From afar, the group of canopy tents in the municipal parking lot behind the Department of Public Works building in downtown New Paltz look like the beverage vendors at a music festival, or maybe even an especially large enclave of roadside barbacoa vendors. Orange barricades surround the tents. A security guard stands at a gap between the barricade, the entrance, to check IDs and hand out menus in the municipal parking lot at 25 Plattekill Avenue, while Bob Marley plays out a speaker that’s propped up on a fence. The future finally arrived in New York on Thursday, August 10, in the form of a farmers’ market/recreational marijuana dispensary hybrid: the New Paltz Cannabis Growers’ Showcase.
The event is to be the first of many—two others will soon launch in Copake and New Hampton—aimed at relieving a massive surplus among cannabis growers in New York. There is an estimated 300,000 pound surplus of cannabis biomass (including THC and CBD products) in the state because of the slow pace of the adult-use dispensary rollout—the state projected that 70 would be open by now, currently only 22 are open for business.
“This is a way to stop the bleeding,” says Jason Minard, counsel for Hepworth Farms, and an organizer of another growers’ showcase event that will take place in November. “The farmer takes all the risk,” says Minard. Growers like the three in the New Paltz Cannabis Growers’ Showcase—High Falls Canna, Oak Queen Farms, and Empire Farm 1830—make the large initial investment that the entire industry relies on, but that also relies on a market to sell their product after the harvest.
Rick Weissman and Tricia Horst, the founders of High Falls Canna (and High Falls Hemp, their CBD business) and the organizers of the New Paltz Cannabis Growers’ Showcase, still have 85 percent of their crop left from last season, which is about 2,000 pounds. They are able to sell their products to six dispensaries in the state, but it’s still not nearly enough. This event, which will run Thursday through Saturday (4pm-8pm, and 1pm-8pm on Saturday), offers growers the chance to sell their product directly to the customers. The showcase will operate weekly for the remainder of the year—or until a retail marijuana store opens in New Paltz.
Weissman mentioned that in a typical dispensary, a budtender would sell their product like a bartender in a bar, with no particular motive to sell a particular product. With the Growers’ Showcase, Weissman, Horst and their team can communicate directly with their customer base. “It’s grassroots,” said Weissman. “Look around,” Weissman said, pointing to all the customers talking to his team under the tents on an August day. “This is what you want!” As per the regulations of the Grower’s Showcase, the three growers have partnered with Legacy Dispensers, an Albany-based dispensary delivery service, because growers cannot sell directly to consumers. All transactions must be done through a licensed dispensary. The customer first picks out a product with an employee of Empire or High Falls or 1830, then walks to the Legacy Dispensers tent for purchase.
I spoke to a 64-year-old customer waiting in line, a veteran, who had been arrested at 17 for buying marijuana on the black market. What was essentially an outdoor dispensary was going on in broad-daylight, in sight of the old courthouse. I talked for a while to the veteran, who lived in the area, and another customer who was from New Jersey. Both men spoke about driving to dispensaries in different cities in the Tri-State area in search of better deals and products. The man from New Jersey mentioned the number of dispensaries in his state (30) compared to New York (22).
The showcase had every item one might expect to find in a dispensary, meaning, all the typical pre-rolls and edibles, and then the stuff not everyone’s heard about yet. Cannabis water, in this case. An employee informed customers that there were only five ingredients in the drink. The marriage of the market and dispensary was complete. It made the whole affair feel like a very convincing fit with the charming, artisanal vibe of New Paltz. It’s such a charming set-up in fact that one wonders if it could stay. Like outdoor dining in the streets of Manhattan, a farmers market for marijuana seems like a compelling enough idea to outlast the crisis that led to its conception.
I talked to the veteran as he was walking out of the showcase, and he immediately expressed buyer’s remorse over the sativa he had bought. He rattled off a few better deals he could have gotten. Shake from another dispensary in NY, some deal from a dispensary in Massachusetts, and of course, the old fashioned way: illegally. I said, “But it was a historic purchase, right?” “Definitely,” he said.
But there’s really still no getting around it. The dispensaries that want to open and actually break ground, not just set up tents, have a lot going against them. Going to New York City, anyone would assume that there are hundreds of adult-use dispensaries open in the state. That’s part of the problem: it’s much faster to exploit the gray area of the times and operate illegally with products bought illegally from other legal states than to follow protocol and live in limbo. At least for now, the New Paltz Cannabis Growers’ Showcase and events like it are jolting the NY adult-use world back into action.
