A few years ago, Howell Miller was in prison in New York State, walking laps around the track with a fellow-inmate he'd befriended, who happened to be a former U.S. congressman. Prior to the prison stint, Miller, a cheerful guy in his early fifties, had run a construction company and a serious marijuana operation, simultaneously. "I was a silent baller," he told me. "Then one of my guys got caught with forty-four hundred pounds on a truck." As Miller neared the end of a twelve-year sentence, he began hearing stories of people getting rich running weed shops: "I was thinking, Why the hell am I still in jail?" His ex-congressman friend, Anthony Weiner, told him on the track that day that the first dispensary licenses were going to be awarded to people who had marijuana convictions. "I thought, I'm gonna get out and look into that," Miller said.
What Weiner had described was the Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary program, or CAURD. It's the flagship program of the Office of Cannabis Management (O.C.M.), the agency created, in 2021, to oversee the legalization of marijuana in New York. The state's cannabis restrictions had been loosening for almost a decade, but that year the government passed a law that would have seemed unthinkable just a short while before. The governor at the time, Andrew Cuomo, had been pushed left on the issue during a primary challenge from Cynthia Nixon; after his reëlection, he found himself knee-deep in multiple scandals, and unusually pliable. The law not only made pot legal for adults; it also allocated forty per cent of weed-related tax revenue to communities where cops had made disproportionate marijuana arrests, and it set a goal of awarding half of all licenses to "social and economic equity" applicants: women, people of color, service-disabled veterans, distressed farmers, and residents of those overpoliced communities.
This story is from the {{IssueName}} edition of {{MagazineName}}.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the {{IssueName}} edition of {{MagazineName}}.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
QUARTET ISLAND
Mendelssohn on Mull celebrates chamber music away from urban pressures.
FIX YOU
The self-help positivity of Coldplay.
ILLUMINATIONS
Suzanne Jackson captures the transformative power of light.
RAT PACK
The classic rodent studies that foretold a nightmarish human future.
ROYAL TREATMENT
The unrivalled omnipresence of Queen Elizabeth IL.
WELL, WELL, WELL
Eating—and not-in the epicenter of hype diets.
NEWARK STATE OF MIND
Mayor Ras Baraka's reasonable radicalism.
DOOM SCROLLING
Social media and the teen-suicide crisis.
THE WORKER REVOLT
Harris and Walz try to stop blue-collar Americans from drifting to Trump.
THE CHIT-CHATBOT
Is talking with a machine a conversation?