How Easy Is It to Set Up a Weed Business in New York? Not Very

M
y initiation into the cannabis trade began in a middle school bathroom. Dime bags led to ounces, which led to pounds, and in my early twenties, my partner “SOME” and I were doing Canadian border crossings and road trips from Northern California to New York City, where we landed loads off Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. 

It was a side hustle that quickly became a main hustle when I realized that journalism and documentary filmmaking were not-for-profit endeavors. Some people have a trust fund — I had a weed fund. It afforded me the ability to create art at my own leisure. 

I built delivery services from the ground up, handing out cards in Tompkins Square Park while walking my American bulldog, Danny DeVito. On and off for more than a decade, my team and I carved thousands of miles through New York City’s streets on two wheels, green-grid cyclists serving up that Sour Diesel. When New York state legalized cannabis possession in 2021, I was among the first to transition to a gray-market retail business. It was always meant to be a temporary venture — as the city announced the opening of the first licensed stores, I resigned myself to the fact that the end of prohibition was here. Like my grandmother Mary Kelly Bulger used to say, “You can’t beat the government.”  

I believe in weed, a morally justifiable criminal activity, and I rode the wave all the way to what I thought was the end. Remember, just a few years ago, it was perilous pushing pounds. Thousands of people are still serving time for cannabis-related offenses nationwide. Fast-forward through New York’s decriminalization in 2019, adult-use legalization two years later, and licensing kickoff in 2022 — which led to an explosion of legal and less-than-legal shops —​​ and New York has reclaimed its title as New Amsterdam, the undeniable cannabis capital of the world. The green rush has reshaped the urban landscape. There are an estimated 2,800-plus illegal cannabis shops in NYC alone. Renegades clash with licensees. Consumers chase deals, indifferent to state regulations. Legacy operators are being nudged out by pencil pushers and industrious Yemeni tobacco-shop owners. The city is a dizzying battleground for bud sales.  

Amid this chaotic market, I decided it was time to grow up and fully dedicate myself to working in television, a respectable career. But when the 2023 writers’ strike happened, I found myself plunging headlong back into the fray. Now, the only constants are the relentless descent of prices, cutthroat competition, and the looming sense from many legacy operators that going legit could be the straightest path to failure — as it has been in other states before us. 

Due to the scattered fiefdoms of legal states (there are now 23 besides New York), the cannabis industry has yet to find its identity. Forget about celebrity brands — all that matters is the grower. Forget about THC percentages — do you judge liquor quality by its alcohol content? And forget about the scientifically inaccurate binary of indica versus sativa, or promises of a specific experience with each — “This will make you sleepy, and this will give you energy.” 

Traditionally, when people refer to “indica,” they are speaking of plants descending from India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan — mountainous regions with long winters that, over millennia, have favored “wide-leaf cultivars,” known for their higher narcotic content to induce sedation and aid in hibernation. Conversely, along the equator, where sunlight is abundant year-round, humans have selected more vibrant and energetic “narrow-leaf cultivars,” rich in the chemical compounds that promote alertness and focus; it’s no coincidence those plants grow in the same regions as cocaine and coffee. As cannabis genetics expert Kevin Jodrey says, “The place shapes the plant, and the people refine and reflect that.” According to Jodrey, there is no such thing as “pure” indica or sativa. “Over time,” he explains, “shamans have traded all over the planet, and most everything, everywhere, is some type of hybrid.” 

I’m currently puffing on this Cuban Black Haze, a 90-day equatorial narrow-leaf cultivar that was popularized in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood in the Nineties. The Colombians sent it to America with cocaine, the Cubans brought it up from Miami, then the Dominicans took over distribution. It was the most popular weed in NYC at the end of the last century, but now it is extremely difficult to find. I’ve found that it’s the most energetic weed. Not for everyone, but it beats taking Adderall. Any other haze hybrids put me to sleep.

Despite the demand for energetic weed, equatorial strains require more sunlight, space, time, and investment, making them less common. In the early 2000s, growers realized it’s much easier to produce a sativa-leaning hybrid in 60 days. Customers won’t know the difference. 

One of my former smuggling partners, Adam Schroeder, is now one of the biggest distributors in the country over at NorCal Cannabis. He says indicas dominate their West Coast sales. But New Yorkers don’t know chill. More than anywhere else on Earth, we can’t stop moving. Having sold weed in New York for decades, I believe that upward of 70 percent of cannabis sales in the city are labeled sativa, but rarely are customers purchasing what they really want. I see an opening to unleash a cannabis brand solely dedicated to genuine, equatorial, narrow-leaf cultivars. I christen it High Functions.  

