Thirty years ago, Havoc was rapping about running from the cops in Queensbridge. On June 6, he stood at 25-15 Broadway in Astoria and cut the ribbon on a legal weed shop he owns, two neighborhoods over from the housing project that raised him. “Thirty years ago, you couldn’t have told me that we would have been able to sell cannabis legally,” he said at the grand opening, per QNS. “We used to be running from the cops, getting criminal records, being shut out of the conversation, and now we are bridging the gap between cannabis and community.”
The store is called The Bridge, and the name is the point. Havoc, whose full name is Kejuan Waliek Muchita, was one half of Mobb Deep, the Queensbridge duo whose 1995 album The Infamous and its single “Shook Ones” are foundational New York hardcore rap. His partner Prodigy died in 2017 from complications of sickle cell anemia, as the Queens Daily Eagle has documented. Queensbridge, the largest public housing development in North America, sits in Long Island City, a short walk from the Astoria storefront where Havoc now sells the exact thing that used to get people from his block arrested.
He is not a logo on a jar. According to High Times, Havoc is a direct owner, not a celebrity-endorsement deal. “Hip-hop gave me a platform, but ownership creates a legacy,” he said. “The Bridge is about building something lasting in the community that raised me.” That distinction matters in cannabis, where rappers routinely rent their faces to brands they do not control. Havoc put his name on the door of a business he actually holds.
To get there, he worked with Bonita “Bo” Money, a TV and film producer and cannabis activist who runs the National Diversity and Inclusion Cannabis Alliance, or NDICA, a nonprofit that helps people from communities hit hardest by the drug war get into the legal market. NDICA helped Havoc land the New York State license. “This has been a long journey for us,” Money said at the opening, per QNS. “We are just grateful for the Astoria community. Thank you for being so welcoming.” Havoc told the trade press the same thing in different words: “As someone who comes from Queens, I understand how important it is to invest back into our communities.”
The grand opening was not low-key. The weekend of June 6 and 7 brought DJ sets from The Alchemist, who played from 4 to 5 p.m. Saturday, Funk Flex from 5 to 7 p.m., and Kid Capri on the turntables Sunday, according to High Times. There were food trucks, product samplings and giveaways, with sponsorship from Canopy USA, Wana, The Botanist and Jetty, the press release notes. Queens Borough President Donovan Richards showed up too, and he did not treat it as a routine ribbon-cutting.
Richards used the microphone to name what the celebration was built on. Before New York legalized recreational marijuana in 2021, he said, Black and brown communities accounted for 86 percent of all cannabis-related arrests in the city, and those convictions blocked many residents from federal college financial aid and other benefits, QNS reported. “We know what happens often when new businesses come into play,” Richards said. “We’re left out of the equation. Havoc is representative of us not being left out of the conversation, that this bridge was not a bridge too far.” The same arrest that once cost someone their financial aid is now the qualifying credential for a license.
New York’s first wave of legal dispensaries came through the Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary program, or CAURD, which the state built to give the first storefronts to people previously convicted of a marijuana offense and to the communities the drug war hit hardest. The Office of Cannabis Management describes the goal: to “speed the delivery of investments into communities across New York State that were impacted by the disproportionate enforcement of cannabis prohibition.” A marijuana conviction that used to be a permanent mark became the thing that moved you to the front of the line.
The catch is that the line barely moved for years. The legal market that finally welcomed him is now huge. New York has logged $3.3 billion in adult-use cannabis sales and licensed 610 dispensaries, with 342 CAURD licenses approved and a majority of all licenses held by social and economic equity applicants, Governor Hochul’s office reported in March 2026. The same office says more than 400,000 marijuana convictions were eligible for expungement under the 2021 law, with over 200,000 already sealed. The state is, on paper, trying to unwind the exact machine that gave people like Havoc records in the first place.
A guy whose entire artistic legacy is built on documenting what it felt like to be a young Black man dodging police in Queensbridge spent two and a half years waiting for a license from a state that spent the prior thirty years arresting people for what he now sells legally. The opening is a win. It also belongs to everyone who caught a charge before the rules changed and never got a storefront out of it.
The Bridge is open at 25-15 Broadway in Astoria. You can find hours and details at the shop’s site. If you want to check whether you or someone you know qualifies to enter the legal market, the state’s Office of Cannabis Management lays out the CAURD program and who counts as justice-involved at cannabis.ny.gov.
Featured image: Tobias Nielsen / CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
