Campaigns have to motivate men, too.
At 11:30 am on June 24, less than an hour after the US Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, Dave Portnoy, the controversial founder of Barstool Sports — a site dubbed the “Bible of Bro Culture” — posted a video to his 2 million followers on Twitter.
“We are literally going backwards in time,” he said in a self-described emergency press conference. “It makes no sense how anybody thinks it’s their right to tell a woman what to do with her body.”
“The woke left, the liberals, they’re crazy. They’re insane people,” Portnoy added. “Yet, I end up having to vote for a moron like Biden because the right is gonna put Supreme Court people in who are just ruining this country, taking basic rights away.”
The video went viral. It was a harbinger of how abortion rights would upend American culture and politics, and become a central component for Democratic advertising in the midterm campaign cycle.
“I’m no fan of Barstool, but the Dave Portnoy video that came out after the Dobbs ruling was surprising to me, and pointed to this new segment of the electorate that I hadn’t been thinking about,” said Josh Yazman, a political data scientist at Civis Analytics, a Democrat-aligned research shop.
Yazman is not alone. Over the last three months, as the threats to reproductive rights grew clearer, researchers, activists, and political strategists have started to think more intentionally about how best to target male voters with abortion rights messages. When Roe was the law of the land, advocates could focus their energies on challenging unconstitutional abortion restrictions in court. Now, reproductive rights battles will be shifting to the ballot box — meaning what male voters think about abortion suddenly matters a whole lot more.
Even for men who self-identify as pro-choice, their support for a woman’s right to choose has historically been fairly muted, as guys tend to treat reproductive rights as a “women’s issue” that’s best left for women to lead on. Researchers have found that among those men who have considered speaking out, many decide against it, fearful of saying the wrong thing or claiming connection to an issue that’s not sufficiently theirs. Even in the US Senate, male Democrats who support abortion rights tend to wait for their female colleagues to chart their federal action plans, wary of bad optics and criticism.
Eight in 10 Americans support legal abortion, “but until this summer it’s felt very controversial to people still … and I think the people that we show [in ads] talking about supporting abortion care impacts that,” said Dina Montemarano, the research director for NARAL Pro-Choice America. “I think people on our side are finally realizing that, and wanting to show that variety … [that] the majority does include people who look and feel and act and think quite differently, and that’s good.”
As a result, campaigners have been experimenting with a host of characters not traditionally used in abortion messaging: young “dudes” talking about reproductive freedom as they fix a broken pipe, or male members of law enforcement talking about the importance of abortion access for public safety. There are ads featuring brothers, boyfriends, male doctors, and male faith leaders. In Minnesota, a recently formed grassroots group called Dads on the Doors is mobilizing fathers to stand up for their daughters’ abortion rights.
“No exceptions for rape? No exceptions for incest? $100,000 fines and jail time for doctors?” asked a white man identified as a “lifelong Republican” in a Beto O’Rourke ad that ran in mid-September. “I mean, this is a free country. We need a governor who gets that.”
Sometimes, like in the Beto ad, the particular message the male character is expressing is not so different from one featuring a female lead or targeted to female audiences. But in other cases, researchers are testing messages they say seem to resonate especially with male audiences — for example, narratives about men stepping up to protect women — even if, in some cases, those themes give women viewers pause.
Will Bunnett, a political strategist with the progressive digital brand agency Clarify, has been designing ads this election cycle for clients who support abortion rights.
“The hypothesis is that men are not super good at empathy or understanding and are more likely to listen if we sort of make it about them,” he told Vox. “So we’re looking to tap into male identity. And some of the ways that are proving most effective make me a little uncomfortable personally, but I’m already sold on this issue, and we’re trying to target the people who need to see something and get on board.”
For men and abortion rights, the messenger matters
In early August, Kansas voters cast their ballots decisively against a measure that would have allowed state lawmakers to further restrict access to abortion. It was the first time abortion rights were tested at the polls following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, in a state where Republicans outnumber Democrats roughly two to one.
Ads sponsored by Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, the coalition that successfully defeated the amendment, featured characters including a male pastor, a male physician, and a male narrator warning of government overreach.
Ashley All, who served as communications director for the coalition, told Vox that they purposefully featured different messengers in their ads, even as the messages delivered —protecting the constitutional rights of women to make their own decision free of government interference — remained largely the same.
“Not only do you do a lot of research to figure out the best message to resonate with the broadest set of voters,” she said, “you look at who influences those voters that you need to move.”
In the weeks following Dobbs and the Dave Portnoy video, Yazman started experimenting with different characters in Civis’s pro-choice message testing and noticed that ads featuring “bros” — generally men born after 1981 — were resonating with different kinds of voters. “Traditionally pro-choice ads include older white women that care most about the issue, or young moms sitting in their kid’s playrooms,” he explained.
One ad test compared a 40-year-old white woman named Shannon who had an abortion after she had her first kid with a younger “bro” named Conrad sitting in his bedroom talking about the women he was afraid for in his life. “The bro’s overall appeal was similar, but a lot stronger with men, Republicans, and younger voters, while the mom did better with more traditional pro-choice audiences,” said Yazman.