A vision of financial success becomes clear in my mind: I aim to become the writers’ weed, dancers’ dank, and painters’ pot of the cannabis world, a steadfast supplier of the most invigorating weed to New York’s creative class. But to succeed, I need to find some partners. Over the past year, that journey has led me to hustlers, smugglers, growers, ex-cons, boardroom execs, financial gurus, and NYC’s greatest legacy cannabis outlaws and operators — and to the conclusion that we’re in the midst of a collective midlife crisis at the end of the Wild Wild East. So come along on a guided tour of the opportunity and fuckery that abound in New Amsterdam.  

The Barneys of Bud

Gotham, one of the few legal dispensaries in NYC, stands on the first floor of an understated modern building on 3rd and Bowery. This is no smoke shop. The high-end design firm Cinema Vitae, who’ve also done interiors for Gucci, brought the store to life, complete with a convincingly real tree that looks like it’s straight out of a Jim Henson set, its branches reaching all the way to the 20-foot ceiling. Well-lit blond-wood shelves exhibit Moroccan pillows, coffee-table books, Seth Rogen’s Houseplant bongs, and other posh household items.

Joanne Wilson, the owner of Gotham, waits for me in the center of the dispensary. A commanding and vibrant 62-year-old mother of three, she’s a legendary angel investor who’s aided in the launch of more than 150 companies. She’s also a powerful pothead who’s been smoking weed daily since she was 15. As the grip of the pandemic waned, Wilson contemplated taking a break from work, but the burgeoning cannabis market proved too enticing.  

I carved thousands of miles through the city’s streets, serving up that Sour Diesel.

“I live for world domination. I can’t deny it,” she says sarcastically. “I was inspired to revolutionize the way we think about buying cannabis.” Citing Colette, a Paris boutique, as her model, she says, “I wanted to create a retail experience that matches my personality and taste. A lifestyle.” 

What she’s created reminds me more of a high-end Soho fashion boutique than the cheap, fluorescent-lit “exotic weed,” a.k.a. “Za,” shops that have proliferated all over the city. For better or worse, Gotham is the only Gotham in Gotham. 

At the time we met, only a little more than 20 stores in the entire state were licensed (now it’s somewhere around 150), and other licensees were flipping their winning lottery tickets in back rooms for more than $1 million. I had considered applying for a license, but the state program — dubbed Conditional Adult Use Retail Dispensaries, or CAURD — under the banner of restorative justice, bestows preferential treatment upon individuals previously convicted of cannabis-related offenses in New York. Out of respect for those who’d done time, I didn’t pursue it. Licenses were also granted to a select group of “nonprofit” applicants who managed to navigate the system. 

Wilson took the nonprofit route, partnering with Strive, a nationwide job-training organization. “They will be rewarded financially as we begin to see a profit,” she says. “I’m not driven by greed. We’re able to provide our employees with benefits, share the wealth, make a difference in the community.” Wilson doesn’t talk shit. She seems like she’s doing this for fun, because she loves weed. Many of the new licensed stores won’t make it, but she owns the space and can afford to last through the inevitable short-term kinks. 

I check out Gotham’s products — by law, licensed New York shops can only sell New York-grown weed — and sure enough, it seems they don’t have a single 90-day, equatorial narrow-leaf cultivar, let alone an original haze, New York’s legendary strain. I tell Wilson about my brand concept — providing the most activating weed in town — and she says she’ll stock my future product, with one stipulation: I must locate a growing partner who holds the necessary license to legally grow and supply the flower. Wilson offers to connect me with Flowerhouse, a name that, according to her, is synonymous with growing “the best shit in New York.” 

The OGs

Before seeking out Flowerhouse, I venture to New York City’s largest retail operator, Empire Cannabis, hoping to investigate what the gray-market competition has to offer. 

In the chronicles of New York’s cannabis underworld, the father-son tandem of John and Ralph Elfand are first-ballot hall of famers. In the Eighties, at the tender age of 16, John plunged headfirst into weed smuggling, embarking on perilous boat voyages from Jamaica to the shores of Florida by his father’s side. The Elfands’ pursuits eventually evolved to production, positioning them among the architects of commercial cultivation with the advent of indoor growing. “We were some of the first people to recognize the power of growing high-grade, hydroponic weed, and it sold like wildfire,” Ralph Elfand, 84, tells me. “Everything else was Mexican brick weed, and we had the good shit.” 

