The “World’s Most Famous Arena” could soon be the greenest.
A top New York state cannabis regulator recently predicted that marijuana will one day be sold at Madison Square Garden.
“This is a new frontier. They’re going to be selling weed at Madison Square Garden eventually,” Damian Fagon, chief equity officer at the Office of Cannabis Management, said on the “I Smoke NY” podcast last month.
MSG declined to comment, but there is no indication that it has plans to begin selling weed.
The Manhattan arena is covered by the state’s Clean Indoor Air Act, which prohibits smoking or vaping in indoor public places.
But the New York law that legalized cannabis in 2021 allows for licensing of lounges where weed can be can be served by “budtenders” — much like the exemption for cigar bars in the anti-smoking law.
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“See the bigger picture here fellas,” Fagon said in the Jan. 31 podcast episode, mentioning the licensing of “smokers’ lounges,” specifically.
In the free-wheeling one hour and 22 minute interview, Fagon also ranted against capitalism — even though he’s responsible for helping grow the budding legal weed industry.
“Capitalism in this country has a way of ruining everything beautiful. Ruined hip hop. Ruining like millenials’ future,” he said to laughter.
“It just consumes, commoditizes, it just makes it terrible.”
He slammed it as destructive to grassroots pot entrepreneurs, saying he could see capitalists “fetishizing” the market and “selling it back to the people who created it.”
The state last summer allowed retailers to sell flowered weed and THC-infused edibles at farmers’ markets amid a firestorm of criticism over the slow rollout of the legal marijuana market, which even Gov. Kathy Hochul has described as a “disaster.”
New York business leaders said it’s no surprise given the state’s own regulator hates capitalism and markets.
“I can only surmise that this helps explain the difficulties surrounding the rollout of that program, which was clearly not designed by a capitalist!” said Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of the NYC Partnership, an advocacy group for Big Apple businesses.
A rep for the cannabis industry critical of state regulators also shook his head.
“It should concern every New Yorker that a state regulator is disavowing capitalism while trying to create a new industry,” said Joe Rossi, a Park Strategies lobbyist who reps a dozen of clients across the cannabis industry.
Fagan has previously said the cannabis industry can correct racial injustices.
“This is reparations work. This is the only kind of reparations work being done like this in the country,” he told Hell Gate in a December 2022 article.
Meanwhile, the Cannabis Control Board on Friday is expected to approve 109 full cannabis licenses to retailers, microprocessors, distributors and growers.
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