Typically, Bunnett said, it doesn’t matter too much if the demographic of an ad messenger matches the demographic of the intended audience. With abortion, however, his team has noticed the opposite dynamic: Matching demographics appears to be a much more significant factor in driving an ad’s effectiveness.
Oren Jacobson, founder of Men4Choice, said they see men talking to other men as really key for mobilizing men as “stakeholders” on abortion rights, not just occasional “beneficiaries.”
“It’s harder for someone who is not a man to convince another man that abortion is their issue,” he said. “I think we have to reckon with the reality that a lot of men have heard women talk about abortion for decades and have largely ignored those voices.”
Certain abortion rights messages resonate more strongly with men
Given that many men feel hesitant to engage with abortion rights, advocates say providing them with specific ways to connect can increase their confidence.
“Men might be afraid to speak out because they think they’ll do it wrong, but when they see a man talking about it and doing so in a way that is very supportive, very clear about where they stand, very clear about why they’re fighting, that’s really powerful,” said Montemarano, the research director for NARAL, who led a deep dive into abortion messengers in 2020.
One particularly resonant ad category NARAL found is a “journey story” — an ad featuring a man explaining their path from not thinking abortion was important to realizing that their constituents or loved ones were being affected and they had to get involved. “That is incredibly powerful for men to hear because many of them are in some phase of that journey right now,” Montemarano said.
Another effective strategy: messages that “define the opposition” in a negative, repellent light. Bunnett said they’ve seen that some of their better-performing abortion rights ads with men have taken the approach of emphasizing that men who want to ban abortion are uncivilized, backward, mean, and rude. “Rather than trying to convince you that you’re such a manly man for thinking carefully about abortion, we’re saying, like, you just need to know you’re not the caveman over there.”
Jacobson pointed to the “Call Bullshit” campaign Men4Choice launched, which encourages men “to call bullshit on the assholes who are using their power to control someone else’s body,” he said. “We have to normalize that it is not okay for these guys to do that, and part of the reason it’s seen as okay is because guys like us just let it go.”
A third message that’s proven effective with men in particular is freedom from government control, which allows more conservative men to identify with the abortion rights coalition, even if they personally hold reservations about terminating pregnancies.
The value of freedom and the ability to make decisions without government interference “is something that men resonate quite emotionally with,” said Montemarano. It’s not that women don’t care about freedom, she added, but that’s always been an “easier and quicker” way for men to connect with the issue, whereas women tend to connect initially via other routes.
In Kansas, All told Vox their “government mandate” ad in particular resonated most highly among male viewers.
Harnessing men’s motivation to help women in need
Researchers studying which abortion messages seem to motivate men most effectively have noticed a fourth category, too: Men resonate with messages about caring for their loved ones and generally helping women in need.
Bunnett says some of their most effective ads have tapped into a “hyper-traditional sense of masculinity,” like themes about saving damsels in distress. “An ad might feature a guy saying, ‘Hey, you might not be able to get pregnant, but this is really, really important to the women in your life and they need you to step up,’” he said.
Bryan Bennett, a pollster with Navigator Research, a group that works to provide messaging guidance to progressives, said he typically sees men as notably less receptive to any given abortion message, by about 10 points, with the exception of messages about forcing women to carry to term under terrible circumstances.
Montemarano’s team also found this same pattern — that men are “powerfully motivated” by messages of supporting women. The fact that men often only seem to care about women’s rights as it pertains to their wives and daughters has long been a source of frustration in pro-abortion rights and feminist circles, and NARAL directly addressed the concern that such messages might reinforce patriarchy in a report published in 2021.
“We recognize that, as advocates, men’s desire to support women can sometimes feel paternalistic, disempowering, or condescending. It is certainly true that its manifestation in our society has often been all of those things,” their report read. “Yet we would not want to live in a world in which people did not want to support and care for one another. In our communications moving forward, we need to explore ways to effectively harness men’s desire to support women within a broader message framework that supports a woman’s agency, rather than in opposition to it.” NARAL added that they believe this is “eminently doable.”
Jacobson of Men4Choice said they’ve also seen pro-abortion rights language that can feel paternalistic. “The way a lot of politicians talk about it, it’s through the lens of their wives and daughters, and in our culture change work, we try to take that good intention and instinct and shift it, so it shouldn’t be that you have to know someone who might need an abortion to care about this,” he said.
But he distinguishes between “culture change” work, or challenging and changing societal norms and expectations, and immediate electoral messaging ahead of the November elections.
“I think advertising for a mail piece or a digital ad right now designed to get someone to vote in November necessarily should be different than what someone focused on long-term culture change is saying,” he said, and cited as an example the difference between saying a “woman could be criminally punished” for an abortion versus “a person could be criminally punished.” The former, at least in 2022, is more effective at motivating concern among voters.
In the coming weeks, Men4Choice and Planned Parenthood plan to jointly run ads targeted at young Black men in Atlanta. Planned Parenthood approached Men4Choice out of recognition that their own brand might be less resonant with those voters.
Yazman said that field research Civis conducted in September on millennial and Gen Z men found these groups were “pro-choice but persuadable” — meaning young men were open to abortion restrictions, and could be moved to support them if exposed to certain messages. This highlights the need for abortion rights advocates to reach young men before anti-abortion messengers do.