The Nineties witnessed the Elfand empire expand over multiple NYC boroughs, as they turned seven-story office buildings into vertical weed jungles. In addition to growing, John says, he orchestrated the transportation of tons of weed across the Mexican border after forming an alliance with a cartel. He says they made millions. But then, in the autumn of 1998, operating on a tip, the authorities raided the Elfands’ Brooklyn warehouse, filled with thousands of illegal cannabis plants. (“That rat!” Ralph screams as John tells the story.) Ralph, 58 at the time of the bust, was given a five-year mandatory-minimum sentence for conspiring to manufacture and distribute cannabis; John, then 28, was sentenced to 10 years. For a time, they were cellmates.  

While incarcerated, John says, he took over cannabis operations at Otisville prison in upstate New York. When Ralph visited, he says, he’d switch out Almond Joys from the snack machine with candy wrappers that were full of cannabis John would later retrieve. They figured out what kosher company packaged the beans coming into the prison commissary, then Ralph sent them to the prison stuffed with weed. (The prison did not return a request for comment.)  

After his release in 2007, John ventured West, gaining expertise in California’s and Colorado’s emerging legal cannabis markets. In 2021, he detected what he saw as a legislative loophole that, in his reading, allowed for private cannabis clubs in New York where a “transfer” of weed, not a sale, could occur. He pulled his sister Lenore into the business, and the three Elfands came together to inaugurate Empire Cannabis, New York City’s first gray-area dispensary chain.  

The Elfands flagrantly did interviews on local news, challenging New York state as they operated without licenses. “License for what?” John asks me. “The state is clearly in violation of the United States Constitution, and we won’t be restricted by their bullshit legislation. It is impossible for a state to be in any sense of the word ‘legal’ — under the supremacy clause, the federal government rules everything, and cannabis is illegal. It’s a fictitious legalization.” Empire received cease-and-desist letters from the state, but defying the authorities, they expanded, boasting six unlicensed dispensaries across the city by the spring of 2023.  

I’ve been in touch with the Elfands for years and at one point considered partnering with them in the retail market, only to decide they were insane to think they could outfox the system. Yet as I head out to meet with John, Empire is still the most popular chain in town. 

At Empire’s Soho shop, a former Sneaker Town on Broadway and Canal Street in Manhattan, the window showcases four-foot cannabis plants by the Kaleidoscope Collective. With mylar murals of Nixon-era newspaper headlines declaring, “The War on Drugs Was Always About Race,” the place feels like a memorial to all those affected by drug laws. 

As I peruse the glass cases, I am reminded what separates Empire from legal outfits like Gotham: superior products at a lower cost. Empire sells indoor California weed, while Gotham serves greenhouse cannabis from first-time operations. If they were dueling wine shops, Empire sells Champagne and Gotham sells sparkling wine from New York. 

John Elfand, six-foot-one with a slicked-back gray ponytail and glasses, is an urban hippie gangster. Standing at the front counter, he plays host to a procession of dealers flaunting their wares for inspection, assessing the quality of the buds and offering vague assurances of future contact. After the dealers exit, John hobbles toward me, extending his hand. (The limp is the result of a mountain-climbing accident.) He looks me up and down, deciding if he can trust me. 

If they want to shut me down, I’ll sue them into oblivion. It’s not my fault they created this loophole.

Before pitching him on my idea, I want to know how long he thinks they’ll be able to stay in business without a license. John interjects, “We don’t ‘sell’ anything. This is a club!” To partake in Empire’s cannabis offerings, interested parties must first join their organization, an initiation that funnels members’ personal information into a repository of data on what Elfand claims is 186,000 members and growing. 

Once individuals have secured their membership, the realm of curated cannabis products opens before them. John, in his own peculiar lexicon, describes Empire as a “not-for-profit” entity providing people with access to wholesale goods — not to be confused with the federally regulated “nonprofit” sector like Gotham. An unapologetic purveyor of out-of-state cannabis, Elfand thumbs his nose at the regulations. He claims Empire grosses $75,000 a day across its locations. “The moment the federal government legalizes cannabis, you’ll see all these big companies swoop in, raking in billions of dollars,” he says. “I’ve spent a cumulative 15 years behind bars, off and on. I’ve been to federal prison twice. I’m not walking away now, just to let some corporate entity like Curaleaf take the whole damn pie. I’d rather head back to the joint.” 

However, in recent months, a slew of reports alleged that some gray-market cannabis is riddled with contaminants, such as E. coli and salmonella. While Elfand declares his products safe, there is no oversight to confirm this. Anyway, he claims licensed stores are just as unreliable: “The licensed growers are so full of shit. The state has them ‘self-policing.’” According to Elfand, this means legal growers “send in the crap they grew for testing, and then switch it out for Cali weed. It’s a farce.”   

