Legal cannabis on sale in New York (photo: John McCarten NYC Council Media Unit)

Law-enforcement sources, anti-gentrification community boards, and other detractors have been up in arms for more than a year about the many smoke shops selling unlicensed cannabis in New York, which have grown to dominate the retail market for the substance.

According to their narrative, these stores are turning New York City into an urban hellscape. But their criticism is more than a bad-faith dog whistle about a legal substance. It’s actively allowing the gray market to flourish.

Here's the simple reason why: When detractors make noise about gray market cannabis, they cement in the minds of cannabis consumers the false equivalency that cannabis purchased in the state’s vibrant gray market is of the same quality as the good, legal stuff available in licensed retail locations. They're validating the gray market every time they criticize it. 

That is a key contributor to the fact that, right now, New Yorkers have an alarming amount of misplaced trust in gray market cannabis. We know this because we asked them.

An estimated 1.6 million New Yorkers report having used cannabis within the past 30 days, according to a 2020 study administered by the CDC. We surveyed 384 of them, asking questions about the prevalence of the gray market for cannabis. We expected to validate the conventional wisdom that it persists merely because of convenience, but our results were more nuanced and informative than that. 

Among the New York cannabis users we surveyed who “sometimes” or “always” shop in the gray market, 71% say they trust the products have been tested for contaminants, and 70% trust they’re accurately labeled. But there are no testing requirements for cannabis sold in the gray market, and there is significant counterfeiting. When the products are accurately labeled, it's because they were smuggled in from out of state.

We also found that, despite this trust, most New Yorkers don’t have positive experiences with gray-market cannabis. 

Sixty-five percent of respondents who shopped in the gray market said the product didn’t get them high enough, while 30% said it got them too high, and 31% said it smelled or tasted weird. A smaller but not-insignificant 12% of shoppers said cannabis products purchased from gray market retailers made them sick. This suggests the longer the gray market lingers, the more it will become a genuine public health threat. 

Our respondents also said that price is just as important a factor as convenience when purchasing cannabis.

Forty-two percent said it’s important to know if a shop is licensed. 

We found that medical cannabis certificate holders, who have better access to licensed, regulated products, are far less likely to shop at gray market retailers; meanwhile, the state has been doing a disappointing job of allowing more legal recreational dispensaries to open their doors to the public. 

This polling data directly from cannabis users makes an iron-clad case for more licensed dispensaries, which in turn suggests that more progressive, not more restrictive, policy is necessary for New York’s cannabis market to function in a safe, lawful way. 

There are still just 13 licensed recreational dispensaries open in New York State, with five clustered in one three-mile radius in Manhattan, and 40 medical dispensaries. To grow these numbers, the licensing process should be faster. Cannabis stores should have multiple financing and banking options. Policy should better incent landlords to lease vacant commercial space in well-off neighborhoods, perhaps through a larger tax on unoccupied space or an auction system to fill tenants. 

The cannabis community dislikes unsafe retailers. A licensed, regulated retailer in every community will solve this problem. There's certainly no lack of demand.

We get it. Regulating this newly legal space is hard, and every state that does it operates from an inherent position of weakness because cannabis still exists in statutory no-man’s-land, banned at the federal level but commonly legal or decriminalized at the state or municipal level.

But, more than two years after New York passed recreational cannabis into law, there is still a clear lack of access to convenient, licensed, and regulated cannabis in practically all areas of the state. All New Yorkers deserve better. 

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Alex Milligan is co-founder and CMO of NuggMD.com, the nation’s largest telemedicine platform for cannabis.