City deputy sheriffs have seized so much cannabis from unlicensed pot shops amid a crackdown that the agency’s offices have become a weed wonderland, with pot stowed in every free nook and cranny they can find, the Daily News has learned.
When the sheriff’s office was tasked with raiding illegal weed shops, the cannabis they removed was initially stored in six 20-foot shipping containers with poor ventilation.
“We were seizing more than the space we had, so we started putting it in different offices,” Ingrid Simonovic, the president of the New York City Deputy Sheriff’s Association told the New York Daily News in an exclusive interview.
“Then they started putting them in vehicles.”
So much weed had been collected that deputy sheriffs responsible for vouchering the evidence from the weed raids were being inundated by the smell — and some even getting sick, union officials said.
The crackdown on unlicensed pot shops across New York has been an effort to stem an explosion following the decriminalization of recreational marijuana for adults in 2021.