Tremaine Wright, chairwoman of New York’s Office of Cannabis Management, says of Empire’s business approach, “It’s not fair if somebody is operating outside of the collective agreement for us to legalize and regulate cannabis and build standards around the products that we’re offering to our customers. Illicit marketplaces confuse consumers.” 

Still, Elfand maintains an unshakable air of legal invincibility. “If they want to shut me down, I’ll sue them into oblivion,” he says. “It’s not my fault they created this loophole. My insurance company and the landlords have all looked into it, and they agree that I’m operating within the parameters of the law. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have insured my business.” 

But as of May 3, 2023, the law changed, potentially closing the so-called loophole Elfand had been exploiting. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation that makes it a crime to sell cannabis products without a license, specifically outlawing “indirect retail sales,” including “a membership to a club, association, or other organization.”

The afternoon we meet at Empire, Elfand agrees to carry my product on consignment. But days later, before I’ve even found a grower to fulfill the order, Elfand calls in a panic, informing me Empire is being raided. “Send the press!” he tells me, before hanging up. 

I race over to an Empire location in Chelsea to witness the standoff. In what they’re calling a “routine inspection,” NYPD officers assisting New York state tax agents have assembled in front of the store. The state officials do not have a search warrant. John denies their entry. The standoff lasts seven hours. Eventually, the tax authorities force their way in, seizing products. Across town, on the Lower East Side, authorities raid a second Empire location on Allen Street, and when Lenore denies their entry, she is arrested for “impeding the investigation.” 

In the wake of the raids, I ask John, “Is this the beginning of the end?” Without hesitation, he reassures me, “It’s all bullshit, a PR move to show they’re doing something. We’re already back open!” Indeed, Lenore was released, charges dropped, and the Empire outposts are up and running one day later — but for how long? Wright tells me Empire is “on borrowed time.” A showdown between Empire and New York state is imminent, and I am forced to rethink doing business in the gray market. 

The Urban Farmer

Following Joanne Wilson’s recommendation, I contact Sid Gupta at Flowerhouse, one of New York’s legal growers. Miraculously, within minutes of our initial phone call, based on Gotham’s interest, Gupta agrees to consider working together. “It’s a royalty deal,” Gupta declares. “You secure the sales, and we’ll navigate the cultivation and delivery.”  

In return, an eight-percent slice of the pie awaits me. I would make approximately $1 per eighth sold. Not a windfall by any stretch, but a start? Legal weed. I could stop hiding and promote my brand in public. 

Amid a glorious July rain, I embark on a 55-minute journey north to meet Gupta at Flowerhouse’s packaging facility in a nondescript office park in suburban Ulster County. As I approach the building, a jacked, five-foot-11 Indian American in a flat-brim baseball cap opens the door. He looks like hired muscle. “I’m Sid,” he declares, extending his hand. “Welcome to Flowerhouse!” 

Beyond the grand double doors lies a 12,000-square-foot warehouse teeming with workers devoted to the meticulous boxing of cannabis products, each destined for Gotham and around 130 other licensed emporiums Flowerhouse serves. “This place is our linchpin,” Gupta says, “the conduit through which we take delivery, process, and dispatch to NYC.” He hands me a generous gift of Flowerhouse Gelato — what Mario Guzman, the creator of the original Gelato strain, would later derisively describe to me as “Canal Street weed.”

You’re fucked. Nobody will spend that much time and money to grow real haze.

We transition into Gupta’s black Range Rover to tour the grow facilities, an hour’s journey north from the packaging citadel. Our discourse turns to our respective cannabis origins. After graduating from NYU, Gupta grew a nightclub and catering portfolio in the city, but in the aughts, as California, Colorado, and Oregon legalized cannabis distribution, he joined the green rush. Setting up camp in Oregon, he unfurled the banner of Pistil Point cannabis in 2013. When the market plummeted, he expanded into hemp and within a few years, he says, was among the largest producers of industrial hemp in the world, churning out thousands of pounds annually and riding the CBD wave that swept the nation.  

Gupta sold Pistil Point in 2021, then was hired by Natura in Sacramento, which became the largest indoor cannabis grow facility in the U.S. After that, he decided to return home to build his own company. Securing one of New York’s inaugural cultivation licenses, he brought together a constellation of licensees that Flowerhouse now represents, arranging to cultivate on their behalf. At present, Flowerhouse stands as one of the largest legal cultivators in New York state.