“I think the Dads on the Doors in Minnesota is great, but I think we also have to talk to 18-, 19-year-old men, so that when they get to that fatherhood stage of life they’ve already been thinking about abortion rights,” Jacobson said. “The older you get, the harder it is to shift your views.”
New York’s admirable — and awkward — efforts to legalize weed.
New York City’s crisp autumn air has a distinct scent to it, and this year that scent is weed. Many of the city streets have a fresh look to them, too — marijuana and cannabis products are for sale, out in the open, everywhere. New York legalized recreational marijuana in the spring of 2021, but the state is still in the process of doling out licenses to legally sell it, which makes the situation … confusing.
So I recently treated myself to a little NYC cannabis secret shopping-reporting tour to try to figure out what was going on. A tarot card reader sold me a pre-rolled joint off of a table in Washington Square Park, warning me to watch out for other sellers who might not know what they’re talking about. An issue to ponder for another day, on both of my merchant’s entrepreneurial fronts. Later, I bought an edible from a smoke shop even though neither I nor the guy selling it seemed clear on what it was. CBD? Just regular marijuana? The synthetic stuff that might set me up for a very bad time? Maybe the tarot reader had a point.
In the Lower East Side, I popped into a store with marijuana-leaf stamps adorning its facade. “This dispensary is not a speakeasy bar … or is it … sorry,” a sign outside read. Then, in some fine print, it got to the point: “We sell weed.” There, I bought what I think are more reliable edibles and chatted at length with the guy behind the counter about his plans for the store. A group of teens walked in to make a purchase, and he turned them away — a move I’m not sure he’d have made had I not been there. (The legal age to buy is 21.) He seemed optimistic about his operation’s prospects. I didn’t mention that a rival shop was going up within eyeshot of his own, or that trucks selling marijuana have popped up on corners across the city.
We didn’t discuss what could become the biggest threat to his budding cannabis operation, a threat faced by every open seller I talked with that day: the fact that none of these operations are really legal. New York is in the process of handing out the first round of 150 equity-focused licenses to adult-use retail cannabis dispensaries across the state. Not a single one has gone out yet.
“None of them are compliant, none of them are allowed,” said Aaron Ghitelman, a spokesperson for New York state’s Office of Cannabis Management (OCM), in an interview. “They’re jumping the gun.”
David Holland, an attorney who focuses on cannabis law, added context: “It’s New York, there will always be some whom if you give an inch they take a mile.”
New York’s weed situation is a bit of a mess. There are a lot of regulatory affairs to get in order between marijuana being legalized in the state and products actually hitting the shelves, and those affairs take time. The state has placed a social justice emphasis on its process, meaning it’s trying to give a leg up to people in the legal industry who have in the past been hurt most by the war on drugs. It’s done so in a well-intentioned but somewhat awkward way that has shut a lot of people from the legacy market — meaning people who have been selling cannabis and marijuana for years — out.
Now, a so-called “gray market” has popped up across the state and city in the form of smoke shops and dispensaries and trucks and delis selling cannabis. Some of them are engaging in a gifting scheme, where you pay $60 for a sticker or other token product and they give you weed as a present alongside it, since gifting marijuana is now legal in the state. The OCM says that this is, in fact, not a legal workaround because, sorry, a sticker doesn’t cost $60, though some attorneys I spoke with, including Holland, disputed that. Regardless, many are just selling it flat out.
Enforcement efforts to curb the activity have been a little bit tricky because neither state officials nor local authorities want the NYPD going in to raid stores and make arrests.
“The idea of rounding up Black and brown bodega store owners is a political nightmare,” said Jesse Campoamor, a chief architect and negotiator of the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act (MRTA), New York’s landmark cannabis legislation. But unregulated, they stand to create another political nightmare. Once retail licenses go out, if some sort of enforcement actions aren’t taken against these gray market actors — which some sources suggested are largely engaged in a “cash grab” — those who go the legal route could be set up to fail.
It’s an incredibly complicated situation, one where there are no clear heroes or villains. An early win — such as getting one of the legal equity licenses — won’t rule out an eventual loss.
“The first mouse gets the trap, the second mouse gets the cheese,” Campoamor said. What’s not evident right now is who’s the first mouse — the gray market guys or the first license holders — or what the trap looks like.
New York is doing its best-ish to get marijuana legalization right
On March 31, 2021, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the MRTA into law in New York, setting ahead a path to regulate adult-use, medical, and hemp cannabis across the state. But he wasn’t exactly in a hurry to get all of the implementation part going, causing a months-long delay in setting up the OCM and getting people in place to get people in place to get regulations rolling.
“Cuomo decided to play politics,” said Melissa Moore, civil systems reform director at the Drug Policy Alliance. It wasn’t until Cuomo resigned in the summer of 2021 and Gov. Kathy Hochul took over that things really started moving. “Within about a week of coming into office, she had done more than Cuomo did,” Moore said.
The month after Hochul was sworn in, she appointed Chris Alexander as the executive director of the OCM, and the agency started to staff up and build out. The state had to first award licenses to cultivators and then to processors, and in late September, it closed its application process for retailers. It received over 900 applications for Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary (CAURD) licenses and eventually plans to award a total of 150.
