Why are there so many illegal weed stores in New York City?

(part one!)

Zaza Express / Google

Happy Monday Searchers,

We’ve got a new two-parter for you. Why are there so many illegal weed stores in New York? Here’s the first part.

I’ve really loved getting to spend months thinking about this story. The New York-iness of it makes it sounds local, but really, it’s much bigger than that.

The cannabis legalization experiment has unrolled state-by-state, with each place trying to learn from and improve on the efforts of the one that preceded it. New York was the cannabis-arrest capital of the nation, and so the focus here has been on repairing that past.

Legislators want to intentionally build a legal weed market that’s designed to be led by some of the people punished for running the illegal one. This is the story of why that hasn’t worked, at least not yet. But it’s also about thinking through the thorny, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, details of this attempt at reparations, a concept we often just experience as a big abstract idea.

Anyway, this is part one. Part two is on Friday. I know different parts of the country and different parts of the world are experimenting with different flavors of drug legalization. If you’ve got a story about what things are like where you are, please drop it in the comments!

Quick note about Incognito Mode

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Thanks for listening! And we’ll be back on Friday with a new one for you.

yours on the internet,

PJ