Odd Lots - NY's Cannabis Rollout Could Destroy a Legal Entrepreneur

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

When New York legalized recreational cannabis for adults, it didn't just want to fling the gates wide open for anyone to take part. Instead it specifically aimed to help out and give priority to individuals who were previously harmed by the war on drugs. However, more than two years after the law was signed, there are just a handful of legal, licensed shops. Meanwhile, there are thousands of un-licensed shops that proliferate across New York City. At the same time, red tape and legal challenges have hampered the efforts of those going down the legal, regulated path. On this episode, we speak with two entrepreneurs who are trying to go down the regulated path: Coss Marte and Alfredo Angueira of Conbud. They've spent over a million dollars getting ready to launch their dispensary in Manhattan's Lower East Side, but have been unable to actually open it on schedule due to various last minute glitches and legal challenges. We discuss what they've encountered in their efforts, and what it's been costing them to go down the legal path. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all. Hi, I'm David Gurra. Join us every Saturday and Sunday for the new Bloomberg this weekend. I'm Christina Rafini. We'll bring you the latest headlines, in-depth analysis, and big interviews. All the stories that hit home on your days off.

And I'm Lisa Mateo. Watch and listen to Bloomberg this weekend for thoughtful, enlightening conversations about business, lifestyle, people, and culture. On Saturday mornings, we put the past week's events into context, examining what happened in the markets and the world. That on Sundays, we speak with journalists, columnists, and key political figures to prepare you for the week ahead. Join us as soon as you wake up and bring us with you wherever your weekend plans take you. Watch us on Bloomberg Television. Listen on Bloomberg Radio, stream the show live on the Bloomberg business app, or listen to the podcast. That's Bloomberg this weekend.

Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg Television, radio, and wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allo. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. Joe, do you remember five months ago? No. It's all a haze. What happened? Neither did I. I actually had to look this up. You remember on 420, so April 20th of this year, we released our first ever narrative, all thought series all about.

the legal marijuana market in New York. Yes, and obviously that was a fun experiment, and I hope we'd do something like that again. My big takeaway from that, I learned a lot about market structure, I learned a lot about the industry, but my big takeaway really from talking to everyone involved, there are lots of people involved in the New York attempt to legalize marijuana, is that however complicated you thought it was and difficult it was to sort of bring in this new market, it's like infinitely more complicated than that. Yeah, it can always get worse, kind of. And that's another way to put it. Yeah. Well, it is true. You know, there was so much excitement about this last year and then even into early this year. And fast forward to now,

I have the sort of latest figures in front of me. So New York signed the law that legalized cannabis possession back in March of 2021. So it's been more than two years. And we only have like, I think it's about two dozen legal weed dispensaries, which I think is one of the lowest, if not the lowest number among all the states that have so far legalized marijuana. And meanwhile, we have like more than a thousand unlicensed dealers, which is pretty much the outcome that New York was trying to avoid. I mean, there's probably more than two dozen within a five block radius from my house in the East Village right now.

And so I remember, you know, about a year ago, I think the first one opened up and it was like, there was like a 10 minute walk from me and you had to show some card to buy there. And I don't know. And then they just kept getting more. They're closer and closer and they're all in all of the bodegas now. And now basically, even though there's supposedly all these issues with payments at the legal one, at the illegal ones, you can buy them by product with credit cards. It really is crazy. But it stems from two things, right? There was an attempt to rectify sort of have passed injustices of the war on drugs by giving priority to people who had been negatively impacted by the drug war when marijuana was still straight up illegal in New York State.

And then in the meantime, this tension now is like, okay, you have the people who wanted to take the regulated legal route, and that's complicated. And then the people who just opened up a shop, and there's been very little enforcement of that. Absolutely. And along the way, you know, again, it's only been five months since we released this series, but there have been all these different legal developments, which we are about to get into, because I'm very pleased to say that we really do have the perfect guests to discuss this. We're bringing back Cosmarte and Alfredo Angera.

