NYC pot dispensary pushing woke ‘Weed & Read’ program

A legal NYC pot peddler is trying to boost profits by also getting customers high on woke books, critics said.

Housing Works Cannabis Co. rolled out its new “Weed & Read” online promotion this month, during which customers buying certain pot products also get a book selected by the Manhattan-based dispensary.

February’s freebie: “Black Girl, Call Home,” by Newark, N.J.-born poet and pot advocate Jasmine Mans, is a series of poems about her path to becoming a queer black woman.

The tome includes lefty language with lines such as, “How do you tell a woman that raising a black son isn’t some type of inside joke crafted by God and some white man?”

To get a copy, stoners must purchase at least one of four products, including pineapple gummies running $30 or weed-infused honey going for $50 a bottle.

Other books rolling out in the coming months include Josiah Hesse’s “Runner’s High,” which bizarrely contends stoned athletes are better off than sober ones.

“I’ll learn that — despite popular misconceptions – cannabis users are typically more physically fit than their sober counterparts, and exercise more often than those who abstain from the plant,” he writes in the book’s intro.

Maud Maron, a parents rights activist and community education council member in NYC, questioned why Housing Works isn’t offering a more mainstream selection of books.

“Their book selection is part of a fact-free and quasi-religious leftism that folks on the left have lost their ability to critique or think critically about,” he said. “They’re advertising to a bunch of people that already agree with them.”

Unlike books, weed isn’t fundamental, Maron said, poking fun at the promotion’s pairing.

“Healthy living is putting down the bong and picking up the book,” she said. 

Councilwoman Inna Vernikov (R-Brooklyn) was flabbergasted upon learning of the free book program.

“Since sane and sober people don’t buy woke, the crazies have found a new marketing ploy to sell their indoctrination,” she said. “For the first time, the radicals are using logic; because one would have to be high as a kite to buy into their bullsh-t.”

Housing Works, a nonprofit that insists its main goal is fighting AIDS and homelessness, has previously come under fire for pushing “harm reduction” services on clients, including providing clean syringes to addicts.

Customers at Housing Works’ Greenwich Village shop – home of the state’s first licensed cannabis dispensary – had mixed reactions about the program.

“If you’re smoking a lot, you need to be exercising your brain,” said Asa Ohalete, a 21-year-old New York University student. “Without reading a book, you’ll fry your mind.”

Others weren’t so sure reading and ‘weeding’ is fundamental.   

“If it’s a cool picture book I could get into it, but reading any other kind of book while high? Definitely not,” said tech recruiter America Young, 33. 

Sasha Nutgent, Housing Works Cannabis Co.’s director of retail, said the “Weed & Read” program was developed to “highlight authors who are helping to destigmatize the nontoxic cannabis plant through their storytelling, their journalistic inquiry or their advocacy.”

“Each book chosen for the Weed & Read Program aligns with Housing Works’ values, which have stood strong since 1990,” she said.