Global Ganja Report

After a one-year hiatus for just the second time since 1973 (the other being the pandemic year of 2020), New York City's Cannabis Parade returned to Lower Manhattan on May 3. The event had become increasingly mainstream in recent years, even drawing big-name politicians—like Sen. Chuck Schumer in 2021 and '22. The next year, the NYC Department of Small Business Services' new cannabis office issued a statement marking the event's 50th anniversary, and paying homage to its Yippie founders! The year after that, 2024, the City became an official partner in the event. But in 2025, the City would not grant a permit for either Washington Square Park or Union Square, the two traditional locations, and instead held a more commercialized NYC Cannabis Festival & Resource Fair outside the Harlem State Office Building on 125th Street. This year, however, downtown activists succeeded in getting a permit for a rally in Washington Square and march to Union Square, where a concert was held featuring the punk-reggae-hip-hop fusion bands Ricanstruction and Rebelmatic. The adversarial spirit, in spite of New York's legalization, brought the event back to its radical roots.

New York City's Democratic Party primary winner for the 2025 mayoral race Zohran Mamdani was a big supporter of marijuana legalization in New York state when the bill passed in 2021. He's also reportedly a cannabis consumer himself. In 2024, City & State New York said, "Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani enjoys cannabis personally." It's unclear whether Mamdani's ever been asked specifically about his personal use of cannabis. But on the day the Marijuana Regulation & Taxation Act (MRTA) was signed into law by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, March 31, 2021, Mamdani enthusiastically tweeted no less than 11 times. He also made the following memorable floor statement:

A federal judge on May 14 stripped New York City of its control over the Rikers Island jail, which will now effectively be run by a third-party “remediation manager.” This comes after the same judge held the city in contempt last November for failing to reduce violence in the notorious jail complex.

For those, such as myself, who came of age in the prohibition era, it was a tad surreal to see the giant electronic billboard overlooking Manhattan’s Times Square (focal point of the world-famous New Years Eve countdown) displaying a “countdown to 420” promoted by a leading brand of rolling papers. But that is what gathered revelers witnessed in the minutes leading up to 4:20 PM on the afternoon of Sunday, April 20.

In Episode 233 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg recalls his days as a young neo-Yippie in the 1980s. A remnant faction of the 1960s counterculture group adopted a punk aesthetic for the Reagan era, launched the US branch of the Rock Against Racism movement, brought chaos to the streets at Republican and Democratic political conventions, defied the police in open cannabis "smoke-ins"—and won a landmark Supreme Court ruling for free speech. The Yippie clubhouse at 9 Bleecker Street, the hub for all these activities, has long since succumbed to the gentrification of the East Village, but it survived long enough to provide inspiration to a new generation of radical youth during Occupy Wall Street. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon.

In the ultimate imprimatur of mainstream acceptance, the 10th annual Cannabis World Congress & Business Expo was held June 5-6 in Manhattan’s Javits Convention Center, the Big Apple’s premier venue for trade shows and industry confabs. And the event had the open participation of New York city and state government agencies, as well as capitalist enterprises from around the country and the planet.

The long-promised crackdown on unlicensed cannabis sales is finally arriving in New York City. The permanent cannabis carnival in Washington Square has been cleared by the police, and unlicensed stores are being raided. Yet, in a bitter irony, obstacles to the licensed retail sector, including legal challenges, continue to mount.

New York City’s Empire Cannabis Clubs has been pushing the proverbial envelope on the possibilities for unlicensed dispensaries that still comply with the law. But raids on two of their Manhattan locations may provide a test case for the viability of this model.