STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — A Staten Island weed business owner is taking part in a lawsuit against the state to have his delivery-only operations exempted from the ongoing halt of the industry.
Michael Gertelman, founder of a local enterprise called NugHub, was one of three business owners who filed affidavits in a case against the New York State Cannabis Control Board. All three businesses had received provisional approval from the state Office of Cannabis Management for conditional adult-use retail dispensaries (CAURD) licenses, but have been unable to open due to the court stay in place since August.
“There’s just people in dire need right now. There’s like literally dozens of us who spent multiple millions of dollars collectively, and [are] just waiting to open,” Gertelman said of why businesses are seeking exemptions. “The amount of damage being done to so many versus, whatever they are looking for, I don’t even comprehend it.”
Gertelman along with the two other business owners — one in Queens and another upstate — outline in their court filings that they had taken most of the necessary steps required by law to get their operations up and running, but have been put on hold due to the court case.
Albany Supreme Court Judge Kevin Bryant put that halt in place in August preventing most new retail licenses or weed shop openings in New York due to a court claim brought by a group of disabled veterans.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs in that case did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication, and a spokesperson for the Office of Cannabis Management declined to comment on pending litigation.
At least five businesses across the state have been able to achieve exemptions since the courts put the stay in place, but most have been unable to open. This includes Gertelman’s delivery business that would operate out of a Forest Avenue storefront in Port Richmond.
In their lawsuit brought Aug. 2, a group of veterans sued the Office of Cannabis Management, Cannabis Control Board, and the individual heads of the two agencies over the initial rollout of New York’s legal recreational weed market.
The group’s lawsuit alleges the state violated the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act, which former Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed in 2021 establishing the market.
Under the law, the Cannabis Control Board had to prioritize certain groups for at least 50% of the state’s CAURD licenses, but has so far only made them available to people with weed-related felony convictions and family members of those people who owned prior businesses.
“Pending the hearing and determination of this application, defendants, their agents and employees are hereby restrained from awarding or further processing any more CAURD licenses and/or conferring operational approval upon any more provisional or existing CAURD licenses,” Bryant wrote in his decision.
Under the state law, service-disabled veterans are among the benefitted groups, that also includes “distressed farmers,” and minority-and-women-owned businesses.
So far, the state, which has been widely criticized for the program’s slow rollout, have made dispensary licenses only available to convicted felons, who fit into the law’s other benefitted category of “individuals from communities disproportionately impacted by the enforcement of cannabis prohibition.”
Since the launch of the state’s legal weed industry, illegal weed shops have sprung up around the state, including as many as 1,500 in the five boroughs, as estimated by the city’s Sheriff’s Office. No legal shops have opened on Staten Island preventing locals from participating in the industry legally.
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