NEW YORK (PIX11) -- New York is finally borrowing a page out of New Jersey’s playbook and empowering local authorities to crack down on illegal smoke shops.

The thousands of stores that have popped up on streets around the city have strangled New York’s budding legal recreational marijuana industry and become crime magnets.

One potrepreneur, Peter Beznos, showed PIX11 around the Williamsburg neighborhood where his legal and licensed dispensary Hii NYC was about to open.

A few storefronts down from him on Bedford Avenue, days before his grand opening, a sign went up reading “smoke shop” with a cartoon cannabis bud.

“Knowing that I’m opening on the block, the same block,” Beznos said, making clear he does not believe this is a coincidence.

In the same neighborhood, there were seemingly illicit stores on every block — selling cannabis openly. In one instance, state authorities did pay a visit to one store and shut it down -- not for illegally selling weed as openly advertised -- but for not having proper worker compensation coverage.

All across the city for nearly two years, New Yorkers have seen illegal smoke shops operating brazenly. PIX11 has reported on stores opening themselves back up in the rare cases where authorities put on the padlocks.

In one particularly alarming case, the New York City Sheriff’s Office recovered cocaine laced with deadly fentanyl in a raid on the east side of Manhattan -- in addition to bags of unregulated bud.

Beznos was among those who went to a recent meeting of New York’s Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) to plead for something to be done.

After the meeting, PIX11 pressed OCM Executive Director Chris Alexander about why the state is not cracking down on the illegal shops. Alexander said his office is trying, but it has been a challenge.

“We are conducting this activity as a regulatory inspection,” Alexander explained. “We seize the product, we shut down the store. Unfortunately, there’s so much overproduction, these stores reopen, and we have to shift resources and get back there, and it takes some time to get there.”

Alexander said local police could and should have been doing more.

“The penal law remains unchanged,” he said. “The felony offenses remain on the books for selling to a minor, possession over a certain amount, selling over a certain amount. We even created a new misdemeanor last year. But we did not see law enforcement engage in that way, so OCM took control of that activity.”

This is what happens in New Jersey, which legalized at about the same time as New York, but has not had the same issues.

In part one of “Legal Weed: Lighting a Path,” PIX11 introduced Osbert Orduna. He has a store in Queens surrounded by illegal competition, while on the other side of the river at his Jersey City location:

“They have their own task force of different city agencies, and so they are focused on not allowing the unlicensed operators to dominate the city,” Orduna said.

But New York City Mayor Eric Adams and even New York Gov. Kathy Hochul insist local police have been too legally limited in what they can do to ticket and padlock smoke shops. Authorities often have to rely on alcohol or tobacco violations to investigate.

So they worked within the recently passed state budget to make clear local municipalities can crack down on smoke shops illegally selling cannabis. Hochul ceremoniously handed Adams a padlock during a press conference, and two weeks later Adams announced that the crackdown had begun.

Alexander said illegal sales do not just hold back the budding adult-use recreational market — but also the product his office has seized can be downright dangerous. He said it is often produced in other states, fails to meet standards, and is sold on the black market in New York.

“We’ve seen from our testing pretty extensive heavy metals, E. coli and other contaminants that are coming out and hitting these shops,” Alexander said.

Next week on part three of “Legal Weed: Lighting a Path,” PIX11’s Henry Rosoff will take a deep dive into how legal cannabis markets make sure products are safe and tested -- literally going seed to sale -- and explain how that works.