They are the CEO of Conbud and the chief compliance officer of Conbud. You might remember them from the series. They are aiming to open up their own legal weed shops, but of course it's been far more complicated and taken a lot longer than perhaps they anticipated. So Cause and Alfredo, thank you so much for coming back on all thoughts. Thank you for having us. Yeah, thank you for welcoming us back. Why don't we start with the basics?

You know, I mentioned some of the legal issues that have taken place over the summer. Why don't you just give us the state of affairs as it exists right now in relation to New York's legal weed industry? Have you ever seen that meme with the dog in the room? It's fine? Yeah, it's fine and everything is on fire. That is literally the state of the industry right now. And I don't mean that in any kind of, you know, funny context. We just got the title of this episode.

New York City, cannabis, it's fine and everything is on fire. Yeah, it's on fire. So there's been, to say it's been a lot of flux as a grand understate. Last time we were here, we had a lot of faith that the state, because of their vested interest in getting the tax dollars and in their vested interest and trying to fix the social justice and equities, we're really going to get it right and had the opportunity to look to other states and say, well, what is it that they did wrong and what is it that they did right? And we can make the perfect model.

We have since learned that despite those best efforts, corporate interests, will always rule, right? When you're talking about the country's largest cannabis market, and by way of that, the world's largest cannabis market in terms of consumption, we're talking about billions and billions of dollars, and the entities that are MSOs and the entities that are ROs aren't going to sit by the wayside, essentially. And they have been throwing every monkey wrench you can possibly imagine into the gears. So that's currently where we stand. So you mentioned corporate interests. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Because I remember, again, from speaking to you and lots of other people for the series, New York's ambition was to do it a little bit differently to other

states. They wanted to create this sort of vibrant, almost like craft beer market for the weed industry where you would have all these local growers and sellers and the money would kind of be kept circulating within the state. And that seems to maybe be up in the air now or being challenged in some way. Yeah, no, it's very difficult to compete with the corporate greed. And I think that's the reality is. So the injunction happened. We were sued. The state was sued because they wanted the veterans to move forward first. That was the veteran's argument that they should have been prioritized. And it was just four veterans, not all veterans, but it's this service disabled veterans.

Now, in the case, we were intervened by these corporations, specific coalition of four multi-state operators that intervene into the case to basically state that we shouldn't be able to move forward. And they're stopping the whole pathway of us opening up, you know, because they want to capture for as much market share as possible in the beginning. And so that's what we're in. Yeah, if we look at this, not as cannabis, right? Let's look at it as any industry,

whether it would be alcohol or whether it be a food product and agricultural product. And you tell Anheuser-Busch that they can't come into the market. You tell Hormel foods that they can't come into the market. You tell big tobacco that they can't come in the market because you plan on doing it craft-wise. You already know you're going to be setting yourself up for a variety of legal challenges,

which is where we're at. I think cost touched upon some of the cases which we are currently involved in, which were submitted to the court. The first case was an Article 78 proceeding that was led by the ROs. An Article 78 proceeding is a proceeding by which that you challenge an agency's authority. You question an agency's authority. If it was like the DMV or something like that and you want to challenge that, you file an Article 78. That was what the ROs had filed. initially. Sorry, ROs stands for? Registered organizations. Okay, okay. I'm sorry. No, no, no, it's fine.

