New York Daily News

Good morning and welcome back from the weekend! 

I’ve spent years covering the massive policy and cultural shifts that have accompanied weed legalization in America — a piecemeal and incomplete process that has affected everything from how we think about health, employment, and public safety, to our notions of justice.  

So I took notice when legal states began showily announcing that they were cracking down on the many, many illegal head shops that have proliferated. In New York, for example, “Operation Padlock to Protect” had shuttered more than 700 unlicensed shops as of this summer and resulted in the seizure of tens of millions of dollars worth of weed and THC-laced products. 

There’s only one problem: In New York alone, there are thousands more such stores still operating. 

The crackdowns give me a noxious whiff of the brutal drug war of my youth — a racist policy push that legalization was supposed to end once and for all. But they also made me wonder, just how had states lost control of the money-making legal marijuana markets they'd so eagerly tried to build and tightly regulate?

I wrote about the phenomenon in a recent issue of Vox's digital magazine, The Highlight, chronicling the state of drugs in America. What I found is this wave of action offers a startling glimpse at what it might actually look like to fully legalize the drug across the US. 

Which is to say, it could get messy.

Drugs — and those who grow, sell, and use them — have a way of being resistant to the machinations of policymakers. That was true at the height of the war on drugs and remains true now. 

But the rise of the black market has, in many ways, blindsided states. New York is a perfect example of one that’s struggling to regain control. 

Unlicensed shops sprung up in empty retail storefronts with jaw-dropping speed after New York state legalized marijuana in 2021. There are the bodegas that keep THC products discreetly under their counters, the leaf-emblazoned “food” trucks, the brightly lit smoke shops packed with pipes, vapes, and THC-laced hot cheese curls as far as the eye can see. They have become so ubiquitous and so popular among the city’s cannabis users and tourists that officials have been playing a fruitless game of whack-a-mole with them for three years. 

But the black market is the bane of plenty of other states, too. In California, there are countless illegal suburban grow operations — many alleged to be connected to organized crime. And they’re cultivating more weed than residents of the state even want to buy and shipping it (in violation of federal law) to buyers across the country. 

In Oregon, which legalized in 2014, it looks much the same. In Washington, DC, where I live and where recreational weed sales were never legalized, there are an estimated 100 illegal weed shops, 10 times the number of licensed medical dispensaries, according to its city officials. And in midwest Michigan, illegal growers flourish, and courts and prosecutors are reluctant to quash them — if they even could. 

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Most buyers don’t really care whether the shop selling their THC-laced Hot Cheetos is licensed, but they’re fully aware when they have to pay an additional $20 in taxes. 

“There’s more public acceptance and interest in the plant, and so [illegal] situations are of course going to continue to thrive — especially if the regulated market is essentially overregulated … and there’s a price difference,” says Jason Ortiz, a founder and former president of Minority Cannabis Business Association and director of strategic initiatives for Last Prisoner Project, which calls for an overhaul of the nation’s drug laws. 

Because the laws of supply and demand apply to marijuana, too, the price of even the licensed good stuff has also dropped precipitously in state after state, driven in part by black market products. 

That has infuriated licensed shops and growers, and sapped enough of their potential income that in California, for instance, the number of legal marijuana growers and brands is down 70 percent — and many shuttered companies owe millions in back taxes to the state, according to reporting by SFGate. 

States that had hoped to rake in tax dollars are also seeing things turn out not quite the way they’d hoped. Take Colorado, a national model of how a state could legalize weed and also profit wildly from it. It made an estimated $1 billion in tax revenue in the first five years after it legalized retail sales in 2014, money it pledged to put toward education. Now, that revenue is dwindling, decreasing by 11 percent in just the last year, according to a state forecast.  

In some ways, it was short-sighted legalization policies and nearly-impossible-to-meet regulations that created the perfect storm that states find themselves in today. New York, for example, took more than a year after legalizing to license a single seller, which sent many weed-seekers eager to exercise their new right to unlicensed sellers instead. Meanwhile, states didn’t do enough to “provide opportunities for all the people currently selling weed to go legit,” says Ortiz. 

