Your taxpayer dollars are set to go up in smoke.
Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to roll out the green carpet for budding pot dealers with a scheme to let them dip into the public purse to start businesses when the state legalizes marijuana.
“We need to help community-based businesses in communities that have suffered with low-interest loans, with all the kinds of facilitation that would help a start-up business get going,” the mayor said Friday during his weekly segment on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.”
“Let’s be real about the free-enterprise system — the capital is concentrated in very few hands and that’s wrong.”
De Blasio, a long-time legalization skeptic, gave his endorsement for recreational pot Thursday — but emphasized that he wants to keep big corporations out of the market and make sure minorities and low-income communities are included.
The push to give public funds to wannabe Mary Jane merchants was tucked away in a report his administration published this week.
“A fund of at least $10 million supporting equity entrants to the field will be needed to make real the promise of equitable access to the burgeoning industry,” it reads.
It wasn’t clear whether the city or state would be fronting the funds, and officials wouldn’t elaborate.
The mayor’s tokin’ gesture is a far cry from the Trump administration’s attitude to pot peddlers — the US Small Business Administration this year banned banks from using SBA-backed loans to fund any business that interacts with the pot industry.
But not only does de Blasio want to open up taxpayer coffers to smaller dealers and growers, he says he wants to explicitly lock businesses “of a certain size” out of the marijuana market altogether.
“Why don’t we create laws that explicitly hold the 1 percent and the corporations at bay? Do not allow them even into this new industry, make it community-based, make it grassroots, and make it an agent of economic justice,” he said on WYNC.
“Bluntly,” de Blasio said, pun intended, the city will have to “challenge Albany” to approach legalization with an “anti-corporate mentality.
“Historically, Albany has been very friendly to the corporate sector during both Democratic and Republican administrations,” he said.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said this week he wants the state to legalize recreational reefer in 2019.