New York Appeals Court Opens Door to Renewed Hemp Shop Raids

The bad old days of armed New York SWAT cops raiding hemp product sellers in search of noncompliant products could be coming back again. A state appeals court has overturned a lower court’s preliminary injunction on behalf of hemp shop owners that barred state regulators and police from raiding their shops without a search warrant.

Although New York legalized marijuana in 2021, the state Cannabis Control Board introduced new regulations in 2023 that restricted which hemp products licensed retailers could sell, including products that were already on store shelves across the state. That led to hundreds of raids on hemp retailers, sometimes including heavily-armed police SWAT teams who handcuffed employees, rummaged through personal effects, and seized millions of dollars worth of noncompliant hemp products.

Claiming the warrantless raids were unconstitutional, the industry fought back in court. A number of hemp businesses led by Super Smoke N Save in Saratoga Springs filed a lawsuit in the state Supreme Court in Albany in 2024. In a January 2025 opinion, Supreme Court Justice Thomas Marcelle, agreeing that the Cannabis Control Board had violated the retailers’ right to be free of unconstitutional searches and seizures, issued a preliminary injunction blocking further raids.

The state agencies involved, as well as the New York City Sheriff’s Office, appealed the ruling, and on Thursday, the Appellate Division’s Third Department sided with the state, holding that the lower court erred in granting the injunction. The state, the court held, had properly defined how it conducted inspections, and retailers were required to consent to the intrusive inspection.

(In New York, the appellate courts are the highest judicial authority, while the Supreme Court is primarily a trial-level court of general jurisdiction.)

In its decision, the appeals court noted that the government must fulfill three requirements to conduct warrantless inspections: There needs to be a “substantial government interest” in enforcing the regulations, the inspections must “provide a constitutionally adequate substitute for a warrant,” and warrantless inspections are necessary to ensure the regulations are properly enforced.

The hemp retailers had argued that the state had failed to meet the requirements for a “constitutionally adequate substitute for a warrant, but the appeals court disagreed. It found that the state properly notified retailers that they could be subject to “regulatory inspections,” possessed the authority to impose administrative penalties for violations, and limited inspections to business hours.

The retailers argued the state failed on the third requirement, saying that inspections often resulted in heavy police presence, regulators or police turning off store surveillance cameras, and the detention of store employees.

“The cannabis law and its implementing regulations, when considered together, adequately define how inspections are conducted,” the Appellate Division wrote in its unanimous ruling. “An otherwise lawful administrative search is not rendered unconstitutional merely because police participate in the search or because the search uncovers evidence of criminal activity.”

The retailers should have exhausted administrative remedies before pursuing a lawsuit, the court added.

“The governing regulations offer prompt administrative review of enforcement actions … and petitioners concede that they failed to pursue those remedies,” the court held. “Petitioners’ fact-specific allegations regarding the seizure and/or destruction of lawful products, searches of nonpublic locations, participation of unauthorized or untrained police officers, and the lack of administrative review by a disinterested arbiter could have been, and should have been, tested through established administrative hearing procedure.”

Regulators and police in New York now have judicial permission to return to the days of heavy-handed raids. Stay tuned.