- Keshawn Warner is the cofounder of Dazed, a cannabis dispensary in Massachusetts and New York.
- In 2008, Warner was arrested for buying weed, but used that to his advantage to open one of just eight legal dispensaries in New York City.
- Warner tells Insider reporter Yoonji Han about his childhood 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 Dazed. 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 drugs. The Woodrow Wilson projects was a great community, very family-oriented and diverse. On my floor alone, there was another Black family and a Puerto Rican family, and an Asian family lived upstairs.
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