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For months, the fate of Aaron Alexis's Bed-Stuy cannabis store has been in limbo, after the state's Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) abruptly changed its interpretation of a rule stating how far dispensaries must be from nearby schools.
Previously, the OCM had measured the distance of a dispensary from a school's front door; the tweak now measured the distance from the school's entire grounds.
That bureaucratic (and somewhat mystifying) rule change from OCM, which occurred at the end of July, upended Alexis's plans. He had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to start his business, signed a lease and built out his store, and was just days away from getting his Conditional Adult Use Retail Dispensary (CAURD) license. Now he was being told that the store was just a little too close to schools in the neighborhood.
Alexis wasn't alone—OCM told more than 40 pending licensees and more than 100 existing dispensary operators across the state, most of whom are, like Alexis, people of color with prior weed convictions who were prioritized for licenses, that they were in violation of the newly tweaked regulations.
But shop operators like Alexis can now breathe a sigh of relief: Earlier this week, as part of a lawsuit filed by several impacted dispensary owners challenging the changes to the buffer zone rule, the state agreed to a deal—until February 15 of next year, dispensary owners can remain, or in Alexis's case, open, in their current spaces. (The news was first reported by the New York Times.)