New York City officials took the field trip to Long Island Wednesday to torch 4 tons, or 576 bags, of illegal cannabis products local authorities have seized from unlicensed sellers over the past few months.
The officials, Mayor Eric Adams and Sheriff Anthony Miranda, also announced that the city has shut down over 1,000 of the roughly 4,000 illicit weed shops in the five boroughs since its latest push to close the stores launched in early May. The effort, billed “Operation Padlock to Protect,” was launched soon after the state gave local law enforcement, including the city Sheriff’s Office and the NYPD, the authority to padlock unlicensed cannabis sellers for up to one year.
The mountain of illegal weed was burned as part of the NYPD’s usual process for disposing of illicit substances at the Reworld facility in Nassau County, which purports to turn the burned waste into renewable energy.
“We’re gonna destroy illegal cannabis in the city,” Adams said during a news conference before the products were destroyed. “It’s not going to go in our neighborhoods. It’s not going to target our children.”
No contact highs
The mayor said they are destroying the cannabis products, rather than putting them into a landfill, in order to prevent them from reentering the market.
“The goal is, we don’t want it recycled back into the communities,” he said. “You place it in a landfill, you really just open the door of people going back into the landfills and trying to salvage whatever they can. The goal is the destruction of the product and not allowing people to just dump it wherever they can.”
However, according to Reworld manager Bobby Green, incinerating cannabis products does not impact the facility’s surrounding communities. Green said the facility uses filtration systems that allow it to “scrub” most of the fumes and expel 99% water vapor into the air.
“All of the smells and fumes are contained within the process, they are destroyed in the process so that it does not affect the community that we surround,” Green said.
Adams said that while the city has shuttered 1,000 shops under its latest enforcement action, it has also inspected over 4,000 locations. The cannabis products seized during the inspections equate to $63 million.
The administration has made a concerted effort to close the illegal stores, which proliferated across the city since cannabis was legalized in 2021, out of concern that they are hurting the still young legal market. The unlicensed stores have been able to spread throughout the city due to the state’s glacial rollout of licenses to legal sellers.
The mayor and governor have argued the shops both hurt the quality of life in the city and endanger public safety by selling products that are unregulated and often marketed to children. Additionally, they argue the illegal sellers are hindering the state’s program to first distribute licenses to entrepreneurs who were impacted by the so-called “War on Drugs.”
When asked about the roughly 3,000 shops that have not yet been closed, Miranda said many of them have been inspected and will be reinspected. But he notably did not say if or when they would be padlocked.
“Over 1,000 locations have been sealed,” Miranda said. “And we will be required to go back to some of these locations for reinspection. Some of them received cease-and-desist orders, which require a second visit. So there are ongoing investigations and we will be revisiting some of them a couple of times.”