Queens pol’s bill takes aim at illegal smoke shops

A new bill from a Queens legislator would give the city and other local municipalities within the Empire State more authority when it comes to shutting down illegal smoke shops.

By Ryan Schwach

A new bill from a Queens legislator would give the city and other local municipalities within the Empire State more authority when it comes to shutting down illegal smoke shops.

The bill from Assemblymember Jenifer Rajkumar, entitled SMOKEOUT – or the Stop Marijuana Overproliferation and Keep Empty Operators of Unlicensed Transactions – would purportedly give the city more authority to shut down illegal smoke shops which have opened across the city since the creation of the state’s legal recreational marijuana market.

Currently, much of the enforcement against the illegal shops has fallen under state jurisdiction through the Office of Cannabis Management, which has largely been unable to keep up with the rate of illegal shops in the state.

"It is time to immediately close all 36,000 illegal smoke shops across our state, including the 1,500 illegal smoke shops fueling crime in New York City,” said Rajkumar, the bill’s sponsor. “My legislation puts the power back in the hands of the people and municipalities, so that we can stop the sale of unlicensed cannabis that is endangering our children and our neighborhoods.”

“We will come together as one State this Albany session and eliminate these epicenters of crime,” she added.

Rajkumar, arguably Mayor Eric Adams’ biggest ally in Albany, first pitched the bill at a mayoral town hall last month in Corona, a neighborhood that is not included in her South Queens district.

“These unlicensed illegal smoke shops are endangering the children of our community and they are hotbeds of crime,” she said at the town hall.

In 2023, Adams made Rajkumar a key ally, allowing her to attend and speak at events not related to her district or her committee positions in Albany. Rajkumar also proposed a handful of asylum seeker related bills last session supported by Adams. None of those bills made it to a committee vote, however two of them were introduced after the legislative session ended.

At the town hall in December, Adams supported the smoke shop bill and said with the new enforcement power, the city could clear out its smoke shop woes in a single month.

“The cannabis law that was passed was supposed to allow only those legal shops to open,” Adams said at the town hall. “The problem with the law, it did not give local municipalities the power and authority to go in and enforce the illegal shops….We are saying, ‘Give us the enforcement power.’”

In recent months, the civil enforcement of illegal smoke shops has been up to the Sheriff's Department headed by Sheriff Anthony Miranda, who explained to the Eagle in September that the department prioritizes certain illegal shops due to the sheer number of them on city streets.

“We prioritize locations that are by schools, houses of worship, parks, daycare centers, that kind of thing,” Miranda told the Eagle in his office on Starr Street in September. “We prioritize complaints where there's been reports of people being sick, and that could be young adults, children, or it can be adults as well, who get sick from the products that they're buying. Those are pretty much community complaints.”

“You need to prioritize locations, because there are things that have happened that are more

sensitive to the community than others,” he added.

Assemblymember Jenifer Rajkumar first promoted the bill to combat smoke shops at a town hall hosted by Mayor Eric Adams on Dec. 18. File photo by Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office

During the town hall, the mayor said that the fines and temporary closures the Sheriff's Department has the authority to levy are not nearly enough to threaten the illegal smoke shops.

“So many of these places are opening and they're laughing at the fines,” Adams said. “It's the price of doing business. They're making so much money that they're just opening and continuing to sell to our children. And so we're hoping this year in Albany that we are now going to get the enforcement power.”

What that enforcement power will look like specifically, and how the city – and the NYPD – would crackdown remains to be seen, and is not specifically outlined in the bill, which remains at the beginning of its legislative journey.

City Hall did not specifically comment on what enforcement under the legislation might look like, but said that the state cannabis law limits enforcements of illegal smoke shops to the state, and that local authorities should be given enforcement abilities.

The state Office of Cannabis Management also did not respond to the Eagle’s inquiry on Wednesday.

During a crime statistics press conference on Wednesday, NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell said that law enforcement visited over 3,000 smoke shops in 2023 and made over 400 arrests.

“The 2,400 smoke shops we currently have in the city, $26 million in illegal paraphernalia seized, $52 million in summonses issued,” said Chell. “The efforts by the sheriff and us riding shotgun with the sheriff are really getting after smoke shops, a big quality of life issue for the city.”

At the local level Queens Community Boards have been managing the approval of legal dispensary licenses as well as the scourge of illegal shops in their communities.

Sherry Algredo, the chair of Community Board 9 which makes up much of Rajkumar’s district, has been outspoken about the proliferation of illegal smoke shops but said the assemblymember’s bill caught her by surprise.

The local leader said she had some questions about what that enforcement will look like, and also feels as though her board has been left out of the assemblymember’s crafting of the bill.

“We would love to work with her, however, we have been excluded,” Algredo told the Eagle. “We haven't heard anything. She says in her statement that she's worked with community leaders, I have not heard from her office personally.”

“[Rajkumar’s press release] said she is working with a broad and diverse coalition of community leaders across the city, [but] Community Board 9 has not been part of a diverse coalition of community leaders, that I can tell you for sure,” she added.

Algredo said that Rajkumar’s office did not reach out about the bill, and has done little to support the board as they deal with illegal shops in their area – a number Algredo says exceeds 40.

“We talk about it every month, it's affecting our community, it's affecting kids who have to walk in front of the smoke shop,” she said. “It's great to hear that she has a bill, we just want to be involved and active since we're dealing with this on a daily basis as a community board.”

Algredo says that they have been engaged with Councilmember Lynn Shulman, who has promoted legislation to combat illegal smoke shops at the city level, but has not received the same level of engagement from Rajkumar’s office.

“We see these town halls but she's also covering our district,” she said. “She hasn't been at one of our meetings since she came when we had the [Sheriff] in April.”

The state Office of Cannabis Management did not respond to the Eagle’s inquiry on Wednesday.