Can’t-a-bis: Judge shuts down enforcement of unlicensed weed shops

The effort to tamp down on the spread of unlicensed cannabis shops around New York City has been dealt a blow by a Queens judge who ruled that the city’s process to shut down the shops is unconstitutional.

As much as we might hate to admit it, the plaintiffs have a point; the lawsuit leading to this decision was brought by a shop owner who had a hearing before the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, which then recommended that they be kept open as the pot in question was seized when the store was not open. The sheriff’s office then overruled OATH.

We are fully on board with the notion that everyone deserves adequate due process. This is one of the most foundational tenets of American society — the idea that no one can be meaningfully deprived of life, liberty, property or any rights by the government or anyone else without a process. This goes for everyone from rogue pot shops to those accused of capital crimes including murder and treason. Everyone gets their day in court.

The sheriff is partially responsible for having ignored the results of these administrative trials. Rules are rules and need to be followed, especially by the government. The case is on appeal and we’ll see how higher judges decide the matter. Should the courts knock down the current procedures, then lawmakers in Albany and City Hall have to re-write them to comport with the Constitution.

That said, the fact of the matter is that these shops need to be shut down, and no other business can get away with setting up a storefront and operating freely without the required compliance measures. If you try to open up a restaurant without a health inspection and food handlers’ licenses and so on, you’ll be quickly shut down for reasons everyone agrees are valid. You can’t sell a regulated substance without regulatory oversight, and that goes double for a drug.

The small, but growing number of legal, fully licensed shops cannot compete against the scofflaws, who are selling pot of an unknown origin. Shutting down the unlicensed places will allow the legit operators to thrive.

While there were certainly a lot of initial hiccups with the rollout of the licenses, they’re becoming more obtainable by those who want to enter the regulated market. The businesses that are refusing to go this route aren’t doing so because it’s not possible, but because they don’t want to have to pay taxes, submit to regulatory rules and otherwise comply with the laws we’ve set forth. Doing so is not just hazardous to public health but unfair to the businesses that have done things the right way, and which are getting left in the dust by their unlicensed competitors.

All of this should have been carefully thought out before pot became legal, but the Legislature, in its infinite wisdom, rolled out a new program with no enforcement mechanisms. The best time to tackle this issue was years ago. The next best time is now, before the enforcement stalls again.

The failure to act allowed thousands of fly-by-night shops to proliferate. Chasing them down with padlocks one by one is now the only answer. But that has to be done by the book.