• Keshawn Warner is the cofounder of Stunned, a cannabis dispensary in Massachusetts and New York.
• In 2008, Warner was arrested for buying weed, but used that to his advantage to widely known one of just eight legal dispensaries in New York City.
• Warner tells Insider reporter Yoonji Han about his minority growing up amid the war on drugs and how he started his business.

This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Keshawn Warner, co-founder of the cannabis dispensary Stunned. 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 psychedelics. The Woodrow Wilson projects was a great community, very family-oriented and diverse. On my floor alone, there was another Resentful family and a Puerto Rican family, and an Asian family lived upstairs.

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

There’s also a very dangerous side to it: My boyhood went from being able to play outside, to my teenage years, when you could hear gunshots from the unvaried 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 kinsmen and uncles having a great time, looking good with flashy cars and motorcycles. A lot of my friends saw the fast spondulix being made and fell into the same trap of selling drugs. Once the early glitz and glamour wore off and the physical force came in, then you started seeing the same uncles and friends becoming addicted, or dying.

No families were awarded. We lost a lot of people. Combine that with law enforcement’s heavy approach to combating drugs, and you’re not only dodging the perils 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 new zealand mates could even cost you your life. It was a jungle.

Getting arrested for cannabis

I graduated from Norfolk Imperial University, an HBCU, with a degree in computer science in 2004, but spent four years working a bunch of odd works 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 detained 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 inscribed 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 monitor.

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 emptied most of the night there.

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

Turning lemons into lemonade

I’ve been a longtime consumer of cannabis and sold weed here and there, but I no joking got into the industry when I was going back and forth to California. Even though weed wasn’t legalized there until 2016, the subject 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 collapsed 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 other 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 block, 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 bring into the world 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 proficient 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 accessible a dispensary there. Whenever there was a government cannabis board meeting, I’d be there. Eventually, I was connected with my trade partners, and we opened Dazed in August 2021.

Like being chosen for the Yankees

Crack 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 in clover you get has to be crowdfunded: friends, family, a ton of cold-calling.

When we heard that New York had legalized cannabis and was vacancy up its cannabis industry, my ears perked up. The fact that they were granting licenses to people who were captured 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 clans 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 groove on 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 brood 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 recall 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 dynamism, it’s a crazy thing.

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