New York set out to award its initial retail licenses in a way that both takes social justice into account and is a little wonky. Applying entities must be “justice involved,” meaning they or a family member have to have been convicted of a marijuana-related offense in the past (if a case got dismissed or certain pleas were reached, it didn’t count). Applicants also had to be at least the 10 percent owner of a profitable business for two years.
You can start to see where the Venn diagram problem resides here: Because of so many structural barriers, the stigma of criminal convictions, and racial inequality, there aren’t a ton of people walking around with marijuana convictions who then went on to run profitable businesses — at least not legal ones. Many operators in the legacy market are quite profitable, but that doesn’t count.
Sam, who has been part of the legacy market for 17 years and runs a delivery service in Brooklyn and Queens, is one of those money-making operators who was shut out. (Sam is a pseudonym, to protect his privacy and business.) He’s had multiple cannabis arrests and has done jail time but can’t meet the business standards. “If they didn’t set up that one requirement, I would have been applying with a smile on my face,” he said. He doesn’t see the current scheme as truly just and thinks everyone should have been given a shot. “I’m just a sitting duck until they give me my opportunity.”
From a bureaucratic perspective, one can see some of the logic behind the application parameters. The OCM didn’t want to be dealing with tens of thousands of applications, and those with a background in running a successful business may have a better shot at running a successful cannabis business if they get one.
Cristina Buccola, an attorney based in New York and one of the founders of the Bronx Cannabis Hub, which helps people navigate the licensing and application process, dealt with many people who thought they would qualify for the CAURD program and didn’t. Ultimately, she estimates she assisted in the submission of 30 applications and describes the process as “crazy” with all it entailed.
“It was a very narrowly drawn pool for a variety of reasons,” she said. “Gathering all this documentation was part of the process, but it was grueling. I’m an attorney and I’m accustomed to this kind of stuff and I thought it was grueling.”
High hopes for potential retailers
With only 150 initial licenses for the 900 CAURD applications, there were always going to be more losers than there are winners here, but the winners are winning relatively big. They are getting more than just licenses — they’re also getting a place to do business. Those who are awarded licenses will get access to turnkey storefronts made possible by a $200 million social equity cannabis fund supported by the state and private actors. (It’s going to be split among up to $50 million from the state and up to $150 million in money raised from the private sector.) The fund is being used for construction and renovations on the storefronts and to purchase equipment, and the cost of that work will be turned into a loan to be repaid by the license holder.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has invested $4.8 million for fiscal year 2023 to help support the city’s cannabis industry, including setting up Cannabis NYC — which will be run by the NYC Department of Small Business Services — to help out entrepreneurs in the space.
“Cannabis NYC will plant the seeds for the economy of tomorrow by helping New Yorkers apply for licenses and understand how to open and successfully run a business, while simultaneously rolling equity into our economy by giving those who have been justice-involved and those with a cannabis conviction a chance to succeed,” Mayor Adams said in a statement announcing the launch. “This is about creating good jobs, successful small businesses, and finally delivering equity to communities harmed by the ‘War on Drugs.’”
Advocates generally see this funding as good, but it’s only a start. The money will dry up fast. “Where’s the actual mechanism to effectuate aiding these people?” said Joseph A. Bondy, a criminal defense and cannabis business attorney in New York, who also sits on the national board of directors of the National Organization of the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). “It’s one thing to say you have $200 million to fund these programs, it’s another thing to have someone there to pick up the phone.”
A spokesperson for the SBS said in a statement that they recognize receiving a license is “just the first step” for a New Yorker. With Cannabis NYC, they plan to “go beyond licensing and really push toward having these businesses thrive,” including providing free business courses and networking opportunities.
Among applicants, hope springs eternal, and they believe their efforts (which came with a $2,000 nonrefundable application fee) will pay off.
Jessica Naissant owns Wake & Bake Cafe, which focuses on CBD, on Long Island, but she dreams of setting up a legal recreational cannabis store near the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Her business is profitable, so she has her bases covered on that front. However, she almost didn’t qualify on the justice front because she was able to plead down her cannabis arrest to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct.
She says the application was “mentally taxing” and the process hard to maneuver, between getting the right documentation and her taxes all together. “They wanted a full true party of interest understanding of who is going to be in this application, and I do appreciate that because they’re not letting just anybody come into the industry and take it over,” she said. The state is requiring extensive information on every stakeholder in would-be businesses in order to try to make sure the people with prior convictions applying for licenses aren’t being taken advantage of and that bigger companies aren’t cornering the market behind the scenes, which has happened in other states.
Naissant, who has operated in the legacy market in the past, acknowledges there’s a temptation to try to make some extra money now by dipping into gray market territory, but she doesn’t think the trade-off is worth it. “I have people coming in all the time asking for marijuana, and know that the temptation is there, but I have tunnel vision on what my goal really is, so I’m not willing to lose that over a small sale,” she said.
Vlad Bautista, the co-founder of Happy Munkey, a cannabis lifestyle company, is also hoping to be granted a CAURD license, his group’s first choice for operation being in Manhattan. Happy Munkey ran a consumption lounge in Times Square from 2017 to 2020 before transitioning into more lifestyle and advocacy when the pandemic hit. They just celebrated their fifth anniversary with a BYOC (bring your own cannabis) party at the Classic Car Club in Manhattan.