Those are the medical operators. So if I could just, just to step back and clarify a couple quick things, you're opening this store or attempting to open up this location, Conbud. You were granted the license in part because out of the social justice or social equity efforts of the law cost, you had served time in prison. And so you were, you know, in this attempt to sort of reverse some of the effects of the war on drugs, you were, I guess, granted, one of the early licenses to open this. Just real quickly, when was that a very initial grant made? So they gave us our license early April. Okay. And then real quickly, when were you hoping to

have the store open up? We were looking to open up on Labor Day. Okay. Now, talk specifically about the Article 78 proceedings. So there's two separate ones. There was one from a veteran group and one from the MSOs. Can you just talk about specifically what these new legal roadblocks are such that we're here in October and the store hasn't opened up? Alfredo. Yeah, so the ROs filed the Article 78 to basically say that they wanted the market opened so that the registered organizations who are these medical entities who are allowed to open up bigger places and more places than other licensees that they should be allowed to open up

immediately and they're challenging OCM so that was an article 78 that was going through that's the office of cannabis management yes office of cannabis management that so they challenged that in the courts and oh they challenged OCM then shortly after that plaintiffs in the case and we're involved in the litigation so I would just like to prefer to just refer to them as plaintiff and not individually but but to cut not to cut you off of Fredo we yeah originally the law was written for involved in the visuals to be the first ones in the game. And so the medical operators, they were pushed back for three years.

Now, when they put this Article 78, the OCRM, the Office of Cannabis Management, responded and said, all right, we're going to allow you to move forward by a year now, which means December 30th they were allowed to open up. Now, all they had to wait was a couple more months. and that, you know, due to wanting to capture the market as much as they can, they're pushing everything back. And they're saying, it's not fair. We want to open up now.

And plaintiff's argument, who's involved in the case, their attorneys represent some service disabled veterans, their argument is that the MRTA, which is the law that passed cannabis in New York, that the MRTA states that all applicants will be allowed to open at the same time with cert. and preferences given to subgroups. So their challenge is that the entire card program, which is the conditional adult recreational dispensary licenses that were given to social justice equity individuals, that entire license subcategory is unconstitutional and therefore they should all be pulled. And that's why they requested an injunction and it froze all the card applicants. Got it. Now that puts,

that creates a variety of issues, right? One, there are certain applicants who've already received their license and who are already open and operational. Now we're talking about me taking away a property of yours. You have something. And the removal of that is a totally different legal procedure, right? That's like a 14th Amendment kind of thing, right? Now, absent that, there are also other individuals who are within that bucket who maybe haven't opened up and maybe haven't been processing sales yet, but have an irreparable harm. And what do I mean by that is they detrimentally relied upon the state saying, hey, you're good, you can continue to move forward, enter into these contractual agreements, enter into this lease agreement, enter into this purchasing

agreement, enter into the staffing agreement. And then now it's, hey, wait, everybody has to freeze. Well, we have debts of mounting over $5 million or, you know, $250,000 or whatever it is. Now there's this entire other group of individuals who find themselves behind the eight ball. And it's really weird because that particular group, the social justice impacted individuals, the individuals who were over-policed, overtargeted, and came from these disproportional areas. Now beg, borrowed and steeled and took all that money that they could from their family, their friend, their 401K, scraped everything together, to open up this business, did the application, followed the guidelines, did everything that you told them to do.

and now they're left holding the bag. It's almost like insult to injury. And it's like almost all over again, this whole thing is happening and they're being further impacted. And it's like this kind of a second war on drugs that is just going through a legal proceeding, I suppose, on the streets.

I'm Francine Lacquhar, an award-winning journalist, and I've got a new podcast, leaders with Francine Lacquhar from Bloomberg Podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from Heads of State to fashion icons about the news of the moment. But I've always been curious, who are these people as leaders? I don't think there's one right way to be a leader. Make decisions.

