Felicia Reid took over as interim executive director of the New York Office of Cannabis Management during a tumultuous period. The state Office of General Services had just released a scathing audit and Gov. Kathy Hochul lambasted the state’s recreational marijuana market as a “disaster.”
Now, a year later and just past the fourth anniversary of the 2021 state law which legalized adult-use cannabis, Reid believes things in the New York cannabis market have turned a corner for the better.
In an interview this week with Green Market Report, Reid shared an optimistic view of how the market continues to evolve combined with real-world clarity on the dangers posed by the still-thriving illicit marijuana trade.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Felicia Reid
You came on during a tumultuous time. How do you feel like the industry is doing currently almost a year later?
Reid: It has been a amazing whirlwind of almost a year. I really can’t believe all that’s happened, especially in the environment that I came in. There was criticisms of the agency’s practice and its process. There was the Office of General Services look into the agency’s operations.
I needed to engage very particularly with not just the folks in the OCM, but really with our stakeholders. I’m really conscious that this plant is so personal to so many people. I hear it all the time. It’s even personal in my own life.
I’m not somebody who’s here to say I have a title and then not do the work that comes along with it. For me, it was really showing both internally and externally that I wanted to show up to support that work. I wanted to make the connections that were necessary for this agency to survive, because it was going in a path where things were very much all over the place.
Several hundred CAURD licensees have had serious trouble getting open. One of the most common that I’ve heard is a lack of access to capital, and the CAURD permits are set to start expiring in June. What are your thoughts?
Reid: You’re a 100% right. The issue there is – and in this business writ large – is access to capital. There are a lot of folks who see dollar signs galore in this industry and want a piece of that, particularly because they have been specifically harmed by the way the state addressed cannabis. Folks have business acumen, but the structures around financing just aren’t there to support them.
One of the things that I’m really excited about with our CAURD program is we just opened up our CAURD grant, which allows for any CAURD licensee to apply for up to $30,000 in grant funding to be able to pay for any operating expense. Send us your receipts, send us your business expenses. If we can do something to help support that, then you’re eligible for these grant monies.
That’s a starting point.
I wish federal views on cannabis would change. But I think we’re not going to get help from the federal level. We as a state have to be very intentional around creating resources programming, and we have done some of that with our Cannabis Hub Incubator Program Academy that works to support our licensees in navigating some of the red tape and the bureaucracy.
We as an agency have to create some of those resources and support structures and some of those financial navigation abilities, but it’s really everyone working toward the same end, which is the survival of New York cannabis. We have as an agency have a lot of work to do to address the stigma, which is also where some of our licensees are getting hung up.
Are you going to support another extension for the CAURDs?
Reid: We just did a first extension of the licensees (in November), and I think we’ll have to see what’s happening on the ground relative to a question around a second. I don’t want to commit to anything, because I am very much an evidence-based person. And I always want to see where things are at as we’re contemplating a policy change or extending or granting an ability for our licensees.
One of the other big policy moving targets has been the number of business licenses that are going to be issued by the state. Has the OCM gotten any closer to figuring out where the cutoff might be?
Reid: That direction has to come from the Cannabis Control Board. At a board meeting last year, they did a resolution around licensing targets and coming to some conclusion around that – and the best that we can do as an agency is to provide the board with as much information about what the market looks like and what we’re seeing.
The OCM did make a recommendation to the board in December around licensing in terms of what we were seeing. A lot of our cultivators, a lot of our processor distributors, all of them got licensed last year, which means that they haven’t totally operationalized until this year. So we’re not going to know until October this year what the impact of that is.
But one of the things that we’re also very mindful of is we don’t want to oversaturate and we don’t want to devalue having a license, which is what we’ve seen in other jurisdictions on the supply side. The best that we can do is pay attention to what we’re seeing on the ground, but also what’s happened in other jurisdictions.
As to the retail side, we made a recommendation to get upwards of between 1,600 and 2,000 on the retail side, and we’re only at 335 open for business right now. So we have a lot of growth left on the retail side of things. But again, we’re waiting and relying on the board to make something conclusive and concrete for the industry about what it can expect based on OCM’s recommendations.
Do you have any guess as to what the outcome is going to be for the thousands of license applicants from the December queue that are still waiting and holding on to hope that they may be eventually going to get a permit?
Reid: There are a lot of people with hopes in this industry, and at a certain point, hopes meet the cold reality of both market forces but also other prerogatives. The thing I always say to businesses is, don’t plan for the industry that exists now. Pay attention to what’s happening in other jurisdictions. Pay attention to what may be the long-term outcome of a policy or a practice, because that’s the future that your business is going to have to orient toward.
When it comes to some of the most successful folks in this industry, (they’re) folks who are constantly doing their homework around what will work and what will not.
We’ve started to walk into the December queue on the retail side specifically, because if we’re not done with the November queue, we’re about to be done.
What are you hearing and seeing as far as the unlicensed market, not just in New York City, but across the state? Is that still a serious problem?
Reid: It is a problem. I’m not going to sugarcoat that. That requires us as an agency to be just as dogged and to get ahead of the ways in which we see things moving. And I will say on the unlicensed side, we’ve seen all sorts of machinations. It’s not just the brick and mortar; it’s folks taking advantage of the mail.
I’m also glad that we created our Trade Practice Unit to be able to go after folks who are licensees who are doing these types of machinations. That work has not stopped. Over the last couple of weeks, our OCM investigations team has been out training other jurisdictions on their enforcement practices.
If we were a small state, having our arms around this issue would a lot easier. But we’re a large state with many different regional attitudes and environments. And so with that, we also want to make sure that law enforcement partners at the local level are also standing up their own enforcement actions.
One CAURD licensee I spoke to recently told me he’s homeless because he’s put literally everything he’s had into trying to open a dispensary in the Hamptons, but can’t get it done. What would you want to say to that demographic of cannabis license applicant?
Reid: The industry that I came into in June last year is not the industry in March of 2025. Things have changed so much, and I certainly understand from an applicant’s perspective, feeling like it is starting to get away.
There is this sort of time pressure to be able to participate in this industry, and participating in the industry, of course, isn’t a guarantee of success. I’m trying to ensure that we as an agency aren’t creating policy missteps or mistakes or overpromising and underdelivering, because I think that elevates hopes and expectations in a way that’s unreasonable. I always want to make sure that the agency is communicating where it’s at, what it’s doing, what it’s looking at.
The best I can do is put that information out there.
[[{“value”:”Felicia Reid acknowledged the emotional nature of the industry, noting it’s ‘personal’ for her.
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