Over a joint in this two-acre verdant maze of canopy greenhouses, Gupta tells me about margins, production frontiers, and economic modeling. Guzman is right: This weed is bad. It’s making me paranoid. Overhead, intricate networks of fishing lines support the burgeoning weight of the plants. The industrial fans, roaring like jet engines, have us screaming at each other. In August, it will get to more than 130 degrees in here, and I’m reminded that no matter how hard anyone tries, New York will never be an ideal climate for growing weed in a greenhouse. 

Gupta extends his arm to a row of familiar-looking plants. “AJ’s Sour Diesel!” he proclaims. There’s no mistaking the iconic, lemon-gasoline smell of New York’s most famous strain, which changed the game when it arrived on city streets in the late Nineties. While the haze has a subtle, piney scent and organic, caterpillar-like appearance, Sour Diesel was densely packed, gourmet-green, and induced a perfect, down-the-middle high. For growers, it produced an exceptionally high yield: more per light than most other plants, with a much shorter maturation cycle than the haze. The Sour Diesel economy dominated NYC for well over a decade into the 2010s — at one point, it was a $1.5-billion-per-year industry. Even in today’s competitive market, it brings in around a half billion annually. 

Gupta has an exclusive with its main developer, AJ, whose nickname, “Asshole Joe,” started as a way to differentiate him from two other Joes, but stuck because he could never grow enough Sour Diesel to satisfy people. Gupta’s grand vision is to corner the market on the original Sour Diesel, making Flowerhouse’s version the standard-bearer of the built-in Sour Diesel universe. “Sour is the great unifier of NYC cannabis history,” he says. “Now, Flowerhouse will be the producer of the original Sour, and that means something to New Yorkers.” But Gupta’s plan is riddled with obstacles. For starters, the federal ban on cannabis means genetic strains cannot be easily patented. 

I try to steer the conversation toward my idea: growing 90-day haze. “Do you know anything about weed, man?!” Gupta says incredulously. He says it could take way more than 90 days to grow haze under these conditions. Instead, he offers a more practical and cost-effective compromise — a sativa hybrid. As we part ways, I know that I will not be doing business with Flowerhouse. 

The Optimizer

In August 2023, a group of military veterans sue New York state, arguing they were unfairly left out of the licensing process. A New York Supreme Court judge agrees to hear the case, effectively putting the entire CAURD program on hold. Flowerhouse and growers across the state have harvested their cannabis, hoping to sell it to 477 stores. Unfortunately, only 23 stores are open at the time, and there will be no additional stores opening until further notice. Cannabis is perishable and susceptible to decomposition within a few months. The ruling threatens to bankrupt the cultivators.  

Amid this uncertain climate, I seek the wisdom of AJ Sour Diesel himself. AJ has been in the game for three decades, but he thinks that he may have jumped the gun on going legit. Over soup dumplings at Joe’s Shanghai in Chinatown, he tells me how things are playing out: “I did the greenhouse Sour with Flowerhouse so that I could be first to market, but the growing conditions are shit, and there’s nowhere to sell it.”

AJ is 50, a lanky, Irish American silver fox with glasses and a coyote smile. He grew up between Manhattan and Westchester, attending reform school, where he sold weed. In his twenties, he toured with the Grateful Dead, selling his wares in the parking lot, a.k.a. Shakedown Street, where traveling dealers would exchange seeds. Out of this weed petri dish came Chemdawg (itself a derivative of Jerry Garcia’s preferred strain, the Dawg Bud), which AJ sold under the banner “the Diesel,” and through years of experimentation and seed-crossing, it eventually became the immensely popular Sour Diesel strain. Through the vagaries of the drug business, AJ became keeper of that precious clone and, by extension, is widely credited for refining and disseminating the industry’s most valuable product. 

In the late Nineties, a pound of Sour Diesel could fetch upward of $15,000. But today, thanks to a saturated market, that pound goes for $3,000, and AJ has tethered himself to the future of Flowerhouse. He’s disappointed with the rollout of legal weed yet stalwart about the future. “In the short term, this is rough,” he says of the stalled CAURD program. “People have poured millions of dollars into growing weed legally, and they can’t get their returns. But in the long run, I know legal is the way. I could sit here and cry for myself because I could’ve made more money, but I’ve had a great life. I was never greedy. I’m too old to go to prison.”

AJ is less optimistic about High Functions: “You’re fucked. Nobody will spend that much time and money to grow real haze. People think Sour Diesel is sativa — it’s a hybrid.” 

