Rewriting decades of misinformation around the plant comes with many challenges. Luckily, Dasheeda Dawson, Founding Director of Cannabis NYC, is in a unique position to educate others and share her story as an example of what happens when cannabis business and law don’t live up to their full potential. Dawson felt complications of the War on Drugs firsthand growing up and even left New York City in search of accessible medical cannabis. Today, the award-winning business strategist is back home to set an example on a national and global level.
Read the full conversation with Loud Thoughts below.
JP: What are you most excited about as New York picks up speed?
DD: I’m most excited about keeping the line on equity and the focus on equity, to hold the government accountable for what has shown itself to be devastating to communities like East New York and the Bronx and Harlem and certain parts of Queens and Staten Island. We’re starting to see that we have communities that have been disproportionately impacted and we can use this as a tool for reparative and restorative justice. I’m happy to finally see one state really focus on that and I think New York is our best start to do that, so far in this country.
JP: The first dispensary opened in the Bronx on July 6, that’s very exciting to see!
DD: That is a very exciting one! The Bronx has historically been underperforming on so many levels, often coming in ‘last,’ as it pertains to standard of living and median income and even COVID outcomes. I’ll always have mad love in my heart for the Bronx, I grew up in East New York and Brooklyn. I’m from Brooklyn all day, but when I traveled the city playing basketball, the Bronx was like a second home because legit, East New York is the whole borough. There’s a lot of the same challenges. [It’s] very much multicultural, multilingual and the approach for social services and resources has always been a scarcity approach, it feels like. This administration and the Bronx Borough President Vanessa L. Gibson, these are politicians and elected leaders that are really focused on bringing the Bronx forward. So getting this dispensary to be open…it being owned by justice involved individuals from the Bronx, is exactly what we are trying to do here with this legislation and with this regulation roll-out in New York.
JP: How do services like Cannabis NYC build trust with community and government stakeholders alike?
DD: It’s actually through just getting in people’s faces in a good way and not going away, being consistent. In February, we launched our LiftOff! Cannabis NYC five-borough tour and that tour has taken us to all the boroughs. We are at this point now where we need to be in the community educating and letting them know what it is we know. We know number one that the majority of people who are looking to get into this industry are not necessarily the same people who were in the industry when it was criminalized, but those people still deserve reparative and restorative opportunities for the past harms of the policies. That was needing a reminder, but the second is that New York state also has an ability to use this cannabis tax revenue from legal dispensaries to go back to the communities and so it behooves us as community members and community boards to want that revenue to come back to our communities and therefore support this opportunity. But lastly, I think more and more, we’re seeing that there’s still so many people that don’t understand cannabis as medicine. They don’t understand the science behind it and it’s a lot more than just smoking a joint. I know I’ve been saying that for almost a decade it feels like now and I’m hoping that folks will start to catch up with the learning curve. I think that’s where New York City really has a capability of leading in the messaging of the transformation of us understanding this plant beyond the stereotype and more in its healing properties that are innate, inherent and what we can use it for to better our environment and our Earth. I think we’re wholly still missing that and that’s a large part of my job is to make sure we get that in public education, as well.
JP: You helped secure the country’s first community reinvestment fund or “canna-grant” in Portland, Oregon. Now we have landmark legislation in New York, the MRTA, giving us an intentional reinvestment plan. What lessons do you hope to apply to New York City and beyond?
DD: I am using the work that I’ve done in Portland as prototypes, as proof of concept. We are currently looking and working on a Cannabis NYC Loan Fund to just start to get some of these businesses off the ground and support with some financing, but I think down the road, we absolutely have to look at grants and we have to look at reinvestment and the city itself will have to determine how we want our cannabis tax revenue to be utilized. The state has a mandate in the MRTA but the cities and local jurisdictions still have an ability to, kind of, do what they want. Even though I’m proud of the 40% [of tax revenue] that the State’s mandate of the MRTA says goes into the Community Reinvestment Fund, when we think about New York City and it being arrest capital of the State for cannabis, we have to, you know, look at that number and adjust. We have a large percentage of the community disproportionately impacted throughout the state, within New York City and so I see that as more like an 80% reinvestment back into those communities.
