Parents and pols protest illegal smoke shop in Jackson Heights

Source: Queens Chronicle

Haze Land, an illegal smoke shop located at 37-07 82 St. in Jackson Heights, drew a crowd of people on Wednesday, May 1. However, instead of buying cannabis, lawmakers, local parents and educators were there to protest illegal smoke shops in their neighborhood. 

Haze Land, which is located down the street from Renaissance Charter School, was shut down by the Sheriff’s Office on April 20 but reopened the next day to the dismay of community members. During the press conference, Assemblymember Catalina Cruz (D-Corona) said the stores were dangerous due to their lack of regulation and their packaging, which could attract the attention of children.

“They are not tested,” Cruz said. “They don’t use union labor. They put people’s lives at risk. And worst of all, the majority of the packaging is for children. How do we know that they’re not allowing children in there?”

According to the Office of Cannabis Management, legal dispensaries are not to be 500 feet or on the same street as an educational facility. Haze Land and Renaissance are within view of each other across 37th Avenue. Maria Patino Garcia, whose daughter is a seventh-grader at Renaissance, said she is concerned with how close Haze Land is to the K-12 charter school and said she alerted the NYPD to the shop’s proximity during a school safety meeting in March. 

“I know that flashy lights, little flashy packaging, colorful packaging, sparks the mind of even the best kids,” Patino Garcia said in an interview. “I don’t want it to come into our school. I don’t want it to affect our children.”

The day of the raid in Jackson Heights, April 20, Gov. Hochul announced that, among other measures, the new state budget would allocate funds for law enforcement to begin cracking down on landlords who rent to illegal pot shops. The fine is now $50,000, but prior to that, landlords like the ones who rented to Haze Land only had to pay $5,000 for hosting illegal smoke shops. City Councilmember Shekar Krishnan (D-Jackson Heights) said that stores selling unlicensed cannabis were treating the fee as the price of doing business. 

“For far too long, there were loopholes in the law that allowed people to treat this as just the cost of doing business,” Krishnan said during the press conference. “We [illegal dispensaries] open up, we’ll get shut down, we’ll get hit with a fine, we’ll pay the fine — but tomorrow, we’ll be back open, we’ll make that money right back by selling poison to our communities.” 

Haze Land was closed during the protest, and no contact information for the owner could be found online afterward.

Stacey Gauthier, principal of Renaissance Charter, said elected officials need to step up in order to shut down illegal and unregulated dispensaries across the city. According to Gauthier, Haze Land is just one of several smoke shops in the area. 

“What’s it going to take? Is it going to take for a child to get sick, a child to die, because we do not know what they’re ingesting because the shops do not follow the rule?” Gauthier said. “I know some of these are your own children, we need to keep this fight up.”

Assemblymember Steven Raga (D-Maspeth) said the communities and lawmakers across the state needed to step up to fight the continuing openings of illegal marijuana stores in New York State. 

“They keep popping up every few blocks. This is not just an issue for Jackson Heights. This is not just an issue for Queens, we see it across the city and across the state,” Raga said during the press conference. 

Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas (D-East Elmhurst) said that not only were the illegal shops putting children at risk, they were also side-stepping the proper laws and taxes that come with opening a legal dispensary. 

“These shops are also violating interstate commerce law. The legal shops are required to sell cannabis and products from New York State farmers and New York State distributors,” González-Rojas said during the press conference. “So again [the shops are] violating the law, evading taxes and harming our New York State farmers that are benefiting from the Marijuana Regulation Taxation Act.”