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On Dec. 29, 2022, Housing Works became the first organization to legally sell cannabis in New York state.

Now, the organization — a Manhattan-based nonprofit that advocates against AIDS and homelessness — hopes to use the profit from its sales to facilitate re-entry for individuals incarcerated on drug-related charges and reverse the impact of the war on drugs.

Charles King, a spokesperson for Housing Works, said the new Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary (CAURD) licenses will help expand the nonprofit’s mission to support and provide employment opportunities for individuals convicted of drug-related offenses.

New York state’s Cannabis Control Board approved 36 CAURD licenses in November 2022. Aside from nonprofit organizations like Housing Works, the state gave 28 licenses to business owners who themselves have or whose relatives have a past cannabis-related conviction in NYS. This distribution is part of the state’s Seeding Opportunity Initiative, which aims to reverse the harmful effects of marijuana criminalization.

King said the organization created a for-profit LLC and applied for a CAURD license in accordance with New York’s Office of Cannabis Management’s social and economic equity program. He said the application process included submitting proof that Housing Works serves a “significant” number of people with cannabis-related convictions and people who demonstrated a minimum of two years of successful entrepreneurship, among other criteria.

“We sought a cannabis retail license as a vehicle to employ people with cannabis-related convictions and to help them move up in the industry and even to secure their own cannabis business licenses,” King wrote in an email statement.

Sean Drake, an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse University, said New York state’s release of CAURD licenses is a “positive step” in decriminalizing marijuana use. He added that the Seeding Opportunity Initiative is important in counteracting inequities with the state’s historical handling of the industry.

“The way things had been done in the past was not necessarily fair, and there were sort of inequities and injustices kind of wrapped up in the system,” Drake said. “I think prioritizing those individuals makes a lot of a lot of sense from a racial justice, social justice, (and) criminal justice standpoint.”

David Holland, the executive and legal director for the New York state affiliate of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), said prioritizing nonprofits to receive CAURD licenses is a “critical commitment” to the state’s equity and community improvement programs.

“These nonprofits are not only historically committed to servicing those who have been negatively impacted by the over-policing of the war on cannabis, but they committed to being the boat that will collectively raise their constituents up as commerce and the industry begin to rise in New York,” Holland wrote in an email statement.

In Syracuse, nearly 80% of the city’s 2,637 marijuana-related arrests between September 2017 and September 2018 were Black people despite Syracuse’s white population being nearly double the city’s Black population, according to data obtained by CNYCentral.

But amid pending litigation, sellers with past convictions in central New York and the Finger Lakes region – where Syracuse is – have not received CAURD licenses. CAURD licenses for individuals with past marijuana convictions have been limited to New York City, including the Bronx, Queens, Manhattan, and Staten Island neighborhoods.

Arlo Stone | Contributing Designer

Joseph A. Bondy, a member of NORML’s Board of Directors and cannabis lawyer, said the injunction was designed to stop the issuance of CAURD licenses based upon state residency requirements as a violation of the Dormant Commerce Clause, a constitutional law which forbids individual states from tinkering with parts of the national economy that Congress has not federally regulated.

Bondy added that if one county violates the Dormant Commerce Clause, every county violates it.

Legal roadblocks have affected other states with similar CAURD programs, some of which involved a residency requirement that stipulated all owners of medical marijuana dispensaries must be state residents.

In August, the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Maine’s Medical Use Marijuana Act violated the Dormant Commerce Clause. Similar lawsuits are under litigation in Los Angeles and Sacramento involving a company called Variscite that was denied a license.

With New York’s CAURD licenses in legal limbo, Bondy said he believes the Office of Cannabis Management’s license program will lose and could shut down.

“It begs the question, if you care about the rule of law, and you know that something is almost certainly going to be found unlawful throughout the state, then why would you continue to issue licenses in these other geographical territories, knowing full well that they may ultimately be found the program to be void?” Bondy said.

Published on January 19, 2023 at 12:11 am

Contact Dominic: dcchiapp@syr.edu | @DominicChiappo2