“A big obstacle for people like ourselves was that you had to have two years of a profitable legal business.” Of the application process, he jokes, “I had to get my baby shoes, my first tooth, it was rigorous.”
Can the legal market live if the gray market doesn’t die? It’s an open question.
New York has said that they think some licensed retail operators should start operating by the end of the year, but among those I spoke with, the expectation is it’s going to take a while for the legal retail market to get up and running. There are still open questions, ranging from whether there will be enough supply from in-state cultivators to what packaging for cannabis products will look like.
“Realistically, there might be a handful of retailers open this year, and everyone else’s expectation is that the retail market isn’t actually going to be up and running in any meaningful way until mid-year next year now,” said Verena von Pfetten, the co-founder of Gossamer, a cannabis lifestyle brand.
While right now the initial round of retail licenses is in a bit of limbo, once that limbo ends, a new and even hairier phase begins, she said, namely for the equity justice-based license holders. “I think the big question, from an industry perspective, is if the city and state don’t crack down on these gray market sellers the moment these equity licenses are issued and places are opening, what does that mean for the people trying to compete with them?”
If I’m operating a legal cannabis store and dealing with all the taxes and rules included in that, and there’s a bodega down the street that’s selling product for much less and looks fairly indistinguishable from my shop to the consumer, it’s going to be a problem for me. California’s legal weed industry, for example, has seriously struggled to compete with the illicit market.
Currently, New York City’s sheriff’s office has made an attempt at slowing the gray market down by impounding some of the trucks or ticketing them, and some cease-and-desist letters from the state are going out. These efforts haven’t been super impactful, given how prolific the trucks and bodegas remain.
Most sources I spoke to for this story agreed that something had to be done to try to give the legal market a better chance at success, but specifics are complicated. Nobody wants the police to crack down on gray market stores and trucks and start making new cannabis-related arrests. There’s an awkward dance going on between the city and the state, with the city saying it’s taking the state’s lead and the state trying to tread lightly to make sure it’s going about this in a fair way.
Buccola, from the Bronx Cannabis Hub, said she believes it will be tax and finance enforcement arms that attempt to shut things down, pursuing illegal cannabis operations in the same way they would any business operating illegally. “It has to shut down in order for the CAURD licenses to succeed, and New York has a vested interest in seeing them succeed,” she said.
“I doubt they’ll be okay with losing all this tax money, especially Gov. Hochul, hell no,” Naissant, one of the CAURD applicants, said. (She added that she hopes the state doesn’t “kill us” with taxes if she gets a license.)
The government may need to get a little creative in its approach. Campoamor pointed to the city’s efforts in the early 2000s to clean up Canal Street’s strip of shops selling knock-off designer handbags and watches in the open. Officials started using public nuisance laws to sue landlords of buildings where counterfeits were being sold and were able to curb the practice. (You can still get knock-off bags on Canal Street, but it’s a more complicated, secretive ordeal.) If something isn’t done about the saturation of illegal stores, he said, “my concern is these licenses won’t be worth the paper they’re printed on.”
Some advocates also expressed safety concerns. Gia Morón, the president of Women Grow, an organization dedicated to elevating women in the cannabis space, warned that the gray market operators create confusion for “the uninformed shopper” who might not know what they’re looking for, or even whether they’re in a legally operating store. “You want to believe that the products are safe,” she said. “When you have these gray market operators, you don’t know where they’re sourcing those products. I’m not saying they’re not educated and informed about the plant, because I’m sure many of them are.”
I recently stopped into one of a chain of dispensaries operating in Brooklyn to chat. I asked the guy at the counter if they were applying for a license. “Maybe we already have one,” was his reply. (An impossibility, to be clear.)
As for the legacy market, including delivery operations — which are prolific, established, and tightly run across much of the city — reactions are mixed.
Sam, the legacy delivery operator, had concerns about the gray market especially. “A person might rather go and walk down the block and get everything they need in a one-stop shop than wait for me for 10 or 15 minutes because I got a couple people before him,” he said.
But Marshall, another delivery operator who has been in the legacy market for seven years and who asked to remain anonymous, isn’t worried. “New York is such a massive market that if anyone has any fear about their inability to penetrate it, they’re just not being creative,” he said. He shrugged off concerns about the gray market, too. “A lot of these bodegas were hit so hard doing Covid, they deserve it,” he said. “If you think that the bodegas on your block are cannibalizing your traffic, then you are admitting that you have a brand that can’t differentiate itself from bodega-grade weed, and you kind of deserve to be cannibalized.”
Just because what’s going on is messy doesn’t mean it’s bad
Most of the people I spoke with for this story had some critiques about how New York is going about legalization efforts. (To be clear, I didn’t talk to any “weed is evil and should be illegal” people.) But that legalization and decriminalization efforts would be imperfect anywhere is inevitable.
