A Long, Winding Road For City Business

Tim Scoma is pictured discussing the process to open Lifted, Jamestown’s first legal marijuana dispensary, earlier this week.
P-J photo by Tim Scoma

It’s been a long few years of waiting and working for Tim Scoma, owner of Lifted, Jamestown’s lone legal cannabis dispensary.

The wait is almost over.

Lifted recently received the 136th cannabis dispensary license from the state Office of Cannabis Management; Scoma expects that his business will be open to the public in a little more than a month once a couple of state inspections are performed by the Office of Cannabis Management and state Pharmacy Board. A QR code on the former Patient’s Pharmacy window will mean Jamestown’s wait for legal cannabis will be over.

“The word on the street is it takes about two to four weeks for the Office of Cannabis Management to do the inspection and then send us, I don’t know if it’s a magnet or a sticker, but it goes in the front window and we can’t make any sales until that certified sticker goes on that window,” Scoma said. “It’s got a QR code that people can scan and it will take them right to the OCM website and say we are inspected and licensed.”

These next few weeks will be nothing like the waiting game Scoma has played over the past three years.

SLOW PROCESS

New York’s Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act was signed into law in March 2021. A slow rollout of legal marijuana products was always part of the state’s plan, but things moved slower than expected when it took months to even name members of the Cannabis Control Board and the Office of Cannabis Management. It wasn’t until former Gov. Andrew Cuomo resigned and Gov. Kathy Hochul took over that the Cannabis Control Board and Office of Cannabis Management were fully formed.

It took months before regulations were crafted – and those regulations included Conditional Adult Use Recreational Dispensary licenses. The CAURD licenses were challenged in court, further slowing the process. While the delays meant the state was losing tax revenue while ceding ground to illegal cannabis dispensaries – particularly in New York City – they also meant business owners like Scoma were left in limbo.

“It’s been a heck of a three-and-a-half-year ordeal,” Scoma said. “You know when I started in 2021 it was baby steps. We didn’t have any regulation. We didn’t have any rules. We didn’t even have people staffed at the Office of Cannabis Management, and I was already starting to get things in place and figuring out what we can do with the place.”

The place is the former Patient’s Pharmacy, which has undergone a transformation from a former Eckerd’s drug store before Diane Mathews and her husband purchased the building to Patient’s Pharmacy and, now, Lifted. The first step was moving Patient’s Pharmacy to its new home in the Dunn Tire plaza on Fairmount Avenue. That site offered better parking for patients and roughly the same amount of space while allowing Scoma to use the North Main Street building to open Lifted.

Scoma, family members and friends worked to prepare the space after Patient’s Pharmacy moved in early 2023, but it would be several months before Scoma was allowed to submit a license to the Office of Cannabis Management. The licensing period finally opened in early October 2023 at a time when state officials said they were tired of the slow rollout of legal marijuana and began trying to speed the process up. Scoma was one of the first to submit his license, aided by the fact he had a storefront ready to go and suppliers lined up.

The waiting continued. In February Hochul announced her displeasure with the slow pace of license approvals by the Office of Cannabis Management. That announcement led to a review of the Office of Cannabis Management, a change in leadership and new authority secured as part of negotiations over the state’s 2024-25 budget to crack down on illegal sellers and move faster to approve licensed dispensaries.

“I’ve been at it since 2021,” Scoma said. “Every year we’re like, ‘OK, this is going to be the year. OK, it’s 2022. We’ve got all the people staffed, we’re ready to go.’ And then they started with the CAURD licenses and the adult use conditional cultivators and conditional processors. And we thought we would have been on that conditional list because my mom is a certified MWBE and we thought MWBEs would have been on that list, but they’re not. It’s for people who have been negatively affected by cannabis laws and over-policing. So we waited again. In 2023 we’re like, ‘OK, OK,it’s 2023. We’re doing it.’ There’s one dispensary open on Dec. 31, that was the first dispensary open in New York City so I’m thinking, ‘OK, here we go. They’re going to start opening, they’re going to do it. And then all of 2023 and finally, right at the end, the very end, we got to do our application in October. So Oct. 4 we had our application in the day it opened.”

There was a final hurdle to be overcome once the application period was open. State law restricts cannabis dispensaries from being within 200 feet of a church or school, and there concerns Lifted was too close to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. It appeared, in fact, that years of waiting were going to be in vain.

“You know because of the church and the closeness to that we had to do a lot of fighting with the Cannabis Control Board,” Scoma said. “At first they actually declined our application because they thought we were too close, so we had to provide a survey. We ended up having that same survey for our showcase, and then they said they needed more, they wanted more info. … Our initial survey said we were from entrance to entrance, which is the rule, it was like 217 feet. After he did the actual survey survey with all the instruments and what not from entrance to entrance – exactly 260 feet ”

The new survey was enough to make the Cannabis Control Board reconsider its decision.