He’s right. I reach out to a handful of other legal growers who all seem to giggle at the notion of growing a 90-day, equatorial narrow-leaf cultivar. The market is experiencing so much turmoil at present, there is no room for experimentation.  

The Grower 

By September, my personal stash of haze has been depleted for the first time in years. I walk around to tobacco shops, delis, and dispensaries where I find Silver Haze, Super Lemon Haze, Ghost Train Haze, and other hybridized versions of what I’m searching for. I need my medicine, so I take the subway out to Rockaway Beach to purchase some Cuban Black. Today, there are only a handful of growers carrying on the haze tradition, and I want to know what they think of the future.

Once referred to as the Irish Riviera, this blue-collar community of cops and firemen has given birth to a post-Hurricane Sandy hipster-beach haunt with new apartment buildings, restaurants, and surfers. My uncle Francis Bulger was the denture maker of Rockaway Beach, and I haven’t been to the old neighborhood since he died three years ago. His parting words — “Lay off the booze, and never get a tattoo they can spot in a lineup” — still ring true. 

I’m here to survive. My mom doesn’t know what I do. I guess I’m still of the mind it’s subversive.

Uptown street legend White Boy Kev cemented his moniker as the sole Caucasian haze dealer in the La Marina Boyz crew, holding down multiple street corners in Washington Heights in the early Nineties. After his brother, a police officer, went to prison on conspiracy charges, Kev took his business inside, becoming a grower. He learned from the best of the Dominicans as he dedicated the rest of his life to Cuban Black Haze. “I came out here to get off the scene and survive,” he says in a raspy, Christopher Walken-esque New York accent. “It’s low-key. I bought a cheap house. Everyone knew each other. Most people mind their business — except for this lady.” He signals toward the window above a garage across the street. 

Recognizing his neighbor was becoming overly inquisitive, Kev has been covering her electric bill for more than five years. “Karma, you know, it all balances out,” Kev tells me. We enter the rundown two-story house where Kev permits a family to reside on the first floor, rent-free, to divert any additional suspicion.  

A far cry from the Flowerhouse legal grow, the second floor of Kev’s grow house consists of a dilapidated kitchen and a living room with no furniture, just rows of plants on top of a warped floor and lights hanging from the collapsing ceiling. The bedroom is outfitted with a second, smaller grow. Under these fluorescents, Kev is capable of re-creating equatorial conditions for his family away from family: Cuban Black Haze plants. Three-foot-tall bags filled with dirt give birth to six-foot trees. A spider web of strings creates grids throughout the room, supporting the stalks. There’s not much room to walk; the plants take up all of the real estate, leaving just a small space for us to sit in two cheap chairs next to the industrial-size water tanks.  

Kev rolls up his sleeves, revealing a faded tattoo of a leprechaun, an overflowing beer mug in his hand. If you gave Kev a green buckle hat, he could play a fine leprechaun here at the end of the rainbow, where he spends most days under the lights. “My mom doesn’t know what I do,” he says. “I guess it’s part embarrassment. I’m still of the mind that it’s subversive.” In fact, Kev tells me that in the past two decades, he has only allowed two other people to see his grow. He checks the bags of fertilizer and, realizing the moisture has been sucked up, talks to his other children. “You were really hungry, eating good!” 

As we smoke a joint of Kev’s freshest crop, my mind kicks back into gear and I feel like myself again. “It was a favorite on Dyckman, because when you’re selling drugs, you gotta always be on your toes,” Kev tells me, referring to the nitro effect the haze has on smokers. “It makes you think quick. You know, ‘Did I do my homework? Is that guy a cop? Maybe I should drink some water.’” 

We spend the whole day shooting the breeze, swapping stories, and sharing joints. Kev’s got a certain Irish charm, and I can’t help but feel a kinship. As the day unfolds, I sense an opportunity for a potent alliance. I throw out the proposition to unite our powers, and we strike a pact to become partners in High Functions. 

Still, the legal route could take years, and I need to make some money now, so I refocus on the gray market. Over the next few months, I embark on a relentless game of phone tag with John Elfand at Empire, hoping to sell him our product. It’s a puzzling ordeal. We make plans, he cancels, and the pattern repeats. On one occasion, he has just been involved in a physical altercation with a cyclist. The next time I speak to him, the Empire store on Allen Street has burned down in a fire. On a third occasion, John is turning himself in to the authorities in California, the result of having been busted with four pounds of pot and 200 cartridges of oil at LAX airport. He finds it comical and insists that cannabis prohibition is all but over. “This is probably my 15th bust. I’ve got a doctor’s note. Fuck ’em!”

