A new cannabis dispensary has settled into Getzville. Northtowns Cannabis, located at 2353 Millersport Highway, is a licensed adult-use dispensary. The shop's arrival lands amid a statewide cannabis market that keeps expanding even as some of its earliest hopefuls are still stuck waiting for approval.
Northtowns Cannabis was founded by Scott Mazza, who also owns Buffalo's Vitality CBD, per the Buffalo News. According to Step Out Buffalo, the shop is a licensed adult-use cannabis dispensary in the Town of Amherst, open daily from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. for in-store shopping, curbside pickup and delivery. Customers must be at least 21 years old and present a valid government-issued photo ID to shop there, the outlet notes.
Mazza eventually joined the ranks of licensed operators after a lengthy licensing wait. The Buffalo News also notes that New York's recreational cannabis industry is about four years old, and that a backlog of applicants, described as including hundreds still waiting for approval, continues to work through the state's licensing pipeline.
A Crowded Field in Amherst and Beyond
Northtowns Cannabis joins a statewide market with 744 licensed adult-use dispensaries open and operating.
Those figures sit alongside a broader statewide snapshot that paints an even bigger picture. A statement from Governor Kathy Hochul's office dated October 27 listed 744 licensed adult-use dispensaries open and operating statewide, compared with 1,039 licensed adult-use retailers overall, as reported by MG Magazine. The same statement said 56 percent of adult-use cannabis licenses had been awarded to Social and Economic Equity applicants.
Sales Climbing, But Not Evenly
New York's legal cannabis market has surpassed $2 billion in retail sales, according to the Buffalo News. MG Magazine's more recent figures put the state's regulated market at approximately $1.41 billion in retail sales through the first nine months of 2026 alone, including $512.6 million in the third quarter. Cumulative retail sales have topped more than $4.1 billion since adult-use sales began in December 2022, per the outlet's reporting.
Growth hasn't been uniform across the state's dispensary map. MG Magazine notes that average daily retail sales rose 3.3 percent between June and September, even as average annualized sales per adult-use dispensary declined 3.4 percent over the same stretch — a sign that as more shops open, each one may be splitting a smaller slice of the pie. A separate CBS News report found that a total of 631 licensed cannabis dispensaries had opened across New York, with the state's cannabis market having generated $3.3 billion in sales by that point, as reported by CBS News.
What the Wait Looks Like for Other Applicants
Mazza's experience echoes accounts from other New York cannabis entrepreneurs who have described years of delays before getting their doors open. One contributor writing for High Times said they applied for a CAURD license in 2022 and later submitted an application in the regular licensing round, where their position landed around 2,100 out of 2,200 hopeful applicants statewide. While waiting, the contributor said they paid $2,500 a month for an empty storefront, and that a federal judge blocked five New York regions from opening dispensaries in 2023, further stalling the process.
Even once approval finally arrived, the costs kept coming. The High Times contributor said the congratulations email arrived alongside a $7,000 fee to issue the certificate for in-store display. The New York State Office of Cannabis Management says application queues for the window that ended December 18, 2023 were created using a random sequence process, though the agency's published materials don't detail further how that process worked.
