, but to get priority in the general round he’d needed to show that he was low-income. “Do you want social equity or do you want to humiliate me?” he said.
Naiomy Guerrero was biding her time, turning down a succession of predatory offers. The language of social equity had come to seem like a cloak for a more brutal capitalist reality. “Many of us want a world that operates on radical principles, but that’s not what we are living,” she said.
Northrup had decided that the best way for him to help was to join the legislature: he was now running for State Assembly. Several licensees lived in his campaign district, in Morningside Heights and West Harlem, and they joked about getting out the vote. He suggested that the licensees organize a trip to Albany to advocate for themselves. “Even if it was just the people in this room, we have power,” he said. The talk continued, and ideas flew alongside grievances and hopes. Could they form a CAURD franchise, and get investors interested in multiple stores? Could they crowdfund? Was it all too late? “If we wait on O.C.M., we’re gonna get screwed,” a man who runs a Jamaican restaurant upstate said. “This is how poor people, like all of us in the room, get marginalized.” Weed bodegas kept opening with crappy product at low prices, and the corporations were right around the corner. “It’s not fair,” Northrup acknowledged, trying to quiet the room. “This is America, and it’s playing out like America.”
In January, I sat down at a bar near Fort Greene Park and looked around for Sirvon, the weed dealer I’d met at the Hub a year and a half before. We’d agreed to have lunch together, at 1P.M., and he had generously insisted on coming all the way to Brooklyn from Eastchester, in the Bronx. But now snow was falling, for the first time in ages, and at three o’clock I found myself eating shrimp co*cktail while engaging in a deeply familiar, almost old-fashioned activity: texting a weed guy to ask his E.T.A.
Sirvon arrived in a hoodie, which he kept pulled up over his head, and wearing a nameplate ring that said “NEW MONEY.” He grew up in the Edenwald Houses, and got locked up for the first time when he was eleven, he said, on a robbery charge. (“My mom’s got seven f*cking kids, and she’s taking care of all of us by herself? Nah, I can’t be asking her for money to buy me my little pair of pants.”) He started selling weed not long afterward. He made a business out of it when he was nineteen and expecting his first kid; his supplier got barrels shipped in from Jamaica. “You had Piff, you had Sour, you had Kush,” he said. “None of this Afghanistan Blueberry Sunshine sh*t.” He started doing deliveries; he expanded and staffed up. “You got people that’s ambitious and hungry, you put them to work together. Then you got people who just like to have a gun and sh*t—‘O.K., you can be the security guard,’ you feel me?” He was moving half a pound daily, touching a grand in cash a night.
Ineligible for CAURD, he’d continued dealing, but the unlicensed stores had messed up his business—partly by emboldening sellers who were new to the trade. “If you’re coming to Edenwald,” he said, “and you see me and thirteen other nigg*s standing right there, you’re going to be, like, ‘f*ck that, I’m going to go to the smoke shop.’ And the smoke shop’s got a dusty bag of chips near the counter, so they be taking E.B.T.!” E.B.T. cards cannot be legally used for alcohol, tobacco, or even prepared foods, let alone marijuana, but the unlicensed stores are already operating outside a number of regulatory boundaries, and so might be willing to cross a few more. (A spokesperson at Brewer’s office told me that he’d also heard rumors about shops accepting E.B.T. for weed.) Sirvon’s profits were way down. He would work past midnight and barely clear two hundred dollars.