JP: Is it weird to collaborate with the Mayor’s Office of Equity, the Sheriff and the Housing Authority for cannabis?
DD: It hasn’t been for me and I think partly because the work I’ve been doing globally in the cannabis industry before I took this role has been about a holistic approach to cannabis. Not just as what we know it as, ‘weed’ and ‘recreational.’ In fact, New York doesn’t have a recreational market—we’re focused on our adult-use market. But I also think we understand there’s nutritional, industrial, agricultural and even spiritual uses of the plant, as well. We all need to have a mindset shift and it’s been great to work with the Mayor’s Office of Equity on the equitable focus and goals. The Sheriff’s Department has been aligned in protecting these goals and with the New York City Housing Authority, we look at communities disproportionately impacted, individuals disproportionately impacted and a large percentage of them are living in NYCHA housing. So it’s important for us to get the information and education to those communities first and foremost and so I was thrilled to have them come on as a partner to educate. For me, this is the work…right? My job is to put these pieces of the puzzle together, so we’re not working in a discombobulated way—it’s a hub and these are just spokes on a wheel and Cannabis NYC is just making sure that the wheel moves in the right direction.
JP: Why is it important that Cannabis NYC be a hub for cultural excellence as well as science, equity and business?
DD: Thank you for noting our mission. I always give it; the mission here is very clear. We want to be the number-one hub in the world, a global leader, for cannabis industry excellence foundationally in equity and education, but we’re going to be across business, science and culture. I always call out culture because I do feel the marketability of cannabis has definitely improved thousandfold in the last decade to 20 years, and I would say a large part has to do with the marketability of hip hop, the marketability of certain cultural references that cannabis has been infused in and those are largely born out of New York and New York City specifically. We have, allegedly, the largest consumer population in the country. We certainly have the loudest and the proudest and I definitely want to make sure that we are celebrating the culture, but celebrating the culture doesn’t mean that we continue to push false information. I think we’ve got to celebrate the culture while educating at the same time. Like I always say I want to be for the culture but I’m for the science at the same time. You can do both—and I’m encouraging people to just flex! Like be, if you will, multilingual with your approach on cannabis. We can talk the street talk because we all understand it, we could bring that authentic culture because we actually all vibe with it, it’s a vibe, but I think when we want to think about the future and where the generational wealth-building happens: it has to be that fusion of culture, science and business, in the right amount. And that’s what we’re here to help with.
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JP: What is one challenge and one victory you have encountered already as Founding Director of Cannabis NYC?
DD: I think the biggest challenge is always going to be the perception that our industry is the unlicensed stores that we’re seeing pop up everywhere. That is right now, my biggest challenge and the fact is that there’s still so many New Yorkers, everyday I meet, that are like, ‘I didn’t know that was an illegal dispensary,’ or ‘I didn’t know that that wasn’t a legal store’. We’re trying to overcome the noise of, I would say, media a little bit—media is a culprit here too, as well as just the noise of things happening without a lot of feedback from the community. We’re overcoming that by doing our listening and learning tour, we’re getting feedback from the community and what we’re learning is: they are concerned and we are too, mostly because these stores don’t represent people from the community and so we’ve been trying our best to help them understand the nuances and the differences between what’s an illegal operation versus a legal store. We are absolutely helping to support them and understand how they get their plug legit. How do they make sure people in their communities that have been participating in this industry for decades have a way to be facilitated in? How do they support that?
Again, our office is really focused on ensuring that people who want to start, transition or grow a cannabis business or cannabis-related business are supported the legal way. At this point, that’s the only way that we can ensure, based on the way the law is written, that we’ll have an equitable outcome. This is what Sheriff Miranda says and I’ll credit him, but ‘if we don’t show up someone else will.’ I think we’re really looking to call to the table people from the communities that have been doing this to participate here in the legal market and doing it now means that we can shape it to be what it needs to be as opposed to coming in later and being upset that it doesn’t fit what the government couldn’t see, if you will.