A poor decision is always better than no decision. Listen to new episodes every other Monday. Follow leaders with Francine Lacroix wherever you get your podcasts. So you have the injunction from the veterans group who think that they should also receive priority. You have the multi-state operators who also want to get into the market. Can I ask a really simple question, which is how much money have you guys spent so far on a business which isn't yet open? We've spent definitely over a million dollars. Wow. And that was all self-funded and came from our personal businesses. I know that most card

applicants don't even have those resources. We are blessed enough that my business partner, Jr. and I own and operate several restaurants. Goss owns and operates. a very successful gym business, you know, the money that we put into this particular venture came at the sacrifice of our other businesses. You know, so we've given all that we could to this. Are you currently paying rent month to month on a location that's just sitting there unused? October 1st rent was just paid. And that was for $38,000. So every month, it's $38,000 out the door. Yep. How tempted are you at this point to just go rent a van and like park it in Washington Square

Park like everyone else seems to. Yeah, I mean, you know, I contemplated that and it's like I'd rather still state work instead of block work. Just because I waited for so long, you know, I mean, I've been advocating for legalization of cannabis since 2016 and still wait, you know, still waiting and going to and feeling like every milestone we've reached was a success. I think we celebrated Alfredo and I probably about five celebrations every time we went to court or even got a license or even got into the next step so if our application being graded is submitted and everything.

So it's been dreams and nightmares for real. Okay. And how much responsibility do you think the state of New York bears in all of this? Because on the one hand, you know, they made promises saying that this was going to be a, social restitution exercise, compensation for the war on drugs and things like that. But on the other hand, you know, if the veterans want to challenge the legality of that, it seems like maybe that's outside of New York's control. I guess another way of asking this is what could they be doing better here?

They could have codified card. So the conditional adult use retail dispensary license could have been codified into law. I actually went up and spoke to legislators months ago about codifying card and they were like, no, the law is fine. We don't need to rectify anything. And so, you know, come today, you know, in August the injunction was placed and, you know, now we're like, oh, we should have codified card and this would never happen and written this into law. But it did it. And here we're... The state could, I mean, the state is dealing with a lot right now, right?

Where does this fall on their hierarchy of issues? We have asylum seekers sleeping in the streets. The city is inundated by hundreds of thousands of individuals looking to get their slice of the American dream. Housing costs are through the roof for certain individuals. You know, we still have a budget that is busted. Still as a result of COVID, we can, you know, on my way here to the studio, we can see the streets in New York are nowhere to. near what they used to be four years ago. We have really mounting problems here. So where does this fall on the hierarchy of the state? Sure, card applicants who faced a large hill of social injustice

are involved. Sure, farmers upstate are involved. Sure, there's an illicit market running rampant, but the state, like that meme, has fires all over the house, right? Right. So what could they have done? Yes, Goss is a million percent correct. They could have codified it. And they didn't, so that would have required a special session. And to call a special session to come in to do this is not going to happen, right? So it would have had to be a multiple things tied into that bill. Why didn't they codified it in the first place, right? You didn't ask it, but that's a great question.

It's because there wasn't an appetite for it initially. And then they didn't feel like it needed to be because they felt the bill covered it. What do I mean by that? I mean if Congress passes a tax law and says, okay, this is going to be the corporate a tax rate, they don't go to the IRS and say, okay, bring us all the tax codes. We're going to go over this line by line with you. Congress gives kind of this broad mandate to these agencies, the same way it would be to the EPA or to a variety of other agencies. They say, this is the goal we want you to get to. How you decide to get to that goal is upon the agency's discretion.

We don't need to know the parts per milliliter of something in water that you find safe, for. We don't need to know what the exact deductions are. We're not going to vote on every single item. We're just going to give you the mandate. And the mandate was given to the Office of Cannabis Management to fulfill this social justice equity component and how the Office of Cannabis Management found the best way to do that was through this card program. So, you know, let me ask you, the other element, you're paying all this money, you're dealing with these legal headaches that you didn't anticipate. The other thing that we were talking about a lot when we had our conversation in April was the existence of all these sort of gray market, non-licensed operators. And, you know,

