Good morning. Today we look at what happened when New York changed its policies on marijuana.
After the drug laws
Five years ago, New York State embarked on an experiment in reparations. It was there, half a century earlier, that America’s war on drugs began, when the state’s draconian Rockefeller laws created a national blueprint for mass incarceration. This had a devastating impact on Black and Latino people, who were disproportionately targeted by law enforcement — a crackdown that intensified, in New York, with stop and frisk. Marijuana played a key role, creating a prison pipeline for first-time offenders. Then, in 2021, New York’s legislators set out to “end the racially disparate impact” of the old laws by passing a new one: Not only would recreational marijuana be legal, but former convicts would get the first retail licenses to sell it, and the state would spend millions to lift up communities affected by the drug war.
Could this law fulfill its promise? As a journalist, I had spent years researching the impact of government policies on the lives of Black families. In 2024, I headed to Hudson, N.Y., to witness the new law’s rollout. A Hudson experimentThis trendy river town — just a short train ride from New York City — turned out to be a fascinating laboratory. This became clear in the data that I unearthed with my colleague Rob Gebeloff. Hudson had been a drug-war epicenter, with the highest rate of drug arrests of any city in New York in the late 1990s. Since then, it had become one of the most unequal cities in America — a gentrification magnet with a historic Black community that was shrinking fast. Hudson was also the turf of an unlikely cast of characters — among them the legendary boxer Mike Tyson and the heiress Abby Rockefeller (whose uncle had enacted the punishing drug laws). She had joined the so-called green rush, growing marijuana and starting a company that sold high-end “dime bags.” Her Hudson-area farm also supplied Tyson’s cannabis brand.
Over a year and a half, I embedded in Hudson with the photographer Kenny Holston. We followed the lives of two competitors vying to corner Hudson’s weed market: Bill Hughes, a third-generation Black Hudsonite, and Joanne Wilson, a white entrepreneur from Manhattan. Each had embarked on a third act, driven by childhood wounds and blue-sky dreams. For both Bill and Joanne, the law offered a chance at reinvention. Bill, who is legally blind, had scaled great heights as a janitor turned politician, but he still felt the need to prove himself. Joanne had established herself as an investor and philanthropist, but wanted to shake the identity of being merely “the wife” of Fred Wilson, a famous venture capitalist.
In Hudson, they each brought something the other lacked. Bill had cachet among his fellow lifelong Hudsonites — and future clients — offering, as he put it, “street cred.” But its power was fading on the town’s main drag, Warren Street, where access to capital mattered more. And capital Joanne had in abundance. How it wentThe story that emerged was — much like the 2021 marijuana law — less about the plant than about America: both its limits and its promise. The drafters had national ambitions, seeing their law as a “demonstration project” for how to implement progressive policy. “If we can do this with weed, what can we do with housing?” asked Jason Starr, who had helped write the law while serving as an aide to the governor. At the core of this project was a high-stakes bet: that the ideals of racial justice could meet the realities of capitalism. As it happened, capitalism found a way to go first, in Bill’s words — or, in Joanne’s, “a loophole.” Without a criminal record, neither of them qualified for the state’s first licenses to sell marijuana. While Bill waited his turn to apply, Joanne bought her way in early. After opening a store in Manhattan, she found former convicts who had landed the first licenses and paid them to help her open three more stores, including one in Hudson.
While the cannabis rollout and its racial justice program remain a work in progress, the story of Bill and Joanne raises an important question: Does Hudson’s marijuana market have room for both of them?
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