I meet with a local Yemeni distributor who supplies 75 smoke shops, but they don’t care about provenance. The average consumer just wants cheap weed that gets them high, and people aren’t willing to pay a premium for the real haze. Between the unreachable Elfand and the crumbling legal market, I begin to lose faith in the New York cannabis landscape. 

The Poster Boy

It’s January 2024, and I’m walkIng down Allen Street toward Conbud, intrigued by the buzz surrounding its release of Mata, the first strain of would-be legal haze. The mastermind behind this operation is former convict Coss Marte, a Lower East Side legend who was best known for running a multimillion-dollar cocaine-and-weed delivery service as a teenager in the early 2000s. His brother, Christopher Marte, is the local city councilman. Coss is the face of the CAURD program that has given those affected by the War on Drugs precedence in the retail-dispensary program. Despite the lawsuit that’s holding up hundreds of approved applicants, he’d already signed a lease, so the judge granted him an exemption, allowing him to open his dispensary one floor below Conbody, his gym where former convicts give prison-workout classes. 

Conbud’s Delancey Street building once served as a bank, its vaults brimming with cash. Today, that same vault has been repurposed to store a treasure of a different kind: legal New York cannabis. The store is adorned with stencils of Mike Tyson, remnants of a recent cannabis collaboration. 

I could have done the gray-market thing, but soon enough the government will collect.

“I tried to be slick back in the day and beat the government, but the system is always going to trump the streets,” Coss says, staring at the two unlicensed gray-market shops across the street. The 38-year-old Dominican has sharp facial features and eyes that seem to be plotting moves ahead. “I could have done the gray-market thing, but eventually, they’re going to close all those stores. The government is going to collect.”  

On the way home, I smoke a joint of Conbud’s Mata. It was produced outdoors in upstate New York by a grower named Ivan. The haze “is from the South,” Ivan tells me later. “It was meant to be grown outdoors. You want your tomatoes from a laboratory or a farm under the sunlight? The only reason we grew it indoors in the first place was because we were breaking the law.” But Ivan admits the length of the season in New York was inadequate for the plants, which needed more time: “It started snowing outside.… We had to cut it down early.” The plants had not yet fully matured, and it’s abundantly clear that the haze needs to be grown indoors.

Not long after my Conbud visit, Sid Gupta is ousted by his Flowerhouse investors. Even well-funded companies are having to recalibrate, and Greg Tannor, the new CEO of Flowerhouse, tells me they had to make some personnel changes. When I ask where the decision to remove Gupta leaves AJ, he says, “Sour Diesel is one of the highest-selling SKUs in the state, and we want to continue working with AJ so that he’s not this mythical legend that came out of the woods and all of a sudden disappeared again. I don’t want to make him extinct. I want him to be present and alive in New York.” That said, Tannor notes that Flowerhouse does not currently grow AJ’s Sour Diesel, and declined to comment on whether the exclusive deal with AJ is still in place.

AJ relocated from Cali two years ago hoping to claim his place in the initial legal rollout. He bet on Flowerhouse, attending events to mark the release of the packaging that carried his name. But his handshake deal was with Gupta, and with Gupta out, six months later, it seems AJ is out of luck. 

“We’re better off sitting on the sidelines until New York figures its shit out!” White Boy Kev tells me as we hit the Lincoln Tunnel. We’re riding in his white Jeep Grand Cherokee, descending under the Hudson River, listening to classic Cam’ron as the light transitions from gray skies into the murky tunnel fluorescents. 

Whereas former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, at the height of his sexual-harassment scandal, legalized adult-use cannabis in the state overnight, New Jersey has spent the past decade building up their medical-marijuana cultivation infrastructure. Having already issued licenses to grow indoors, they are much further along in the process. We’re meeting a grower there who is willing to dedicate warehouse space to produce the 90-day haze.

We enter the desolate industrial stretch of the Meadowlands where they used to sink dead bodies in the murky swamps on the side of I-95. MetLife Stadium looms through winter-bare trees. We pull into the last parking lot before the highway, where a lone white Mercedes G Wagon sits.

Like Sid Gupta, Nick Desai grew up the son of Indian immigrants in New Jersey, but he lived on one of the most dangerous streets in Jersey City, sharing a house with up to 13 family members at a time. As a kid, Desai was sent to India for a year to live in his late grandfather’s shack to learn about hardship and poverty, an experience that defined his future mindset. Back in America, he started selling weed in high school. He opened a dive bar in Jersey City called Nick @ Night where, he says, the coal-miner/merman bar scene in Zoolander was filmed. Desai and his company, Niche, were awarded a medical cultivation license in 2019, and he plans to open Authorized Dealer Dispensary, a licensed cannabis retail store in North Bergen, N.J.

