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.
Denne historien er fra February 26, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra February 26, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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FAMILY STYLE
\"La Maison,\" on Apple TV+.
CLOSE QUARTERS
Jen Silverman's \"The Roommate\" and Celine Song's \"Family.\"
IMMATERIAL GIRL
Sophie is gone. Her music lives on.
MERELY PLAYERS
Race, politics, and the theatre collide in Alan Hollinghurst's
MOVE TO TRASH
Is it time for a new Constitution?
RHYTHM COLLECTOR
Eblis Álvarez's Meridian Brothers unites the many strands of Latin music.
Ambrose
Lily wants to live in the old days. Her mom, Debra, says, No, you don’t, because in the old days all women did was cook and sew and die in childbirth, but Lily still wishes she could travel back in time.
THE ESCAPE ARTIST
The Italian priest who helps women in the Mafia flee the criminal underworld.
UNCOMMITTED
Among the Gaza protest voters in Michigan.
SENSORY OVERLOAD
A wild Danish restaurant combines avant-garde dining with immersive theatre.