How this register is built

The spine of this register is the New York State Office of Cannabis Management licence registry, published as the Current OCM Licenses dataset on Open Data NY. It is the state's own list of who holds a licence.

The registry does not carry phone numbers, opening hours or whether a shop has actually opened its doors. Those come from the operators' own websites and menu platforms, and each one is recorded with the source it came from.

Weedmaps, Leafly and similar aggregators are not used to establish that a shop is licensed. They list unlicensed businesses too, which is precisely the confusion this register exists to remove.

• Registry-verified — the licence number and the address both matched a record in the state registry.
• Secondary sources — not yet matched in the registry, but two independent sources agree on the licence and the address. Treat these as provisional.
• Unverified — anything less. These are kept out of the default view.

When a field says Unknown, it means nobody has checked it — not that the answer is no. A shop shown without delivery may well deliver. Recording an unchecked field as a definite “no” would make the register look more complete than it is, at your expense.

The same rule applies to opening status. A licence being active does not mean the doors are open: New York issued many licences long before the shops were built.

It does not sell cannabis, take payment, or rank shops. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Office of Cannabis Management or any other state agency.

A shop missing from this list is not proof that the shop is illegal — the register may simply be behind. Equally, a listing here is not a substitute for the check you can do yourself at the door.

469 records across Manhattan (122), Queens (120), Brooklyn (119), Westchester (50), The Bronx (35), Staten Island (23). Phase one covers the five boroughs of New York City and Westchester County.

Every one of these is a gap we can name and count. Naming them is the point: a directory that only shows what it is sure of, without saying what it is unsure of, invites you to mistake its silence for completeness.

• 15 records with an unconfirmed status. The state registry lists the licence as active, but the shop does not appear on OCM's public list of open dispensaries, and we will not call a shop open on a guess.
• 17 licences past their published expiry. The registry still marks them active. Whether they were renewed is not something the published data answers, so each such record says so on its own page rather than showing the date without comment.
• 17 addresses the state gives two ways. The licence registry and OCM's public-open list disagree, usually on the ZIP code. The registry address is treated as canonical and the disagreement is recorded on the record instead of being quietly resolved.
• Medical dispensaries are listed but rarely confirmed open. The 4 Registered Organizations here are licensed to serve patients. OCM's public-open list covers adult-use retail, so for most of them there is no source that confirms they are trading today.

If a record here is wrong — a shop has closed, an address has changed, a licence has lapsed — the fix belongs in the underlying dataset, not in a caption. Report it with the licence number and a source, and it will be corrected at the next import.