JP: Tell me more about the fourth edition of your book, How to Succeed in The Cannabis Industry: Why is it important we talk about equity? Do we need it to succeed?
DD: 1,000%. I feel like we’ve built a lot of structures in the United States in an inequitable way. We’re doing a lot of work to try to hide that, now that the smoke and mirrors are starting to clear. I think younger and younger generations are like, ‘Wait, what?’ We have information that’s being able to be shared in a much faster and broader way and I do think that there’s a requirement for accountability. Accountability for the past and the past decisions and not just ‘decisions,’ because government leaders made that. You can say okay, maybe I didn’t make that decision myself, but to be compliant with it and to continue to vote people in or to support these types of efforts. We have to fix that, but we have to admit it and we can’t gaslight folks. I’m constantly just saying we have to be a little bit more transparent around the truth, because I think that that’s just a critical part of us moving forward.
The truth is, we have not seen social equity really in practice in America ever before because America wasn’t built on, again, equitable goals from the door, just based off the three fifths clause. We, at the end of the day, have overcome a lot but I think it will only happen for us if we admit that equity and equality are also not the same things—we’re not trying to give everybody the exact same thing. Equity is about giving people what they need, when they need it and how they need it and doing the best that we possibly can as a government entity to ensure that that gets done, for everybody. And I know that sometimes people are like, ‘Oh, there’s not enough resources for it.’ But there is and I think what we’ve done is we’ve had a real lopsided hogging and hoarding of resources in one particular group and I think we all are aware of it. At this point we are calling for new resources, especially like a cannabis industry, a new industry; calling for that, at least as we start new things, to not maintain the history of lopsided inequities, for us to be very, very deliberate and intentional in our strategy, so we can have the equitable outcomes that I think this industry really deserves.
JP: It is amazing to be on the frontier, exploring the beginnings of this program.
DD: I’m thrilled to be back home doing this work, I feel like it’s a full circle moment. It’s still sometimes surreal for me because I left as a patient refugee. I could not qualify for the medical program here and two months ago, I got my medical card in New York and I am now a certified medical patient. I’m excited about that because it’s a demonstration, again, of what we can do and should be doing. The program itself has certainly been improved upon and I’m looking forward to seeing how it can be extended even further and how the adult-use market will provide me more options as a medical cannabis user. Because again, the top reasons people are shopping in the adult-use market are for medicinal reasons: sleep, pain and anxiety and I just think it’s important for us to honor that in our growth of culture, business here in this city.
JP: What are you excited for in the future?
DD: I’m really excited about what we have coming up in this quarter…In addition to trying to launch a Cannabis NYC Loan Fund, we are also piggybacking on a lot of existing programs that the Department of Small Business Services already offers to entrepreneurs in New York. We’re infusing them with cannabis, pun intended. We have a fast-track for cannabis entrepreneurs and we also have our Business Solution Centers that are now going to have Account Managers that are cannabis competent. They can help with one-on-one business planning, legal connections, even financing connections, the licensing application; all of the support that goes into that…The last thing I’ll say is we are launching our monthly newsletter. It’s called The Plug and we’re really encouraging everyone to sign up so we can keep people plugged into what’s happening not just in the city all around us, but also what’s happening within the city and what’s happening within certain agencies as it pertains to cannabis. There are a few that we’ve been working with—15, 16 or so. We have guides, how-to’s and FAQ’s and we want to make sure that there’s a real hub for people to access them.
Sign up for Cannabis NYC updates here or call their hotline at 888-SBS-4NYC (888-727-4692)
About the author
Jack Porcari
Founder, Loud Thoughts
Jack Porcari is a patient advocate, writer, and musician from the vibrant city of Buffalo, New York. He holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and a certificate in journalism from the State University of New York at Buffalo. As founder of Loud Thoughts, a pioneering cannabis media company, he helps people of all backgrounds understand the relevance of cannabis in the modern world.
