State government apparently hasn\u2019t screwed up pot legalization badly enough yet: Now it\u2019s looking to dictate wages for \u201cbudtenders,\u201d certified \u201cganjiers\u201d (cannabis sommeliers) and \u201ctrimmers\u201d at legal-MJ shops.<\/p>\n
Yes: Gov. Kathy Hochul\u2019s Cannabis Control Board is looking to set up a union-run wage board<\/a> to oversee the legal industry, when the state is still plagued by gray-market pot shops thanks to the ill-conceived and moronically-managed<\/a> legalization scheme.<\/p>\n Is anybody involved here not smoking the product?<\/p>\n Hochul supposedly purged the incompetents who\u2019d been running the Control Board over a year ago, but it seems she only installed a union hack and an \u201cempowerment zone\u201d grifter instead.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \t\t\tMore From\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPost Editorial Board<\/p>\n And police had no real power to stop them.<\/p>\n Unlike even permissive California and Colorado, our Legislature didn\u2019t keep the ban on public use \u2014 so the skunky fug of burning weed is now everywhere, making America\u2019s greatest city stink like a teen\u2019s closet.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\tGet opinions and commentary from our columnists\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter!\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\tThanks for signing up!\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n And don\u2019t get us started on the complications caused by lawmakers\u2019 insistence on hobbling the Control Board with an absurd social-justice mission to somehow \u201crepair\u201d the harms caused by past enforcement of laws against pot.<\/p>\n Now a \u201cwage board\u201d to micromanage the truly-legal shops that are still getting on their feet? <\/p>\n We\u2019ve 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. <\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to see how reasonably intelligent leaders otherwise could still be piling screwup on top of screwup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"State government apparently hasn\u2019t screwed up pot legalization badly enough yet: Now it\u2019s looking to dictate wages for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":332673,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[8110,8979,23599,125143,7317,304,426,6239,6210,22904,9,24,55,54,56,299],"class_list":["post-332672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-alcohol","tag-cannabis","tag-drug-legalization","tag-drug-war","tag-drugs","tag-editorial","tag-kathy-hochul","tag-mafia","tag-marijuana","tag-marijuana-legalization","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332672\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/332673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}