One-party rule of Albany is both comedy and tragedy
New York’s top weed warden promises a crackdown on Gotham’s one-on-every-street-corner illegal smoke shops — a hilarious, ironic and altogether futile pledge.
“We are going to wipe away the illicit market,” said Tremaine Wright, head of the state Cannabis Control Board, on Thursday. “But it’s obviously going to [take] years.”
This is hilarious, because New York’s public spaces are full of pilled-out zombies, main-lining junkies, their respective suppliers and fatal ODs — but nobody says boo about them.
It’s ironic, because when Albany okayed recreational marijuana in 2021, it explicitly structured the program to benefit ex-cons who had done time for selling weed.
Now a new generation of illegal pushers is crowding the “rehabilitated” old guard — and who could have predicted that?
And it’s futile, because hardly a day passes without fresh evidence that New York has lost the will to protect its streets, schools, markets and mass transit from criminal conduct.
Now New York’s annual lawmaking season is coming to an end, and a question looms: Just how far down the slippery slope will progressive Democrats take the Empire State?
Currently before the state’s veto-proof Legislature are two new insults to the rule of law:
* One is the so-called “Clean Slate” bill, which comes shrouded in rhetoric concealing its true intent — eventually to do away with most criminal records altogether.
That’s scary, but certainly consistent with the public-safety havoc wrought by progressive Democrats since they took unambiguous control of Albany in 2019.
* The other is the “Good Cause Eviction” act — an assault on fundamental property rights.
Again, the legalese is thick, but the bill imposes strict rent-control statewide, while making it as difficult as possible to evict rent deadbeats and tenants who create public nuisances.
Could there be a more explicit drop-dead message to New York’s vital rental-housing industry? Probably not, but don’t expect the damage to stop there.
Such are the fruits of one-party governance.
To be sure, New York has always been a blue state, no matter which party is in control.
“Rockefeller Republican” was a center-right curse back in the day, and GOP Gov. George Pataki presided over massive social-welfare expansions during his three terms.
But the hard-left’s current hegemony is fundamentally different.
Its 2019 trashing of New York’s entirely reasonable criminal codes is hardly news — everybody knows that streets, parks and mass transit are far more dangerous than they were just three years ago.
And nothing will change soon — as the “Clean Slate” and “Good Cause” legislation demonstrates.
So, getting back to New York’s so-called “clandestine” illegal weed industry — its hundreds of gaudily lit storefronts about as undercover as a rock concert in Central Park.
A crackdown?
“Recently enacted laws allow for the arrest of anyone who operates a business that sells cannabis without a license,” said the NYPD Thursday.
But if peddling harder drugs is okay — and the evidence for that includes dead bodies in public spaces — why expect the cops to pay attention to illegal pot pushers?
Aren’t they just tomorrow’s ex-cons, due “equity” reparations whenever the legal-pot law is amended?
Still, don’t blame the cops.
The fish indeed rots from the head, and this dead mackerel is in one-party Albany.