Vikiana Reyes, program coordinator for cannabis education at Medgar Evers College and the head of the Legacy CORE Foundation, which provides support services to those in the legacy cannabis space, lamented how many people were left out of CAURD application opportunities. She also worried, for those who are awarded licenses, that while they’ll get loans through the social equity fund to set up their businesses, they’ll struggle to get funding to buy products to fill their shelves. “Where are they going to get the money?” she asked. They could wind up in deals with shady lenders or creditors with unfavorable terms, or that leave them without much control over their stores.
That retail equity license holders will be doomed to fail is a concern Sam, the legacy operator, shares. “They’ve got to go up against every other shop that’s not paying taxes right now,” he said. “Are they really setting up these CAURD applicants for generational wealth? Or generational debt?”
Holland, the cannabis attorney, thought there were better ways to go about legalization that would get more of the legacy market in faster. “One option would be to legalize the existing market and everybody buy a license,” he said. Or you’d put in place an amnesty program for legacy operators. “If you created amnesty, you would have a pretty significant inroad for a lot of people.”
Bautista, who helped push for New York’s marijuana legalization to be passed, acknowledges the system in place right now has its own shortcomings, but he doesn’t think that’s what matters. “No other state in the country has really tried to embrace social equity and the legacy market,” he said. Instead, other states have tried to “alienate and ostracize” the legacy market. “I don’t know if it’s going to be perfect, but we can’t let the perfect get in the way of the good.”
Police are no longer able to use cannabis odor as a reason to justify stop-and-search. The stigma so many people grew up with around marijuana in New York and across the country is declining. Communities that have disproportionately been harmed by the war on drugs are getting a chance at some reprieve. A couple of months ago, I watched an older woman roll a joint on a late-night subway car and then share it with a group of four young men. Smoking on the subway is not allowed, and I’m sure plenty of people were annoyed. But it was also really fun to see happen.
“It’s refreshing to see in my practice today people who come not to discuss getting their loved ones out on bail or avoiding prison, but asking how they can best position their business, obtain a license, brand a product, or raise capital,” Bondy said. However, he understands many people’s continuing interest in the legacy market. For some, “it’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.”
Where does this leave everything? It’s hard to say. The entire conversation and legal framework around marijuana is pretty muddled right now in New York, not to mention the entire country. While many states have legalized and decriminalized marijuana, at the federal level it remains illegal. President Joe Biden recently announced a pardon of thousands of people with federal marijuana possession convictions and also said the administration would take a look at the legal category pot is in, which is currently at the same level as heroin. Still, that doesn’t immediately change much of the landscape for retailers.
Even state-sanctioned sellers have to operate in cash and debit, and they’re not subject to the same tax treatment at the federal level that other businesses are. There’s also the simple fact that legal marijuana is being taxed and illegal marijuana is not, meaning the latter is cheaper for consumers and sellers in the recreational space.
Nobody’s quite sure how any of this is going to shake out. There’s a lot of money in play, and there are a lot of unanswered questions. What’s happening on New York City’s streets looks like progress, even if it’s uneven and imperfect.
Bautista, from Happy Munkey, knows that he might not get a license, but either way, he’s glad to have gotten a shot. His outlook on life, which he laid out at the end of our conversation, is one we could all probably adopt: “You’re too blessed to be stressed, things will get greater later, and always choose happy.” The cannabis industry, like every industry, is messy. But it’s hard not to root for an attitude like that.
The underdog made a comeback. But these three questions will determine the future of the war.
Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russia has defied the odds, and it has sent Russian President Vladimir Putin to a new point of desperation.
On October 10, Russia rained dozens of missile strikes on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and some nine other cities, many deep into the country and away from the battlefield. The strikes killed at least 11 people and injured more than 80 others, according to Ukrainian officials, and hit residential areas and energy infrastructure.
Putin ordered the barrage in response to a major explosion two days earlier on the bridge connecting Russia and Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that Russia has occupied since 2014. That Saturday explosion, which Putin described a “terrorist attack,” was a symbolic and perhaps strategic blow to Russia.
Seven months in, the war remains unpredictable as Russia and Ukraine seek to advance their own interests before the harsh winter ahead. Late last month, Putin announced that Russia had, in an illegal move, annexed four occupied regions in Ukraine. Despite that proclamation, Ukraine has actually expanded the territory it controls, and Russian troops retreated from the city of Lyman. Ukrainian also gained ground in Kherson, one of the regions that Putin had annexed. Putin had already mobilized hundreds of thousands of Russians, as just as many Russians seem to be fleeing the country to avoid fighting in the conflict.
But there are still big questions about where the war goes from here and what will shape the conflict this winter and onward. To understand them, I spoke with experts on Europe, Russia, and international security, and listened to European leaders speaking candidly on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly last month.
Three determining factors will play an outsized role in Ukraine’s future: support from America and European partners, the risks that Putin is willing to take, and the conflicting definitions of what victory might look like.
- Will war fatigue overtake Europe and the US?
The war is being fought in Ukraine, and Ukrainians are certainly suffering the most. But the costs incurred by Ukraine’s primary backers, the United States and Europe, will determine Ukraine’s capacity in defending itself against Russia. Without Western support, Ukraine’s recent victories in the counteroffensive will be difficult to sustain.