Places such as Connecticut and Massachusetts and Washington DC also legalized and decriminalized despite not having much of a strong agricultural base for actually growing marijuana; illegal sellers have filled the gap by simply bringing in better weed from other states. 

Now, states are wrestling back control of the market through raids like those in New York, and DC, and California, and Oregon, and — well, you get the picture.  

They “are trying to build a market that’s unnatural. We’ve always had a cannabis market; it’s grown on the West Coast, it’s brought to the East Coast and other parts of the country, and that market worked,” says Rafi Aliya Crockett, who was an appointee on Washington, DC’s Alcoholic Beverage and Cannabis Board until 2022. Now, states are trying to stop that market to ensure that licensees are rewarded, she says, “by knocking out their competition.” 

Crockett left the regulatory board frustrated over enforcement. “It’s the drug war 2.0,” she says. “And we’ve decided who are going to be the winners and who are going to be the losers.”

The slew of illicit shops padlocked by police on the local news, and the rise of organized-crime-driven operations in suburban neighborhoods, have the potential to alarm Americans who have only just begun to support the notion of legalization. And it could provide fuel for those who are opposed to it. 

A growing number of reputable sources within medicine and the scientific community are already sounding the alarm about increasingly potent products sickening users. There’s almost no doubt that at least some of those products are illicit and unregulated. As a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recently noted, the patchwork laws from state to state have contributed to the risks. 

In that way, the black market could backfire against the very legalization movement that has allowed it to come out of the shadows. 

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AI progress might be slowing down — but that’s not a bad thing. It took decades after its creation for the internet to transform the world. Artificial intelligence might face a similar journey. Experts say to expect the impact of AI to grow, not shrink, over the next few years, regardless of the decreased speed of scaling the technology and their respective companies.

The truth behind antibacterial soaps: Antimicrobial soap is better than plain soap at lowering the amount of germs on hands, but in most situations, the risks aren’t worth the benefit. Safety experts at the Food and Drug Administration say that using certain antimicrobial soaps too often can cause the absorption of germ-killing ingredients into the bloodstream. 

The best books of 2024 are here: In a fraught election year, many books can feel trivial or get lost in the release calendar. Our critic rounded up eight titles that deserve your attention. These literary works of art are worth spending some time with before the year’s up.

At risk of extinction: According to a meta-analysis of nearly 500 studies, the number of species that could die out could reach half a million if the world fails to enact additional policies to curb carbon emissions. 

Do Democrats need to moderate to win? There have been plenty of debates about Vice President Kamala Harris’s messaging style during her campaign. Should she have leaned towards one party line or the other? Those are the questions at the center of the conversation between our senior political correspondent and Osita Nwanevu, author of the forthcoming book The Right of the People.

A cult-favorite menu item is returning to McDonald’s: Joe Erlinger, the president of the fast food chain, has announced that Snack Wraps, the popular tortillas filled with chicken tenders, lettuce, tomato, and sauce that were discontinued in 2016, will be returning some time in 2025. [Forbes] 

The future of anti-obesity drug coverage: President Joe Biden has proposed the expansion of Medicaid and Medicare to cover weight-loss medications like Ozempic. President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is against such drugs, while GOP members are divided over the plan, which would be expensive to cover but could help mitigate the costs of conditions like Type 2 diabetes.  [Semafor]

Kevin Mohatt for the Washington Post via Getty Images

That’s the number of chickens that perish before ever reaching the food supply in the United States. According to an analysis by the international animal rights group Animal Equality, this figure far exceeds the combined number of turkeys, pigs, and cattle slaughtered for meat annually. 

So what’s the cause of this high mortality rate? Experts say it’s built into the poultry farming industry’s business model. You can read more about this growing animal rights issue here.

 Edwin Remsberg/The Image Bank

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade. We'll see you tomorrow!

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