Has the state Office of Cannabis Management begun to turn things around?

State Office of Cannabis Management Executive Director Felicia A. B. Reid has spent nearly a year in her post overseeing the state’s pot regulator and just in time for the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act’s fourth anniversary. The office has come under fire for years for mismanagement and ran a gantlet of legal challenges in its quest to get legal dispensaries online.

But Reid believes that under her leadership, New Yorkers are set up to blaze legally and safely with even more dispensaries cropping up and on-site consumption centers on the horizon. She’s committed to more collaboration and transparency within the agency as well as bringing dozens of new staff members into the fold to increase efficiency.

The industry has taken its lumps, but Reid sees the current status as one where expansion is the priority, not just survival. She caught up with City & State over coffee and the whir of the state Capitol’s Dunkin’ for a Q&A on her agency and what the future holds. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How would you rate the progress you’ve made since starting?

It’s been unbelievable to me the level of progress that the agency has made. You know, when I came in, I had a certain expectation, which I always knew was going to be up for changing. That is to say I know that the chamber had a perspective. I know the agency had a perspective. I know the Legislature had a perspective on what was happening with OCM. And so for me, the truth lies somewhere between those three and trying to figure out, OK, what is happening on a day-to-day basis, what is in deficit or lacking, and where do we want to go? And I think one of the things that was really important for me starting out was sitting down with every single office at OCM and hearing what worked, what didn’t work, what the pains were, what the successes were, what everyone else’s vision was for this agency. Because that gave me an interesting roadmap to figure out, OK, these are the people who have to do this work every day and make this industry and this agency real. How do I support that? And then on the other side, sitting down with the industry and hearing back from them what works, what doesn’t, what they want to see and what they want to hear and what they want to be able to do. And so with all of that hearing, it has resulted, I think, in an agency that has grown.

Something consumers and industry members are really curious about is: When are we going to see on-site consumption permits?

We’ve heard a lot from the industry about being really interested in this license type. One thing we have the benefit of in New York is we’re not the first jurisdiction to try certain things. So we’re also paying attention to what’s happening in California, what’s happening in Colorado, what’s happening in other jurisdictions. On how this license type works: What are the pitfalls? What are the wins? I’ve known in other jurisdictions, it’s an incredibly difficult license type to operationalize. In fact, we’ve heard from certain states that most businesses that get into on-site consumption are operating at a loss. And the question becomes, you know what, why is that? What’s going on there? So as we develop this license type, which we’re actively working on, because, again, we want to make sure that the regulations actually make sense for the industry that’s going to be charged with operationalizing them, that we’re being really considered in the approach, while also keeping in mind a lot of public health and safety issues. So I think from our partners on the health care side, folks are concerned about violations of the Clean Indoor Air Act for businesses, they are concerned around, what are my insurance costs going to be? Should I operationalize this type of license type? You know, it isn’t just as simple as, hey, here’s the thing we want to do, let’s write some regulations to get these things opened.

This time last year, there was a lot of doom and gloom, and questions of whether the industry would even exist and that’s very much not the case now. Is that down to a sort of new approach to OCM, or have things just naturally gotten healthier?

Oh, I wish things had just gotten naturally healthy. I just went off into a land where things just happen, because you want them, like Jesus, take the wheel. I will say this, I’ve worked in really difficult areas of state operations for many years. I know how to get things from an idea to implement it … and coming into the agency, I spent a lot of time asking many questions of folks across the agency, whether you were an admin or you were an investigator or you were in compliance. It’s like asking, “What are your challenges?” A lot of the issue that I heard were that people were very much siloed, and that people weren’t involved in being able to make decisions or didn’t have good information on the decisions they were being required to make, and so for me, the biggest thing with the agency was at least hearing from everybody. Some of the things that we would normally expect to see in an agency in terms of its own accountability, I put into place. The audit internal controls division, which is not the sexiest part of agency work, is necessary because what those types of divisions do is ask, “Are you doing what you say you’re doing?” That’s the agency’s only internal accountability, and so I’m used to running an agency in a division where we may have a set of policies, but also have a quasi independent group of folks who are actually testing that, and that’s really important for me, because we’ve got to know what we’re doing and where we are, and if we’re not doing what we’re saying we’re doing, what is the industry feeling then?

What does raising awareness for some dispensaries and cannabis businesses in the state look like for the Office of Cannabis Management?

We’ve launched a couple of things. One is our local map. So if you were to go just to the interwebs, type in, you know, New York state cannabis local map … our map is going to come up in terms of where you can find licensed dispensaries. There are things that folks can look out for, like making sure that when they’re going into a store, they’re seeing that licensure certificate on the window. When you go into a license dispensary, and I’ve had this pleasure, both as going in my official capacity, but also going as a consumer, is being able to ask questions. Folks who really care about this industry, who care about their consumers, are going to have the answers to those questions, whereas unlicensed stores are there to make a profit off an interest in cannabis. That’s a very different positionality from where our licensed dispensers are, which are local businesses putting money back into their own communities. They’re developing relationships that are supporting not just the cannabis industry, but labor writ large, in terms of what they do. It’s really about consumer education, consumer care, patient care on the medical side and making sure that there is integrity in this industry.

What do you think is the next leap that OCM and the state need to make to meet the promise of the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act?

I’ll answer in a way where we’re seeing the most need for our attention, that’s on the compliance side, and in our newly developed trade practice bureau. The reason I say that is because I think there can be philosophy in the way you approach the cannabis industry. You could be there to figure out how to make as much money as possible legally and move on. Or you can be there to really understand that when we’re talking about our industry, we’re talking about a legislative effort that was intended to do something very real, very concrete, and something that hundreds and thousands of people have tried to do and have worked toward doing over a period of decades, but we’re still not there yet. I think for many folks, you know, once an industry gets going, it’s easy to forget about the social economic equity goals that this piece of legislation is supposed to benefit New York and New Yorkers for the long term, not just the immediate. And so I want to make sure that as we as an agency are doing our regulatory work, that we’re paying attention to those avenues, those opportunities, where folks may try to take advantage and addressing them, and not addressing them in a way that’s like slap on the wrist, but really saying, “When you violate this law that has the blood, sweat and tears of so many people in it, that's going to mean something.” That has to mean something.