Brian Laird on WNYC.

By the way, a program note, we were just previewing the Democratic Convention, and we will have live coverage on the station each night this week.

It's NPR's live special coverage of the primetime speeches

with analysis included. You can tune in tonight at 9 on WNYC, and then we'll have

similar coverage Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday night, but beginning tonight at 9 on WNYC or

live stream it at WNYC.org. Now we're going to get local and talk about the crackdown

on unlicensed New York cannabis shops. If you live in the city especially and you walk around

really at all in shopping districts, you're probably seen them, these bodega-like shops that

sell vapes, soda, snacks, cigarettes, and as of a couple of years

ago, when weed became legal in New York, we. But in May, Mayor Adams kicked off a program

called Operation Padlock to Protect, and since then, the NYPD has been rapidly, by all accounts,

shutting down these unlicensed cannabis shops.

Nearly a thousand have been closed since the program kicked off, and they've seized more than $40 million worth of product as they try to leave the market to the legally licensed dispensaries.

Big part of the reason that they're dealing with the proliferation

of these shops is because the legalization of cannabis in New York State back in 2019 was something

of a bureaucratic fiasco. The licensing prospect took ages, still taking ages. And in the meantime,

with cannabis newly legal, people took the opportunity in a way you can't blame them

of taking it into their own hands and starting to sell. So now the city and state are catching

up and trying to get the cannabis economy to come above board, above ground, and we're seeing

it up close up in many neighborhoods. With us now to talk through the crackdown,

the difference between licensed and unlicensed shops and explain a little bit about what we can

expect next is our own Caroline Lewis, healthcare reporter at WNYC and Gothamist.

...