We tour Desai’s sprawling, 62,000-square-foot warehouse, which will soon produce hundreds of pounds per month. He describes what plants will be held where. High Functions Haze will demand its own grow room to accommodate for the longer cycle, and Desai has hired Dane Wahlstrom, one of Oregon’s top-selling, top-shelf growers, to oversee our product. “Haze is a nostalgic experience that transports you back a few decades, when you had to drive to Dyckman Street to see White Boy Kev in Washington Heights,” Desai says. Having grown up in the New York area, he knows the importance of being able to say that he is selling real haze.  

We shake hands, like black-market legacy operators do, hoping to have our product in stores by late 2024. We celebrate over a joint on the roof of Desai’s 50-story Jersey City apartment building, taking in the NYC skyline from the other side of the river. I have covered every one of those city blocks by bicycle. I’ll be back there when New York gets its act together. It’s not a race.

The Next Chapter

At the end of April, I visit Ralph Elfand in his Midtown hospice. Empire has continued to expand, establishing a four-story cannabis complex on downtown Brooklyn’s Fulton Street Mall, and they’re feeling optimistic about the future.  

“It’s only fair. We taught them how to do it right as these idiots consistently fucked it up,” Ralph shouts at the state of New York, his voice booming over the TV as he sits in a wheelchair, drawing labored breaths. He reminds me of Hector Salamanca from Breaking Bad, albeit as if played by Alan Arkin. Ralph is battling a rare coronary disease that hampers his heart’s ability to pump blood, leaving him with just a short time to live, but he hasn’t lost his edge. “Nixon, may that cocksucker motherfucker rot in hell!” he erupts as mention of the DEA rekindles his fire. It’s captivating to witness this titan of American cannabis, a South Bronx Jewish legend, still so spirited at life’s twilight. We spend hours discussing the days he smuggled cannabis to his son in prison, Ralph still indignant at their incarceration over a plant “that grows like fuckin broccoli!” 

A month later, on May 28, I receive a text from John Elfand: “[They’re] raiding my Chelsea spot.” I grab my bike and pedal furiously. Along the route, I pass storefront after storefront of shuttered weed shops. Recent weeks have seen a crackdown. Over 600 stores have been closed, and word on the street is this time it’s for good. 

Outside the Chelsea Empire, Lenore Elfand watches as officials from the mayor’s office, the OCM, the Sheriff’s Office, and the NYPD haul trash bags of bud that are slung into the back of a police van. The store’s dozen employees stand in confusion on the sidewalk. Unlike last year, Empire won’t be opening a few hours later this time. As the van drives off with their wares, a sheriff’s deputy uses the store manager’s confiscated keys to lock the gate, affixing a closure notice for unlicensed cannabis sales. The manager protests, “We’re a club!” The deputy retorts, “You don’t have a license. Maybe try getting one.” 

Before peeling away in her own car, Lenore tells me, “We’ve been waiting for this for years. So it begins.” She speeds off down Seventh Avenue toward City Hall to protest the closure.  

The Elfands are determined to battle New York state, but the sweeping closure of gray-market stores signals a potent shift as “for rent” signs now dot the cityscape. Over the next two months, with their competition culled, licensed shops such as Conbud double their profits.

On June 2, I attend Piff Con, the black-market weed-dealer convention, in Jamaica, Queens. The air conditioning in the 30,000-square-foot Amazura Concert Hall is broken, and the weed smoke burns my sweaty eyeballs. The venue is bustling with more than a thousand of New York’s most prolific trappers, growers, and personalities. It’s mostly men with chains and tattoos, booths with mason jars, Ziploc bags, and branded satchels full of cash, and heads bobbing to the trap music coming from the live DJ. I’m onstage watching White Boy Kev judge the Piff of the Year Award. While Piff once referred to haze, Kev later tells me that out of the 50 entries, only four or so were the original, 90-day haze.

I run into an old friend from my delivery-service days and tell him that I’m once again hustling, trying to fund a documentary about weed, but without a weed hustle to fund it. “Full fuckin’ circle!” he exclaims. He nearly went out of business, but with the closing of hundreds of gray-market stores, black-market delivery services are experiencing a momentary resurgence as New Yorkers return to texting bicyclists with bags of buds. “Why not launch another serv?” he suggests. “The black market will never die.”