Dasheeda Dawson, is now known as NYC’s cannaboss aka the founding director of Cannabis NYC an initiative to spearhead the agency’s support of the growing cannabis industry. Dawson will lead the agency in public education, direct services to cannabis entrepreneurs and professionals, legislative advocacy, and policy development at all levels of government.
She has returned home from Oregon to direct efforts assisting in building legal cannabis businesses and hopes that her efforts will absorb the illegal cannabis market. Her own story of cannaphobia is what started her on this path.
Dasheeda is seeking to end Cannaphobia (unreasonable fears toward cannabis and the people who use it). Often it happens due to social stigma and a lack of education.
Dawson was growing up in the 80s in East New York, Brooklyn, when the War on Drugs had reached its height in America. At that time, Dawson says that she didn’t want anything to do with weed. At the age of 10, transit police would search her backpack for drugs when she went to school. During her teenage years, police officers would slam her friends to the ground over small amounts of cannabis. The arrests unequally targeted the poor Black and brown neighborhoods in New York City, and many still distrust the government to this day over it.
From those experiences, Dawson had a negative viewpoint of marijuana. Up until 2016, she wouldn’t even let anyone know about her cannabis use until her mother, a longtime cannabis user, died. Her mother encouraged Dawson to use marijuana to treat some of the health issues that she experienced like chronic pain and fatigue.
It was during this time that Dawson left her corporate career and took up learning a new one from a medical marijuana program in Arizona.
After this program, she would oversee the legal and medical marijuana industry in Portland, Oregon. Dawson, now 43 years old, has returned to New York City with a new vision to support entrepreneurs who would like to participate in the industry. She will serve as the director of Cannabis NYC, and she will coral city services to build sustainable cannabis businesses.
Over her lifetime, Dawson has served as a cannabis consultant to businesses and legislators. She hopes to absorb the illicit market without steep punishments for violators and persuade them with incentives instead. Dawson will serve in a quintessential role in bridging an inequity divide, and she will set up the industry in New York. Unlike in Portland, Oregon, where it was already set up, Dawson will play a role in how it is legalized in New York City. New York first legalized recreational marijuana in 2021, but it isn’t expected to go fully legal until the end of 2022.
“Leading Cannabis NYC is an incredible full circle moment. Growing up in East New York, I survived the height of cannabis prohibition and witnessed targeted enforcement derail the lives of my friends and family. I was stopped, searched, and treated like a criminal before I ever touched the plant, which shaped my initial perceptions,” says Dasheeda Dawson, founding director, Cannabis NYC. “Now, as a cannabis patient, educator, and regulator, I get to support other consumers, small businesses, and local stakeholders in the growing industry so that cannabis — once used to suppress communities like mine — can be tapped as a tool for transformation. I’m thrilled to be back home, helping to craft an equity-centered approach to the city’s cannabis industry framework that welcomes all New Yorkers to the table.”
Dawson’s active role in a variety of things related to cannabis has made her knowledgeable and useful to the legal weed industry in New York.
