I was arrested for trying to buy cannabis 15 years ago. Now, I run a multi-million dollar business selling weed.

• Keshawn Warner is the cofounder of Dazed, a cannabis dispensary in Massachusetts and New York.
• In 2008, Warner was arrested for buying weed, but used that to his advantage to open one of just eight legal dispensaries in New York City.

This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Keshawn Warner, co-founder of the cannabis dispensary Dazed. The essay has been edited for length and clarity.

I was born in East Harlem in New York City in 1978, in the early years of the war on drugs. The Woodrow Wilson projects was a great community, very family-oriented and diverse. On my floor alone, there was another Black family and a Puerto Rican family, and an Asian family lived upstairs.

But when the drugs came in, my community was heavily affected. It became a quick and easy source of money for some people.

There's also a very dangerous side to it: My childhood went from being able to play outside, to my teenage years, when you could hear gunshots from the same basketball court we'd been playing on since we were kids.

There was a major shift in the socioeconomic dynamics of the neighborhood. You see your brothers and uncles having a great time, looking good with flashy cars and motorcycles. A lot of my friends saw the fast money being made and fell into the same trap of selling drugs. Once the early glitz and glamour wore off and the violence came in, then you started seeing the same uncles and friends becoming addicted, or dying.

No families were spared. We lost a lot of people. Combine that with law enforcement's heavy approach to combating drugs, and you're not only dodging the dangers of the everyday in your neighborhood — you're also getting caught in the middle of law enforcement. To them, we were all the same. Hanging out with your friends could even cost you your life. It was a jungle.

Getting arrested for cannabis

I graduated from Norfolk State University, an HBCU, with a degree in computer science in 2004, but spent four years working a bunch of odd jobs because I had a hard time landing a job, like many others.

Then, in 2008, at the height of the stop and frisk era, I was arrested for trying to buy cannabis.

I'd happened to walk into a building that was set up as a sting operation. As soon as I entered the building, I walked straight into the other end of a 9mm gun. My first instinct was that I was being robbed, but then I realized it was the police.

They snatched me up and took me to the back of the building to interrogate me. Then the paddy wagon came and took me to the local precinct. I spent most of the night there.

From then on, whenever I tried to apply for jobs, I was denied, even though I was qualified. They never told me why, but you know what you're being disqualified for — because of your record that comes up in a background search.

Turning lemons into lemonade

I've been a longtime consumer of cannabis and sold weed here and there, but I seriously got into the industry when I was going back and forth to California. Even though weed wasn't legalized there until 2016, the business was being conducted as if it were.

What really tipped me off was in 2017 or so, when my wife and some of our friends went on a couples' trip to Breckenridge in Colorado. Denver had become one of the first states to legalize cannabis, so the first thing I did as soon as we landed was to go straight to the dispensary.

The dispensary was a small, rinky dink trailer with no frills. They had around eight to ten permits on the wall, which also listed how much they had to pay for the permits. I'm doing the quick math in my mind and realizing, "Wow, they have to pay so much," yet I'm looking around this tiny place and then the antenna went up: They're making a lot of money to be able to pay for all these permits and staff.

Once I heard that Massachusetts would be among the first states on the East Coast to legalize weed, I knew I'd open a dispensary there. Whenever there was a government cannabis board meeting, I'd be there. Eventually, I was connected with my business partners, and we opened Dazed in August 2021.

Like being chosen for the Yankees

Opening a business in the middle of the pandemic was our biggest hurdle. Then there was the fundraising, especially with a business that's not federally legalized. Any money you get has to be crowdfunded: friends, family, a ton of cold-calling.

When we heard that New York had legalized cannabis and was opening up its cannabis industry, my ears perked up. The fact that they were granting licenses to people who were arrested for cannabis offenses was especially great. I applied, and soon after in August 2022, I was told I was going to be one of the first four folks to get a license in Manhattan.

Being a Manhattan boy and going through the highs and the lows, and now being able to be the first in the industry like this, it felt like being chosen for the Yankees.

It's a lemons to lemonade kind of story: I'd been exposed to cannabis from a young age, including from my father, who'd smoked weed for forever. Hip-hop was the culture I grew up around, and cannabis is also infused in that.

I remember all the times my mom was on my case, like, "Why are you smoking weed? Is that why you failed math class?" And now, seeing it become a viable industry, it's a crazy thing.

We know the magnitude that New York plays in the global market. In our first year, we grossed about $1.2 million. Now looking forward to 2024, we're potentially eyeing $5 million. It's a huge feeling for someone who grew up on First Avenue, being stopped and frisked — and here we are now, with something that can change the trajectory of my family's future. It's crazy and I'm enjoying it.