we were sort of premised on this idea that maybe there would be a crackdown. Not only does there not seem to have been a crackdown, it seems like there are way more than there were in April and nicer ones. So it's not just... Wait, wait, wait, a lot of the trucks are gone. The trucks... You have to admit. But there are more stores, it feels like, more. like brick and mortar shops. Yeah, I see fewer trucks. I see way more brick and mortar shops. I see nice brick and mortar shops. So like actually ones that were clearly not just sort of a bodega type environment, but like something that really looks like an Apple store or a Nike store, all these entities somehow allow you to pay with a credit card or some sort. What is your

confidence at this point that whether it's the city or the state has some sort of way to, I guess, make sure that people who are not going down the licensed route won't be your competitors. I think we need to educate the public, you know, more forms like this, more forms that, you know, the media puts out in terms of what is a legal store. There is a lot of issues with these nice stores being popped up everywhere and you walk in and you're like, oh, wow, these people got their license. It's beautiful in here. So the general public doesn't even know, you know.

And I think the more we put out there and the more ads, the more marketing that the state could do, you know, we could educate the audience. But right now, it's going to be difficult. You know, I have in a thousand foot radius, there's, you know, probably 50 to 60 shops around me. And there's not supposed to be one. We're supposed to be the only one, you know. And so it's going to be difficult. But I think we planted ourselves in the right neighborhood. I'm born and raised in the Lower East Side and I'm a local business owner there and a lot, a lot of people know me.

A lot of people are anticipating our opening. We've been able to really educate it through word of mouth, which the state hasn't really done successfully. But we'll see. I'd rather spend a million dollars on a legal store than an illegal store and then be shut down and have that, you know, open air. I remember talking to someone from the state and they were making. making a similar argument, like, if you build the legal weed bodega, they will come. Like, the public will eventually have a preference for legal shops. But I guess devil's advocate question here, the longer this uncertainty goes on and the longer that you have these illegal or gray

market stores, do people get used to that option? Because, like, I can tell you, up until very recently, there was a truck parked relatively close to me. And it was fairly easy. to go there and they had stuff from California that theoretically I might enjoy. If my dad is listening to this, I never went to the wheat truck. But you know, like I got used to it being there. It had the same offerings every day. It seemed pretty professional. It took credit cards. That was pretty good option. But we got to re-educate on what you're using, you know, you don't know what this is. They found a whole bunch of metals. They found a whole bunch of, you know, insane substances. this substance that's supposed to be organic and clean and safe.

You don't know where you're consuming. It's like, I don't know, buying buying a, on FDA, Churro in the subway train. You know, like, you could do you do it, but you might have the runs later, right? You know, so you just never know. And now with this whole fat and will scare, I mean, that's a bigger, that's a bigger like you know a solution to like educate the audience like yeah that we found

fentanyl in weed you know there's been a whole bunch of stories on that cost is right education is is crucial but that puts the onus on the consumer and new york city is if the population hasn't decreased post-covid right is about eight million people in the greater new york region that puts the onus on eight million different people and that's a lot to ask of them you know And while Koss is right, you know, you eat the Trudeau from the subway station, you may get the runs, but they're there for a reason because people purchase it. They're good too, yeah, the people are buying it. It's worth it. Yeah, it's worth the runs later.

Well, people are becoming creatures of habit to your point, right? And if I see it there every day and it may be illicit, I'm still going to go in. It puts the onus on you where you go into a bar, and if a bar is open and you walk in and you order a drink, you automatically assume that they are licensed to have a liquor license. You don't say, hey, where's your liquor license number? Are you licensed by the state of New York? Because you make that assumption because we've come accustomed to that. So I think the next prong besides educating the consumer is enforcement. If I couldn't open up next to your studio and just open up next to McDonald's without a license and start selling hamburgers or start selling wine or start selling anything without somebody eventually coming and saying, hey, we've got to shut you down.

