New York’s double-jointed marijuana marketplace – New York Daily News

If you can get in on it, this business is only going to grow. I’m not trying to be tongue in cheek: It’s making fortunes for everybody.

Cigarette companies bought names years ago, liquor companies are pouring fortunes into it. They’ve got lobbyists ready.

These billionaires are waiting to jump in, because it’s money in the bank. Everybody else is already selling. It’s not illegal anymore, and nobody, including the cops, cares that you need some license. Unbelievable!

I love it, that it’s out in the open. And the product is magical in a certain way, how it’s all different types: This one knocks you out and that one wakes you up. This one makes you want to dance and that one makes sex better. It’s really kind of crazy.

But it’s not exciting for me, the business, like in the old days. It’s business-like, not romantic enough.

That’s Steve, a 76-year-old pot-loving personal trainer in Rockland County who in a previous life in Manhattan owned — along with partners whose clean records let them get liquor licenses — the Coney Island High club and the Veg-City Diner and Burritoville restaurants.

In a life before that, he first got himself into great shape while making the most of the time he was eventually sentenced to in New York and elsewhere for growing, selling and smuggling marijuana — from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Thailand, Columbia and Canada, not to mention flying a full cargo load in on his own plane from Mexico for the experience — and making a fortune in the process.

With weed really legal to use in New York now, just 45 years after the state supposedly decriminalized it, but no licenses issued yet to non-medical sellers, things have been, well, cloudy — never mind those “Cannabis Conversation” PSAs instructing teens not to use the stuff and the 21-and-up crowd to take care and store it safely.

Cloudy enough that there was a brief window where cops believed they were allowed to use it off-duty before the NYPD said otherwise, at least for now. Cloudy enough that Weed World Candies trucks in Times Square got seized by the city sheriff — because they hadn’t paid their parking tickets.

Meantime, storefronts, sidewalk tables and delivery services across the city are openly offering joints, eights, edibles and vapes, along with their less intoxicating but no-license-required Delta-8 THC and CBD cousins. Movie directors will inevitably be using tents with people selling weed next to tents with free COVID tests as a visual shorthand for “NYC, 2022.”

While the state’s new Office of Cannabis Management, responding to reporting in Gothamist, finally made public the handful of toothless cease-and-desist letters it’s sent to business owners for unlicensed sales, no one in a position of real authority is saying much about what will or should happen to those sellers once they’re competing, likely by the end of this year, with licensed, regulated and taxed sellers.

So I figured who better than Steve to ask about all that, and his advice for the New Yorkers who have a pot conviction (or a family member with one) along with experience running a legal business. Next month, the licensing line will open first to those New Yorkers, who can fill out a long, detailed application and submit a $2,000 fee to be considered for turnkey-ready stores as the state aims to give a head start to locals who were punished by the drug war before the billionaires get to join the authorized new game.

All business is two words: customer service. Take care of your people, and keep your word. Use your brain and take care with the numbers — know your profits and losses. Know what you’re doing and who you’re doing it with. And give the people what they want.

As to his own illicit career, Steve recalls:

We were hippies who jumped into something that became insane — caught the wave and went from selling pounds to delivering shiploads.

The money got to be so much that it became very dangerous at the end. People were being killed — you’re dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars. One guy got burned to death in his car in Spain; a captain got drowned off his boat. I think they were ripping off people in the mob. It was all business sealed by a handshake, and I kept my word…

Now, it’s a different world, a different thing. Even Trumpers are potheads!

The sellers I know, they’re not caring about the police. Why should they? It’s wide open. A lot of people don’t want to do the official thing. Why pay taxes and get a license when they’re already making more money now with the regular customers they’ve had for years?

If you’re a good businessman, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in, said Steve.

Siegel is a senior editor at the non-profit news outlet The City, and a Daily News columnist.