State government apparently hasn’t screwed up pot legalization badly enough yet: Now it’s looking to dictate wages for “budtenders,” certified “ganjiers” (cannabis sommeliers) and “trimmers” at legal-MJ shops.
Yes: Gov. Kathy Hochul’s Cannabis Control Board is looking to set up a union-run wage board to oversee the legal industry, when the state is still plagued by gray-market pot shops thanks to the ill-conceived and moronically-managed legalization scheme.
Is anybody involved here not smoking the product?
Hochul supposedly purged the incompetents who’d been running the Control Board over a year ago, but it seems she only installed a union hack and an “empowerment zone” grifter instead.
To recap in brief: The law the Legislature got then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo to sign instantly decriminalized pot long before the state could set up a system to license and oversee legal weed shops.
So a horde of entrepreneurs with folding tables and magic markers set up on sidewalks and in parks, quickly followed by thousands of not-really-legal brick-and-mortar stores running without a hint of regulation, community approval or even reliable taxation.
And police had no real power to stop them.
Unlike even permissive California and Colorado, our Legislature didn’t keep the ban on public use — so the skunky fug of burning weed is now everywhere, making America’s greatest city stink like a teen’s closet.
And don’t get us started on the complications caused by lawmakers’ insistence on hobbling the Control Board with an absurd social-justice mission to somehow “repair” the harms caused by past enforcement of laws against pot.
Now a “wage board” to micromanage the truly-legal shops that are still getting on their feet?
We’ve long suspected Cuomo, personally a pretty square guy, was happy to let the Legislature bungle legalization rather than get his own hands dirty; now we have to wonder if Hochul, also no beatnik, is content to let government over-regulation mess the industry up again.
It’s hard to see how reasonably intelligent leaders otherwise could still be piling screwup on top of screwup.