A group of New York cannabis dispensary owners filed a lawsuit against state regulators last week claiming they allowed dispensaries to open too close to one another, violating the state’s rules prohibiting dispensaries from opening within 1,000 feet of one another. Four dispensary owners in Manhattan and Brooklyn allege that the Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) allowed shops to violate the 1,000-foot rule, running afoul of regulations that would only allow shops to open within 1,000 feet of another shop if there is a “demonstrated need.”
Actualize Dispensary, Astro Management, L.O.R.D.S, and R&R Remedies, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, contend that OCM did not properly conduct a required review before granting the waivers for the shops to open within 1,000 feet of their already existing dispensary.
In a statement, Jillian Dragutsky, CEO of Astro Management, said the Cannabis Control Board (CCB) recently granted a Public Convenience Waiver to a dispensary seeking to open within 1,000 feet from a dispensary owned by Astro Management, which puts the company “in an untenable position” and “endangering its viability as a business” when the dispensary is “only weeks away from launching.”
“It’s as though the rug were pulled from under us without notice or reason. It seems clear to me that the CCB has chosen arbitrarily to ignore the statutory requirements it is legally bound to follow when considering whether to approve an application for a Public Convenience Waiver for a particular location. This must stop; the Cannabis laws, its rules and regulations issued by the state of New York which the OCM and CCB are charged with following and enforcing, must be followed without any latitude.” — Dragutsky in a press release
Osbert Orduña, CEO of The Cannabis Place dispensary and co-chair of the Service Disabled Veterans in Cannabis Association and the National Hispanic Cannabis Council’s Tri-State Chapter, said the “CCB continues to act with capriciousness and in violation of its own proximity regulations.”
“By arbitrarily issuing waivers, these governmental organizations are undermining the very communities they claim to be supporting,” Orduña said in a statement. “We are asking for the CCB and OCM to be true to their originally stated intention to provide opportunities for various classes of licensees.”
Vaughn Jefferson, majority owner of L.O.R.D.S. LLC, said that by “ignoring proximity protections and granting waivers without due process, communities will be oversaturated and [Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary] (CAURD) operators will fail.”
Currently, 38 other New York CAURD licensees have signed Affirmations of Support for the lawsuit.
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