Up in smoke: Inside New York City's chaotic crackdown on unlicensed weed shops

On May 28, 2024, Lenore Elfand, the owner of Empire Cannabis Club, an unlicensed dispensary in New York's Chelsea neighborhood, received a frantic call from an employee. NYPD officers and deputies from the city's Sheriff's Office were lined up at the door, poised to raid the shop. Elfand said in an affidavit that when her security guard insisted on filming, officers placed him in handcuffs, killed the security cameras, and stormed in. Elfand arrived 15 minutes later to find news crews interviewing New York City Sheriff Anthony Miranda, who was monitoring the raid. Inside, officers gathered products they suspected to contain THC and carried them away, Elfand said in a deposition. Her security guard was detained without charges for 30 hours. When she was given paperwork to sign, she wrote, the invoice "had no actual documentation of what they took." More troubling was an omission: more than $10,000 in cash that she said officers removed from her store and that she never got back. Her claims were part of a larger suit on behalf of several cannabis merchants, in which a judge found that the Sheriff's Office violated the shop owners' constitutional rights. Weed, now legal for medical use in 40 states and fully legal in 24, has become one of the most ascendant industries in America. Cannabis retail sales nationwide have tripled since 2019, to a projected $34 billion this year. Now Big Weed is poised to get even bigger. Last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to expedite reclassifying cannabis from a Schedule I drug (the same designation as heroin and LSD) to a less dangerous Schedule III drug (like ketamine or Tylenol with codeine). The order doesn't legalize marijuana, but paves the way for further research into its potential benefits and for tax breaks for cannabis companies. But building a successful business in a newly legal industry can be chaotic. And one place especially tumultuous has been in America's largest city. After New York State legalized marijuana in 2021, the state-approved industry was slow to materialize. As demand surged, hundreds of opportunistic merchants opened shop without licenses. At one point, The New York Times reported, they outnumbered Starbucks locations. Many were cash-only - making them prime targets for robberies. Teens loitered outside them, passing around medicinal-strength doobies they had purchased without any hassle. And the smell was everywhere: parks, playgrounds, even the steps of the Met - all wafted with dank clouds of ganja. In 2024, after a public outcry, Gov. Kathy Hochul granted Mayor Eric Adams the authority to launch Operation Padlock to Protect. It was a sprawling deployment of K-9 units, SWAT vehicles, and officers in tactical gear to raid illegal weed stores, confiscate inventory, strap the merchants with debilitating fines, and potentially shutter them for as long as a year. The mayor heralded the dragnet as a rousing success. By City Hall's estimate, $95 million worth of cannabis products from the unlicensed sellers were seized. For Elfand and other operators of unlicensed...

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