John SchroyerOne of New York’s top social equity champions in the marijuana trade, Office of Cannabis Management Executive Director Chris Alexander, resigned from his post on Friday after weeks of speculation about how he would continue after the governor announced publicly that she wanted him gone.
Alexander’s resignation will be effective June 7, according to a source, meaning he will remain in his post for another week and a half.
Gov. Kathy Hochul said earlier this month that Alexander would not be reappointed in the fall to his job, following the issuance of a scathing state audit of the OCM and the recreational marijuana market rollout the agency has overseen. But originally the plan was for Alexander to remain on the job until September.
That’s not feasible, Alexander wrote in his resignation letter, which was widely shared on social media Friday.
“I have been reluctant to write this email due to the deep connection and commitment I have to this work and to this Team,” Alexander wrote. “And while I planned to serve out the remainder of my term, I no longer have confidence in my ability to do my job and lead this team effectively under current circumstances.”
Hochul’s demand for Alexander to step down came after the Office of General Services found a severely flawed approach to the state’s adult-use cannabis market rollout, but there’s been industry pushback to some of the findings in the report, including that the OGS allegedly used flawed metrics to judge the OCM’s performance, according to several media reports.
That led at least one state lawmaker, Brooklyn Democratic state Sen. Jabari Brisport, to assert that Alexander was a “scapegoat” for the Hochul administration, Spectrum News reported.
An OCM spokesperson declined to comment on the situation to Green Market Report. Alexander could not be reached immediately for comment Tuesday.
But in a statement, Hochul said, “I am grateful for Chris Alexander’s work, first in developing and securing the passage of the Marihuana Regulation and Taxation Act and then in launching the Office of Cannabis Management.”
“Under Mr. Alexander’s leadership, New York took its first steps toward developing a robust legal market that elevates those disproportionately impacted by cannabis prohibition, and as OCM transitions into its next phase, we look forward to continuing the work of building the strongest, most equitable industry in the nation. That has and always will be our mission, because it is what New Yorkers expect and deserve,” the governor said.
It’s not clear yet who will lead the agency after June 7.
Alexander was appointed to lead the OCM in 2021 by Hochul in the run-up to the New York cannabis market launch, which formally started sales in December 2022.
But in January, cracks emerged when the governor went public with her frustration over what she called a “disaster” of a market rollout. When the OGS report was issued in early May with findings that the OCM underspent its own budget and had an enormous backlog of license applications, that appeared to be the final straw for Alexander.
“We’re taking much needed steps, long overdue, to make the cannabis program in New York successful and work as promised,” Hochul said in a press conference in which she announced Alexander’s departure.
The press conference was held at the same time as a Cannabis Control Board meeting that Alexander was attending on Friday, May 10.
Alexander has become something of a flashpoint among many in the New York marijuana community, with some backing his staunch support of a social equity focus to the market structure, while others have blamed him for the snail’s pace of the rollout and much of the frustration borne by cannabis business license applicants.
Thus far, the OCM has overseen the opening of just 130 legal marijuana shops in New York, compared to estimates of between 1,500 and several thousand illegal cannabis stores doing business in the state. The OCM still has several thousand more retail permits yet to evaluate, along with more license application windows to open in the future.
2 comments
michael g mclaughlin
May 28, 2024 at 8:39 pm
New York bad rollout? Off with their heads!
Lawrence Goodwin
May 29, 2024 at 3:06 am
Thank you, John and the GMR team, for the consistent coverage.
For almost 25 years, I’ve closely followed news related to New York’s cannabis policy. It’s a story of one long heartbreak after another.
The basic fact is: Our state lawmakers and bureaucrats made huge mistakes setting up both the medical and adult-use programs. They all need to be more honest and take real hard looks at states that went before us. In just 5 years, for example, how did our little neighbor Massachusetts surpass $5 Billion in AU sales? Because canna-officials there didn’t shove state control of the market down licensees’ and consumers’ throats like New York does, every step of the way.
Severe limits on the number of medical shops; the state’s imposition of ‘vertical integration,’ and Cuomo’s ban on flower sales first ruined business opportunities 10 years ago. So many patients were dissuaded from signing up that it’s a miracle NY’s medical companies even survived.
New York’s adult-use (AU) market today is complicated by burdensome state restrictions, including the imposition of *outdoor grows* (really dumb because cannabis pollen naturally goes airborne), which make it extremely difficult for most licensees to make money–same as the medical program from 2016 on. Since early 2023 the woeful lack of AU retail (much like persistent lack of med shops for patient access), combined with harsh THC% taxes (now repealed), drove countless consumers to unlicensed shops and ‘pop-ups.’ Today the prices in our legal shops remain way too high for anyone to get excited about spending their hard-earned money there. Our situation is now quite dire.
New York officials always seem to think they know better than everyone else, and fool themselves into believing they are capable of being a ‘model for the nation.’ There may be no better example they have failed in that regard than on cannabis policy.
If New York’s medical program is any indication, we’ll be lucky if the myriad regulatory and commercial problems get resolved before 2031–10 years after the AU law was passed.