The Fifteenth Episode of The Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast. I’m Dave.

The Mayor of New York City, a city whose economy dwarfs most nations, has a podcast. The only person listening to it is a dog walker in Queens named Dave.

If this is your first time listening, it’s great to have you here. There’s sorta an evolution going on as the podcast has continued, so you may want to listen to each episode in order to get the whole experience, but on the other hand, that’s a bunch of episodes at this point and the overarching whole thing we’ve got going on here is fairly consistent, and can be more or less summed up with, either way, don’t listen to the mayor’s podcast, it’s bad. Today, I’m talking about the 15th episode of mayor Eric Adams’ podcast, the Get Stuff Done cast, titled S1 E15 - Getting Cannabis Done Right in New York, released September 9th, 2023.

I’m going to set the stage a bit for the listener, since I’m dead certain that the mayor won’t. Recreational weed was legalized on March 31st, 2021 when then State Governor and serial groper Andrew Cuomo signed a bill that was sent to him by the state legislature. This allowed business people to apply for licenses to sell marijuana that is certified by the state. It also expunged marijuana related criminal records statewide. Licenses that were filed by people who’d been negatively effected by marijuana criminalization were intended to be bumped to the front of the line.

Over two years later, bureaucracy, red tape, inefficiency and law suits have conspired to gum the process up considerably and today and there are only a handful of legal dispensaries in the city, I’ve shopped at one and it was a very pleasant experience. There are also more illegal weed storefronts in my neighborhood alone than legal places to buy the stuff in the entirety of the state. And really, I’m not sure what anyone expected. NY isn’t the first state to legalize weed, these are established issues. The gray and black market wasn’t just going to evaporate. Drug dealers are business people, and they’re a particular kind of businessperson: the type that doesn’t fear the law. In order to transition out of the gray and black market, there needed to be someplace for these people to go, and since the regulatory regime moved with the speed of cold molasses on freezing marble, the place for them to go was the many many many empty storefronts that a decade of insane rents and the COVID pandemic conspired to create.

So that’s the current situation in NYC vis a vis weed. You can buy it legally if you get on the subway for an hour, or you can buy it from a storefront that’s probably just as good 15 feet from your apartment, and also they might just offer you shrooms. With this as the backdrop, Eric Adams had Cannabis NYC Founding Director Dasheeda Dawson on his podcast to talk about how it’s all going.

Cannabis NYC is an official arm of the government of NYC, part of the Department of Small Business Services, which I mention here in case the mayor neglects to.

“How did you start, give us some background,” the mayor is still kicking things off a vaguely as possible. Dawson has been an MS patient for 15 years, and so she was a medical marijuana user, but had to relocate to the west coast for a long time because New York didn’t even have legal medical use until 2014.

She went to work branding herself as the Weedhead out west, as an advocate for marijuana. “You turned pain into purpose,” says the mayor. And then repeats himself, almost word for word from last episode with the saying about the dark place being a planting not a burial, but because it’s a chance for him to say the thing he thinks is clever that he’s been waiting to shotgun in, he misses the chance to make a joke about the weed that might grow after the planting.

Anyway, Dawson was the weed czar for Portland, OR and consulted with other governments, and had a major focus on equity. And that’s good!

They cut in a clip of Eric Adams giving a speech about how he’s going to shut down the illegal weed shops, how they’re not going to come into our communities, and I’ll let the five that are within a minute’s walk of me know. Maybe two weeks ago I was walking in my neighborhood and saw one of them get raided, a ton of product went out the door and into a police van. The next day it was open again. Raids aren’t the solution! Being tough on crime isn’t the solution, it’s what got us generations of people locked up in the first place. The solution is to actually get legal markets open, but frankly, that’s up to the state, and not Adams.

Adams asks how we balance equity and enforcement, and to his credit he says he doesn’t want to go back to the days of heavy handed response to drug related issues. Dawson says we’re already doing it, so uh oh. But also probably true, to be honest. The city can only do so much. She adds that we need to educate within the communities about how to move legacy sellers to legal, and the problem isn’t that there aren’t people who want to sell legally, the problem is that so far they have to spend 2 years not selling weed while waiting to open a weed store that will lose huge amounts of business to gray market shops.

Adams asks for details on what people need once they actually get a license, and this is kinda interesting, both because it’s actually informative and also because it’s the first time I’ve heard the mayor ask someone for, like, facts related to their expertise. There are a lot of rules related to the real estate you use, you have to be 500 feet from a school, 250 feet from a house of worship for example.

They’re working to network and hold workshops for free for licensees.