Following Monday’s bombardment, Kyiv gave “instructions” to Ukrainian diplomats to lobby Western governments for air defense systems that could protect civilians and critical infrastructure from future Russian attacks.
Western support for Ukraine is a crucial variable. The sanctions that the US, Western Europe, and some Asian countries have imposed on Russia continue to have a boomerang effect on the world economy. The winter ahead will change the fighting conditions on the ground and, equally importantly, the cold weather will remind Europe of its dependence on Russian fossil fuels for heat. If inflation continues and the energy crisis looms, will the US and an at times divided Europe become fatigued with the war and become less inclined to support it?
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The US has sent more than $17 billion in military assistance to Ukraine. With each package comes new questions around whether this volume of security aid can be sustained — not just economically, but whether enough missiles and bullets exist in Western stockpiles to bolster Ukraine. Some defense experts are warning that the conflict is consuming weapons stockpiles faster than nations can refill them.
The West’s willingness to continue to send weapons may also depend on Ukraine’s momentum on the battlefield, says Kristine Berzina, a security researcher at the German Marshall Fund. “If the underdog is doing well, even if things are hard, there’s something in our societies where supporting the underdog as it takes on the big bad guy successfully — it’s just a good story. How can you not help them?” she said. “Whereas if it feels pessimistic and terrible and depressing, well, then it feels like a lost cause.”
A recent survey fielded by Data for Progress and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft suggests that only 6 percent of Americans polled see the Russian war in Ukraine as one of the “top three most important issues facing America today.” It ranked last, far behind inflation, the economy, and many domestic issues.
Another recent survey of 14 countries in Europe and North America from the German Marshall Fund found that in Italy, France, and Canada, climate is viewed as the primary security challenge, while the countries closer to Russia and Ukraine, on the eastern edges of Europe, named Russia or wars between countries
Though American military aid has been robust, Europe’s support has been much more mixed, with some European countries spending less on the war than they are spending on imported Russian oil and gas. “That point about the difference between the kind of aid that has been provided to Ukraine versus what’s been paid in oil revenue, it just blows my mind every time I hear it,” Andrea Kendall-Taylor, director of the Transatlantic program at the Center for a New American Security and a former US intelligence official with ties to the Biden administration, said recently on the New York Times’s Ezra Klein Show. Why is it happening? “I wish I knew. I don’t have a good answer,” she said.
Nathalie Tocci, director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome, told me that the European Commission has not held up its commitments. She says the sluggishness in disbursing economic aid to Ukraine is partly political but mostly due to bureaucratic hurdles.
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Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images
So far, European countries, even Hungary, have largely supported Ukraine. But for European leaders staunchly backing Ukraine, political challenges may emerge as the war further exacerbates domestic economic issues. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s exit this summer was hastened by the economy and inflation, issues whose multiple causes include the effects of the Ukraine conflict. French President Emmanuel Macron lost his parliamentary majority in June. Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s government was split over Ukraine; it wasn’t the only reason for the collapse of his coalition, and now the far-right leader Giorgia Meloni is his successor. The war was not the immediate cause of any political leader’s downfall, but political changes in Europe are a reminder that governance is deeply connected to the emerging energy and economic crises.
If support in Europe wanes, there’s also the question of whether the US will be able to rally it. Since the Cold War, the US has put most of its military and diplomatic focus on first the Middle East and then, more recently, Asia. “Washington just has no real grasp of Europe today, doesn’t understand the centrality of the European Union, and tries to operate as if it doesn’t exist,” Max Bergmann, a former State Department official who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me in June, in advance of a NATO summit.
The Biden administration has been hugely successful in dispatching US diplomats to unify Europe, but Washington is still operating with a deficit on the continent and without a deep understanding of a sustainable long-term Europe policy.
- What risks is Putin willing to take?
Putin’s order to send long-range missiles into Ukraine on October 10 was a reminder that even as Ukraine retakes territory, Russia will be willing to take risks — sometimes out of a place of weakness. That was the case with Putin’s announcement of the annexation of Russian-held territories in Ukraine and the partial mobilization of 300,000 troops. His unpredictability is a major X factor.
It’s unlikely that the mobilization will be effective because Russia doesn’t seem to have the highly trained personnel or advanced weapons to quickly alter their position in the war. “There will be bodies who will be there but they will not have equipment, they will not have significant training, and they will not really have the provisions for the conditions they’re going into, especially given that we’re again heading into the cold season,” Berzina said.
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AFP via Getty Images
That could mean an increasingly desperate Putin. “It’s quite existential for him. It always has been,” said Jade McGlynn, a researcher of Russian studies at Middlebury College. “His whole entire idea of what Russia is — this great messianic power — depends on having Ukraine.”
Nowhere has that desperation been more apparent than in the rhetoric surrounding nuclear weapons. In the early hours of the war, Putin threatened “consequences you have never seen” against Ukraine’s supporters, and again in recent weeks he has offered veiled threats of using a small nuke. That would be norm-shattering and earth-shattering, figuratively and literally. Even threatening to use a nuke violates the norms of international relations.
Putin has emphasized that the United States was the only country that had used a nuclear weapon, (twice) on Japan during World War II. It seemed to be a retort to Biden’s United Nations speech last month in which he chastised Putin for his “reckless disregard for the responsibilities of the non-proliferation regime” while minutes later praising President Harry Truman, the president who authorized those nuclear attacks.
