STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — A recently resolved court injunction put New York’s fledgling legal marijuana industry on hold for months, but it’s starting to take shape, including on Staten Island.
Michael Gertelman, head of a soon-to-open delivery service called NugHub, said his business is slated to open in the coming weeks around the same time a brick-and-mortar establishment, Flowery, is set to open in Charleston.
Gertelman said Tuesday that his delivery service, headquartered in Port Richmond, just needs an inspection from the state Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) on the way to being fully licensed.
“We’ve been raring to go for a few months now, so we’re not going to lose too much time once the license comes,” he said. “Since the injunction is over, I’ve been daily emailing OCM trying to make this happen.”
A group of veterans sued OCM, the state Cannabis Control Board and the individual heads of the two agencies in August over the initial rollout of New York’s legal recreational weed market.
The group’s lawsuit alleged that the state violated the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act, which former Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed in 2021 establishing the legal market.
Under the law, the Cannabis Control Board had to prioritize certain groups for at least 50% of the state’s conditional adult-use recreational dispensary (CAURD) licenses, but had only made them available to people with weed-related convictions and family members of those people. Eligible owners had to have owned a prior business as well.
Albany Supreme Court Judge Kevin Bryant put the halt on the weed industry in place shortly after plaintiffs filed the lawsuit preventing most new retail licenses from being issued or weed shop openings in New York, but the parties announced an agreement in November initiating an end to the lawsuit.
Under the state law, service-disabled veterans are among the benefitted groups, which also includes “distressed farmers” and minority-and-women-owned…
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