The bust was a bust, and it could end up costing New York City some serious green.

A day after prosecutors dropped criminal charges in a case spotlighting confusion over hemp, marijuana and conflicting laws, the Brooklyn brothers caught in the chaos took the first step toward suing the city and the police department.

A new law signed by Gov. Cuomo on Monday lays the groundwork for the manufacture and sale of home-grown hemp products — including popular CBD oil — across the state.

The regulations require growers, processers and sellers to obtain state permits and hire independent labs to test their merchandise.

The law also sets labeling standards and mandates that New York-based hemp companies use only crops grown in New York.

“The hemp industry in New York is exploding and with that growth comes a responsibility to regulate the industry in a way that helps ensure its long-term viability and protects consumers,” Cuomo said.

The legal cannabis industry is still taking shape and evolving. In many ways, the industry is figuring itself out as it goes. And that leaves the door open for people to enter the space and do all sorts of creative or unexpected things.

One of the most recent examples of this is a cannabis auction taking place this weekend in New York City. The event, billed as The Cannabis Auction Exchange, will focus exclusively on selling CBD strains and products.

A case of mistaken identity might end up costing a Brooklyn, N.Y. man his livelihood.

Oren Levy, the owner of Green Angel CBD, was waiting on a shipment of legal hemp from his producer in Vermont last month when New York police came swooping in and confiscated the 106-pound delivery upon arrival at a FedEx outlet.

Police proudly posed with the massive seizure before realizing the US$20,000 shipment was not marijuana, but rather its non-intoxicating cousin, hemp.

The New York Police Department was pleased with itself in early November. On the 75th Precinct’s Facebook page, they posted images of officers and 106 pounds of what they called “marijuana that was destined for city streets.”

Except it wasn’t marijuana. And it was destined for a legal marijuana dispensary, not the “city streets.” Unraveling all that took time, but not before a shipment was seized and a person arrested -- all for, apparently, doing things that are perfectly legal.

Officers with the 75th Precinct in Brooklyn appeared unable to distinguish between marijuana and hemp, according to Jahala Dudley, one of the people who made the legal shipment.

Cornell University professor Larry Smart researches hemp breeding and genetics.

From his perspective, it’s the type of research needed to enable hemp growers to succeed now that the crop is legal again in the United States. 

Even with U.S. states focused on bringing social justice to cannabis legalization, people from lower socioeconomic households are being left behind.

The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) has issued a memo informing the 20,000 federally subsidized households it oversees that they will not be able to use cannabis in their residences even after the drug becomes legal for recreational use in Illinois at the start of next year.

Hemp farmers in New York are poised to get a boost from new rules allowing medical marijuana companies to use their crops to produce CBD products.

Further, the rules seek to reduce the costs for thousands of medical marijuana patients statewide who use CBD, or cannabidiol, state officials said.

The rules would allow the 10 licensed medical marijuana companies to buy the less expensive hemp and related extracts grown under the state’s Hemp Agricultural Research Pilot Program, which launched in 2015.

Previously, the medical marijuana companies had to rely solely on their own operations to produce CBD, which increased the costs for patients, state officials said.

While the global drug market may be heavily associated with Latin American cartels and violence south of the border, places like New York and Chicago have their own homegrown drug trade thanks in large part to the Sicilian-born La Cosa Nostra. This mafia organization had an iron grip on most illegal activity in major cities like New York and Chicago for entire generations, writes Danielle Guercio. 

Made men or Men of Honor, as they were called, were bonafide bloodthirsty operators, though because they assimilated into white culture-at-large, they escaped many of the harsh slurs that are thrown at Black and Latinx gang members with impunity.