Another concern is, if things continue to go badly for Putin, whether he will expand the theater of war to other fronts and countries.
In the category of desperate acts falls what may potentially be an act of self-sabotage, a Russian attack on the Nord Stream gas pipeline. It raises concerns that Russia may attack other critical energy infrastructure in Europe.
The nationalists in Russia, according to McGlynn, may pose the biggest threat to Putin, as they push him toward even more extreme means. They want him to go all-in on the war, even as the mobilization won’t likely alter Russia’s footing.
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Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images
The extent to which Putin might be willing to repress Russians is also important. The calling up of reserves is one indicator, as is the shuttering of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and other media outlets, and the arrests of critics and activists. That intensity of repression also limits the possibility for Russian domestic opposition standing up to Putin.
- What is the definition of Ukraine winning?
The country that so many analysts predicted would fall in the first week of the invasion in February has endured the first 200 days of war, and Ukrainians say they are confident in carrying on the fight so long as they have ample support from the West.
A senior Ukrainian official, speaking recently in New York on the condition of anonymity, said that Ukraine was united in its war against Russia — and hugely depends on Western support. “The truth is that the battlefield today is the negotiating table with Putin. Because he respects strength,” they said.
“We are going to fight until we defeat Russia,” Oksana Nesterenko, a Ukrainian legal scholar currently at Princeton University, told me. Not because Ukrainians are so brave or have so many resources, she explained. “It’s about the future of the Ukrainian nation, about the future of Ukrainian democracy,” Nesterenko says. “We don’t have any choice.”
But there is a great deal of confusion as to how anyone defines victory. The Ukrainians, the Europeans, and the Americans “haven’t talked in specific terms about what we consider an acceptable outcome to this conflict,” Thomas Graham, a Russia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me.
While the Ukrainians have expanded their demands in light of their successful counteroffensive and are now talking about nothing short of retaking the territory Russian has occupied since 2014, the United States and each European country seem to hold their own perspective. “The Germans and the French, at the leadership level, would accept a negotiated solution that might include some territorial concessions on the part of Ukraine as a way of de-escalating and helping deal with what they see as an increasingly difficult socio-economic situation,” Graham said.
On the Russian side, Putin initially claimed to want the demilitarization and de-Nazification — in essence, regime change — of Ukraine. And now he has annexed four provinces that he has long sought. “The possibility that Russia could win on its terms, that possibility is now very remote,” says Michael Kimmage, a Catholic University professor who specializes in Russia. “I do think that we could, in a very worrisome way, enter into a nihilistic phase of the conflict where Russia is not able to impose victory on the war, but will try to impose defeat on the other side. And maybe that’s the Russian version of victory in this war.”
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That would mean stretching the war on as long as possible, hence the massive mobilization, and the possibility of a war of attrition. McGlynn says that Putin’s notion of victory is at this point divorced from what the Russian army can actually do. “What we’re most likely to see is a way to entrench a situation on the ground in areas that they already control,” she told me.
In Washington, meanwhile, there has been little talk of what diplomacy among the parties might look like. It’s not that a team of negotiators is going to hash out a settlement over carryout, but ongoing diplomatic engagement between the US and Russia is going to be needed on a variety of levels and in a variety of forums to set the conditions for a future resolution — and even to address the narrow goal of averting any potential misunderstanding that could end up looking like the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Russia expert Fiona Hill who served in the Trump administration recently emphasized to the New Yorker the risks of Putin’s brinkmanship and the misunderstanding it breeds. “The problem is, of course, us misreading him, but also him misreading us,” she said. More communication could help. But Secretary of State Tony Blinken hasn’t met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov since January 2022 (they had a “frank” phone call in July). And the recent Data for Progress survey emphasized that a majority of Americans would like to see more diplomacy. “A majority (57 percent) of Americans support US negotiations to end the war in Ukraine as soon as possible, even if it means Ukraine making some compromises with Russia,” writes Jessica Rosenblum of the Quincy Institute.
The war’s endgame may be a long way off. Still, it’s no small feat that Turkey has brokered a deal to get Ukrainian grain to countries that need it and Saudi Arabia arranged for a prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine. In the meantime, Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan hosted talks between senior officials from Azerbaijan and Armenia last month, but the Biden administration has hardly been discussing avenues for diplomacy with Russia.
Though Graham praises President Biden’s handling of the war in Ukraine, he worries that the with-us-or-against-us rhetoric from the White House precludes opportunities for engagement with Russians. “If I fault the administration in any way — I don’t think it has articulated in public what this conflict is really about,” he told me. The US has alienated broad swaths of the Russian population through sanctions, and Biden has framed the conflict as an existential one between democracy and autocracy.
“Existential conflicts have a way of not persuading the other side, perhaps, to negotiate a solution to this problem that meets their needs, their minimal security requirements,” Graham told me. “In general, I think it is inappropriate to frame conflicts as a struggle between good and evil.”
Update, October 10, 12:30 pm: This story was originally published on October 1 and has been updated, most recently on October 10 to include news about missile strikes across Ukraine.