This doesn't meet health department requirements. This doesn't meet state liquor authority. This doesn't meet construction requirements. This doesn't meet, you know, requirements that you're basically trying to market to children. You don't meet any of these things. We have to close you down. And in New York City, that has some of the most stringent building codes and has some of the most stringent laws in relation to opening up businesses, enforcement is key. And these places that are illicit, that are putting, you know, that are selling products that aren't tested, that may have a variety of heavy metals and fentanyl and a variety of other things, enforcement is key.

education and enforcement. You can get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now. I'm Amy Morris. And I'm Karen Moscow here to tell you about our new on-demand news report delivered right to your podcast feed. Bloomberg News Now is a short five-minute audio report on the day's top stories. Episodes are published throughout the day with the latest information and data to keep you informed.

Yes, there are other products like this from a variety of news organizations. But they usually rerun their radio newscasts throughout the day. That's not what we do. We create customized episodes that can only be heard on Bloomberg NewsNow. And we don't wait an hour to publish breaking news. When news breaks, we'll have an episode up in your podcast feed within minutes. So you're always getting the latest stories and developments. Get the reporting and the context from Bloomberg's 3,000 journalists and analysts

we're all over the world. Listen to the latest from Bloomberg News Now on Apple, Spotify or anywhere you listen. You know, you mentioned the alcohol analogy, and I think about that all the time because I walk home from the subway on St. Marks most days, and there were literally people, you know, I decide selling on a table.

And I would never, you would never see in this day and age, like, you know, someone selling shots of liquor out of the street. Excuse me. Aren't you the guy that buys nutcrackers on the beach in the summer? What do you think those are? You do that? I have. I have. Yeah, you know, you're out there on Coney Island or Rock.

Good, yeah. I'm just saying you wouldn't expect to see. I'm not saying you would never buy it. And we don't want to take those individuals that are hustling in the streets and making their money because that's a that's a livelihood. No, no, I get it. I'm just saying it's just extraordinary that here was this drug that people were going to prison for and not many years ago.

And now there's much less enforcement it would seem than even alcohol. It was literally the only point I was trying to make. Just from an operational standpoint, if let's say tomorrow, it's like all the legal issues go away. Is Conbud ready to go? Can you turn on the lights and open the door? The lights are on. The doors are closed. Okay. Like, all we're missing is product. So we're not allowed to get product, but, you know, basically we're turnkey.

We would need a couple of days just to make sure we dusted everything and got the staff in and did a couple of dry runs. But, yeah, we're ready to go. How long can you sort of wait in stasis? That is a very good question. Again, we're in pending litigation, so certain things we don't disclose. But we've done our math. We know how long we can hold out and we can continue to be in this run at a deficit until things turn around.

And I'll say it is not very long. We don't have a long run, right? Yeah, we do not have very long. It just sounds like incredibly frustrating both the month-to-month cost, seeing the seeing the stores open up and operate how many did you say 50 or 60 within a 10,000 foot radius

from where you are? A thousand foot radius A thousand foot right crazy Also the broken promises The broken promises, yeah Well speaking optimistically If we do have a great day At court and things move forward You know we're looking to open up October 20th

That's what we want our goal to be The court, yeah, the court this Friday is hearing the case of 12. Are you familiar with the court process of what's happening right now? Why don't you fill us in exactly what we're looking at? All right. So this Friday, when the- So just so people know, we're recording this October 5th. So when you say this Friday, you mean October, just so people understand the date. Yeah, October 6th.

So October 6th, a motion will be heard. When the plaintiffs filed their lawsuit, we in-pled, meaning we said, listen, you are suing the state and you're suing OCM, but we have a vested interest. This affects us. So we want to implede into this case. Okay. So it is Combud and three other dispensaries that joined us.

And we impleted into the case. We are the only actual card applicants that are involved besides the state of New York itself. So the judge asked for a variety of things for the injunction. We requested that the injunction be lifted because it was doing irreparable harm to us. We were bleeding money. You know, we had staff. We had contracts. And this was putting us in a position.

where, you know, we couldn't recover from. And in very short order, we were going to have to file bankruptcy. So that, we put that request before the court. And basically the judge at one point basically said, okay, listen, here's what we're going to do. We're going to free X amount of people from this injunction as so long as the Office of Cannabis Management says that they have met these following requirements. The Office of Cannabis Management supplied a list to the court. The plaintiffs contested that list.

