They Signed Up to Grow Weed. Then New York State Pushed Them Into the Black Market

March 22, 2024
AggregatedNews
Cultivation, New York
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Weed legalization was supposed to prioritize mom-and-pop businesses — but for some upstate farmers, things didn’t go as planned

Just a few months before this, the deal would have seemed impossible: New York’s longtime underground growers, excluded from receiving the state’s first pot licenses, resented the newly licensed farmers. They had limited experience growing the plant, but were going to be the first to make a legal business off it. The relationship shifted after New York, in less than two years, fumbled its market, creating a bottleneck in the supply chain that threatened to shut down many of the first legal farms at the same time as it upended the state’s existing cannabis market.

Multiple licensed farmers confirmed to Rolling Stone they had resorted to selling pot off the books to stave off crushing debt, with legacy growers — loosely defined as growers, like Shawn, who supplied the market during prohibition — moving their legal harvests into black market supply chains.

In what legislators have deemed an “agricultural emergency,” farms are sitting on over 250,000 pounds of weed that is slowly rotting, after regulators failed to open stores on time. “We’ve been begging for support to effectively very little response,” said Senator Michelle Hinchey, Chair of the Senate Agriculture & Food Committee, at a subcommittee hearing in Albany. [Read More @ Rolling Stone]