The mayor asks what types of licenses there are. There are nursery, cultivator, processor, distributor, delivery sales, retail sales, micro business from seed to sale, cooperative license, onsite consumption (clubs, lounges, etc). Onsites aren’t yet able to open but anywhere you’re able to legally smoke tobacco you’re able to smoke weed, far as she knows.

Another cut in of the mayor talking tough on closing illegal shops.

Let’s talk enforcement says the mayor. I believe, he says, that there’s a venture capitalist behind all of these shops that have opened and we need to zero in. Seems unlikely, but sure why not. How much of a negative impact are these shops on the legal shops? It’s huge says Dawson. Legal companies are paying taxes, paying for testing of their product, and they’re working from a social justice angle. Illegal shops are eating into all of that, targeting the uneducated consumer. Well, and the one who doesn’t want to go to the nearest legal store, which in my neighborhood is two trains away. It’s not that I disagree with any of that, but the consumer is only going to accept so much friction in their weed purchase. Even before it became legal you could call a guy who’d bring it to your house.

How long has it been around? Was it cannabis that they were smoking in the peace pipes, asks the mayor?

Yikes.

Dawson copes gamely with this pretty gross question and says it’s been around for 2000 years but focusing on recent history, she talks about how awful and racist government policy has been since the 30s and particularly since Nixon.

There are all kinds of opportunities that legalization represents, the mayor brings up, which yeah, there might be a pitchforks in a gold rush sorta thing going on, maybe. But I’m not sure that many more people are going to start using weed just because it’s legal. Certainly, if legality is the issue for those folks, they won’t start using if there’s only a half dozen places in the city they can get the dang stuff.

As episodes of this podcast go, this is relatively inoffensive. The mayor only said like a dozen things that a normal person would say after suffering a major blow to the head. He only said something which That relative might say at Thanksgiving once.

But there wasn’t, like, a reason this podcast needed to exist. The mayor could have done a much more robust job of discussing this new division at Small Business Services, but that doesn’t appear to have been his goal. It’s not clear what his goal was. Enforcement of the law is a local issue, but the regulation and slow opening of dispensaries is a state issue. Adams has very little reason to be involved in any of it, and frankly it shows. It’s also unclear what Dawson can do to move the needle here, though I don’t think there’s a problem with her trying, or providing what information and experience she can to licensees.

The whole thing is a good reminder that even at his best, the mayor will make a weird podcast because he’s a weird man.

I suppose, in that sense, game recognize game. I tip my hat, sir.

So what was this weirdo up to from the release of the previous episode on August 18th, 2023, and the release of this one on September 9th? As always, a great deal of my research is done by simply reading Hell Gate and The City, and I really hope you’ll support them, they’re great news gathering organizations. Links to their websites are in the show notes.

Speaking of the influx of migrants at a town hall, Adams said “This issue will destroy New York City. Destroy New York City.” I really hope someone has sampled him saying “Destroy New York City” by now.

A video surfaced of a man pushing a teenage woman. The woman pushed his hand away, to which the man responded by punching her full in the face. If you’re wondering why Eric Adams praised that man for not opening fire, would it help to know that after that, the man’s coworkers picked the woman up and put her in handcuffs? The teenage girl in question was not at the time of the incident a suspect in any crime, but rather was standing and observing an arrest in progress without causing interference. She has never been accused of a crime prior this incident. For his part, the man who punched her has been accused in the past of putting someone in a chokehold, abuse of authority and losing a gun the city gave him.

But not every cop kept their job. A top chief in the NYPD’s risk management division was ousted by the incoming police commissioner for suggesting that the NYPD is engaging in too many vehicle pursuits that can lead to collisions with other vehicles or pedestrians.

Adams continued to complain that the Feds wouldn’t relax the rules about work authorizations for migrants, and he could probably just issue NYC specific ones himself if he’s so worried, but his concerns that migrants need jobs did not stop several NYPD sweeps to confiscate scooters that are used for delivery drivers, who are often migrants, taking away their ability to make a living.

Adams visited Israel and touched the place where Jesus’ body was said to have been prepared for burial. He then went to the Western Wall and touched it. Both times he was wearing a bracelet typically worn by ravers and electronic music fans that said HUSTLE on it.

If you liked this, or thought it was interesting and want to hear more, the best way to make sure you do so is to hit subscribe on whatever podcatcher app you’re using to hear my voice right now. The best way to let other people know about this podcast is to tell a friend or enemy about it, but I refuse to believe that liking it does anything, and reviewing it will just take up moments of your life that you could be telling a friend or, I don’t know, learning to take apart a lawnmower engine.

Transcripts of this show are available at:

https://stuffstuffcastcast.wixsite.com/stufftranscripts

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See you next time.