My experience was Colorado and Washington. Nobody in either state will bother with black market weed. You can find a licensed dispensary with quality product within a 5 minute drive 20 hours a day.

They both did it right, and took different approaches even. Colorado is a bit looser on the requirements for dispensaries and have cheaper product overall. There is a licensed dispensary just about every block in Denver, sometimes two, when I left. Not sure about now.

In Colorado actually the legal product is cheaper than former black market prices too. In WA is about the same price but there are some cheaper options if you're OK with a lower quality product.

By "Quality" here I don't mean that it's laced, but that it's a product with less high quality plant in it. More stems, less buds, that kind of thing.

I don't know NY law or licensing, but I've heard that this sort of unlicensed pop-up pot shop problem occurred in some States where they didn't plan the roll out and licensing very well.

Either couldn't get their shit together to regulate it properly, and dragged their feet for too long after legalization, or didn't issue nearly enough licenses to sell to meet the demand.

WA had more issues than Colorado actually with meeting demand initially but they recovered pretty quick. It was because they had a different licensing scheme whereby you can't grow and also sell retail, you gotta pick one.

In Colorado you can grow your own and sell it to retail customers. They also seemed to issue far more licenses than WA did.

In any case, I'd look to Colorado for a good case study. WA for a mediocre one. And then CA and NY for what not to do. CA also had some of those pop up shops that were unlicensed.

Part of the reason for that is they've been so slow to allow them to open. There's only like 8 stores at the moment (4 of those are very recent), and they're all in Manhattan except for one that's way out in Jamaica at the end of the JZ line. Because there's so few of them, they always have an hour long line of people waiting to enter, mostly tourists.

The higher prices will still leave room for black market weed sales, but right now the biggest problem is buying weed legally is a 2 hour ordeal.

NYC had a very peculiar roll out where they made it very difficult to get a license to sell but then didn’t do any enforcement for needing the license.

In most places that rolled out legal pot that wasn’t the case and people largely do use the legal places. The only time it’s not true is if the taxes are so bad or if there are regulations that make the quality worse that it makes the legal pot extremely uncompetitive.

That's got to be some sort of policy failure. Perhaps they need to make it easier to run a legal dispensary, crack down on the illegal ones, or both.

In California, the only people that still buy black market weed are kids that aren't old enough to go to a dispensary.

NYC has like a dozen recreational dispensaries right now. Likely not nearly enough supply to meet demand