In August, New York mayor Eric Adams stood before a banner festooned with cannabis-leaf emblems, making what he billed as a major announcement. “Today, we light up our economy,” enthused the mayor. Referring to recreational pot sales, he continued: “The regulated adult-use cannabis industry is a once-in-a-generation opportunity … Cannabis NYC will plant the seeds for the economy of tomorrow.”
Welcome to New York’s post-pandemic economic-development policy: the promotion of vice. In this New York, vice isn’t something to tolerate, operating on the edges of the law, in a black market in a dense, wealthy city; it’s a premier growth industry.
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here. Adapted from City Journal.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post