NIAGARA FALLS (TNS) — It was 4:20 p.m. Monday and Falls Police Narcotics Intelligence Division detectives decided it was the perfect time to pay a visit to an illegal marijuana dispensary on Cleveland Avenue.
“We thought it was a good time to do it,” Detective Kevin Maluchnik said with a chuckle. “We weren’t the first (drug investigators) to visit there.”
On Feb. 13, investigators from the Niagara County Drug Task Force executed a search warrant on the house in the 1800 block of Cleveland Avenue. They found a makeshift marijuana edibles operation and shut it down.
For less than 24 hours.
“The next day, the complaints started rolling in again,” Maluchnik said. “the traffic there was just non-stop. In a residential neighborhood, you had 15 cars an hour pulling up there and then pulling off.”
NID commander, Capt. Ted Weed, said pot was sold out of the nondescript house similar to legal businesses in places like Colorado.
“They were running it like a store,” Weed said. “They opened at 9 a.m. and closed at 9 p.m. and they had their edibles displayed on shelves. It was all out in the open.”
The interior of the home was described as simply the shelves lined with edible pot, a single chair for the “sales clerk” and a locked mailbox, hung on the wall, for payments to be deposited.
The collection of edibles seized by detectives resembled a candy display in a theatre. Items like Peanut Butter Breath Premium Cannabis and Rappers By Choice and Guava Nectar lined the shelves.
Maluchnik said a bag of Peanut Butter Breath was selling for between $60 and $80.
“They operated it like a legal dispensary,” Weed said. “You’d select your product and then drop your money in the locked mail box on the wall.”
“You’d cash out like it was a 7-Eleven,” Maluchnik said. “But it’s still illegal in New York state.”
Weed said as the neighborhood complaint calls kept coming in, detectives knew they had to pay the illegal dispensary a visit.
“It was a nuisance,” Maluchnik said. “You have kids coming home and getting off school buses right there. We need to do something.”
Detectives said they are still working to identify and charge the supplier and operator of the edibles dispensary.
They charged the sales clerk in the home on Monday, Timone Prince, 32, with 4th-degree criminal possession of marijuana.
