Mayor de Blasio has been skeptical of legalizing pot, but now — suddenly — he wants to subsidize it in the name of redistributing wealth. Talk about high aspirations.
As The Post noted, a report Hizzoner’s folks just put out called for a “fund of at least $10 million” to support “equity entrants to the field” and fulfill the “promise of equitable access to the burgeoning industry.”
Said de Blasio: “We need to help community-based businesses in communities that have suffered, with low-interest loans” to help them start marijuana businesses.
Squeeze taxpayers, in other words, to help pot sellers. What on earth is he smoking?
It’s one thing to make weed legal — quite another to have Joe and Mary Jane New Yorker subsidize its sale. Heck, steering public funds to normal businesses is rarely justified. Indeed, as Gov. Cuomo has found out, it often leads to corruption rather than “economic development.”
NYPD boss James O’Neill, for example, worries about new problems when weed is legalized, such as people driving while impaired, as he noted Sunday. Yet just as taxing something will lead to less of it, subsidizing a product can spur more sales.
With Cuomo demanding Albany issue a full-steam-ahead to marijuana sales, and both houses of the Legislature to be controlled by Democrats come January, legal pot seems a sure thing in New York soon.
Can’t de Blasio even wait, at least, to see how it works out before promoting it — with taxpayers’ money?
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