That initial list was 30 card applicants. of which we were one, then plaintiffs contested several of them, and that list was whittled down to 12. OCRM supplied that list of 12 to the court, and that list of 12 is going to be heard this Friday because we were not on that list of 12, but because we are in pled into the case and we have our own counsel on it, we don't have to wait for OCSM. We will be circumvating OECM, and this Friday, our own motion as well will be heard to lift the injunction from those 12 as well as us. All right. Well, since we're recording this a day before, a very important court date, it sounds like we're going to have to get an update from you maybe before we release the

episode and just see which way things have gone. Or we could send you a photo of us celebrating a year. Yeah, I know. Celebrating for the sixth time. And by the way the market has already opened October. Actually, yesterday, the market opened to the general public so anyone could apply. we actually submitted our application yesterday as well. So we... For a general application. All right. All right.

Well, Koston Alfredo, thank you so much for coming back on and providing us an update. And we'll see what happens. Thank you for you. Thank you. Joe, I think you summed it up perfectly in the intro. No matter how complicated you thought the legal weed market already was in New York, it seems like it's just grown even more complex. The other thing I was thinking about was Alfredo's point about, you know, you can't

can't place the onus for the entire industry on the consumer. You know, I myself am not the best consumer of certain things. And so I really think you have to twin it with enforcement. And of course, the difficulty so far has been, what does that enforcement actually look like? No one wants to go back to the days of the war on drugs. But at the same time, you cannot have a thriving illegal market with, you know, a lower cost overhead that's competing with the things. that is supposed to be funneling money into the state. Yeah, this is, I mean, this is the key thing, which is that, you know, the idea is that the licenses were designed to, you know, hopefully

encourage people to go that route. And yet, you know, in theory, even when Con Bud opened, at least as of right now, there are going to be numerous competitors who, in theory, have potentially lower taxes, lower cost bases, are able to potentially bring in product. from out of state, which the New York State operators aren't able to do. Payments are challenged still for the legal operators. Meanwhile, like I said, it seems like all these places suddenly accept normal credit cards right now. So it does feel like there is a limit to the extent to which the market can be solved through consumer education. So a little update. After we recorded this episode, we spoke to the con bud team on October 5th. On October 6th,

the Friday, the injunction was in fact lifted, which means it looks like Con Bud should be able to open on October 19th. So they can do their sixth celebration. Let's go check it out. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our guests on Instagram, Conbud at Conbud N.Y. Follow our producer Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin and Dashel Bennett at Dashbot. And check out Potlots, our series from last April, tremendous amount of background context to further understand this conversation.

And for more Oddlots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Oddlots, where we post transcripts, a blog and a newsletter. And go to our Discord, Discord.org, g, slash oddlots, to talk about this episode and others with fellow listeners. And if you enjoy Oddlots, if you want us to do a deep dive, another series into another particular market, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening. This is Tom Keene, inviting you to join us for the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. It's about

making you smarter every business day. I'm Paul Sweeney. We bring you complete coverage of the U.S. market open. We cover stocks, bonds, commodities, even crypto, all the information you need to excel. And I'm Alexis Christophorus. Bloomberg Surveillance also brings you the analysis behind the headlines. We do that through conversations with the smartest names in economics, finance, investment, and international relations. We do all this live each and every weekday, then bring you the best analysis in our daily podcast. Search for Bloomberg surveillance on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere else you listen. On the East Coast, listen at lunch. And on the West Coast, listen as soon as you wake up. That's the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast with Tom

Keene, Paul Sweeney, and me, Alexis Christophorus. Subscribe to today wherever you get your podcasts. Bloomberg Surveillance, essential listening each and every business day.