New York’s Weed Rush Is Here. They Came to Cash In. For generations, entrepreneurs and dreamers have moved to New York City to strike it big. Now they’re coming to sell a lot of cannabis.

S. was 30 and C. was 22 when they first met — at a focus group for public transportation in Tampa, Fla., in 2012. The age difference between them was a problem for her at first. “I was like, immediately, ‘No,’” S. says. She had already spent a decade trying to figure out her life. There were years spent working on behalf of tomato-farm laborers in Florida, followed by a stint as a union rep for janitors and security guards at Harvard, in Massachusetts, then jobs as a pastry chef in Boston and in Austin, Texas. By 2016, she was back in Tampa, her hometown, working in kitchens, still making pastries. She was, in C.’s words, “this beautiful, smart woman who’s about this community life.” A few months after the focus group — where, as it happened, they were the only two participants who actually used public transportation — she messaged him on Facebook: “Hey, question, you know anyone I could cop some weed from?”

She wanted to make some edibles; he seemed like someone who might be able to provide the key ingredient. Though he was abstaining at the time, worried about the drug testing at his job at a mental health organization, he had used and dealt cannabis since high school. He had some connections. “Luckily, where I was hanging out at, my neighbor was an old head, like, 70 years or 75 years old,” C. says. “He was selling hella weed.” [Read More @ The NY Times]