NYC’s First Weed Dispensary May Be Coming to Downtown Brooklyn
Medically-motivated stoners, cross your fingers: New York City’s first weed dispensary could be opening on Downtown Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall as soon as January.
Long Island-based company PalliaTech, a producer of marijuana-based pain medications, is vying for a state license to to distribute their products in Brooklyn, and announced its lease for a 3,000-square-foot, second-floor space at 425 Fulton St., between Pearl and Jay streets last week. The dispensary would be a close neighbor to Borough Hall, and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams would welcome it. “I want Airbnb. I want Bitcoin. I want a marijuana dispensary. Come to Brooklyn,” Adams said during a recent speech about real estate at the Harvard Club. The approval process for getting a license is a tough one, though–only five licenses are being awarded state-wide, and applications require dozens of pages of business summaries, construction timelines, and other 420-unfriendly paperwork.
The dispensary would not be a Cheech and Chong-esque affair–its aesthetic would emphasize the medical. “It’s going to look like a super-modern pharmacy,” Andrei Bogolubov, executive vice president at PalliaTech, told Crain’s New York. And it won’t replace anyone’s delivery service. New York’s medical marijuana program, which was approved last July under the Compassionate Care Act, is considered one of the country’s strictest. Weed can only be distributed in the form of cannabis extracts, like oils and capsules, and the distribution process would be closely monitored by the state Department of Health. “The clientele will be people registered in the program … there isn’t going to be any walk-in traffic.” Patients with prescriptions would have access to pharmacists. PalliaTech hopes to have news of approval by July.
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