NJ legalized weed but left out black market pot dealers. Now, they want in.

This isn’t legal.

Recreational marijuana, as of last week, is legal in New Jersey, but what Ed Forchion is pulling off at his restaurant on East State Street — or, rather, down the alley and behind the restaurant — is something entirely different.

On a recent day, a dozen or more people were crammed into a small hallway behind NJ Weedman’s Joint, the restaurant bearing the moniker he’s worn as a legal weed advocate the last 20 years. Forchion’s customers hunched over to peer into a glass case filled with individual jars of marijuana flower.

On the shelves behind the displays were small, sealed, pre-weighed bags — $40 to $60 for a one-eighth ounce of marijuana or three of any strain for $100. Whole ounces of pot went for $250 to $350, anywhere from $50 to $150 less than what the state’s licensed medical marijuana dispensaries are charging.

At the end of the hallway two dealers sat at tables with the kind of plastic containers normally used to store leftovers but adapted to peddle pot as people walked into the warm, unmistakably skunk-smelling inside or back outside into the cold. [Read more at Asbury Park Press]