“New York will create a bureaucracy out of anything.”

So wrote one of this newspaper’s Facebook followers after reading a post about the state’s new “Office of Cannabis Management,” set up as the agency tasked to regulate legal weed and its derivations. The Office was a long time coming; ex-Governor Andrew Cuomo had stalled his appointment of potential agency leadership and then he stepped down. His successor moved (relatively) quickly and, voila, we have a new state agency.

The appropriately snarky observation came after we shared the Office’s announcement of its CANNABIS CONVERSATIONS. “Let’s talk about the new law and next steps for cannabis in New York,” they say, setting a series of online events between now and February 21.

For a new agency, they’ve got the cadence down pretty well. This feel-good “let’s talk” business is an old trick they think suggests to New Yorkers that they’re genuinely interested in what we have to say. But no, it’s a sideshow, a make-work project in the foreground while those in the background toil away at what they want to come from the “conversations.”

It’s not that public outreach doesn’t lead to any good ideas; on the contrary. Public discussions generally bring about the best, most practical ideas. An example: “Why don’t we open dispensaries the way they did it in Massachusetts?” Those, however, are words that grind the gears of any New York State agency wonk who wants to make sure that we do things here just one notch differently from...

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