NYs new luxury legal cannabis dispensaries are as bad, in their own way, as the creepy illicit ones
“Defining deviancy down” — Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous phrase for lowering the bar of what’s considered acceptable behavior — now means defining dope upscale.“Cannabis presented through a luxury lens” is the motto of a new, three-story marijuana emporium called Charlie Fox, located at 719 Seventh Ave.at West 49th Street in Manhattan and opening in December.Sprawling across 6,000 square feet, it will sell only slightly fewer forms of ganja and related products than the Fantastic World of the Portuguese Sardine, around the corner, sells varieties of canned fish.All in a clean, unthreatening, wood-paneled setting — unlike at the hundreds of rancid-smelling unlicensed weed peddlers that defy the city’s crackdowns, and at the legal ones that are only marginally less creepy.
At a preview a few nights ago, it resembled a supper club with a second-story bar and a DJ.Charlie Fox belongs to an insidious new breed of marijuana shops: New York State-licensed dispensaries that aim to replicate the experience of a high-fashion boutique or art museum.They’re a growing number of the estimated 60-odd legal dispensaries in the Big Apple — to say nothing of hundreds of illegal ones that defy the city’s crackdown.
They signify that abandonment to heedless chemical indulgence, which rent the underclass social fabric, now is not only welcome but celebrated for the fine-wine-consuming, dinner-party crowd.Thus, we find Charlie Fox’s “luxury” predecessors such as Travel Agency at Union Square, one of three stores the company has in the city, sporting the air of a Madison Avenue fashion boutique; Gotham in the East Village, which is “informed by New York City’s art, fashion and culture scenes,” according to weed industry chronicler Fast Company; and Dagmar Cannabis on West Broadway in Soho, “inspired by the rich cultural tapestry of Soho” and where “we have seamlessly blended the vibrancy of this iconic neighborhood with the allure of ...