The Owner Is an OG: From a Clay House in Dhaka to a Licensed Dispensary on Jamaica Ave

On February 17, 2024, six days before Silk Road NYC opened its doors, a user on r/NYSCannabis left five words under a thread about the new store on Jamaica Ave: "Silk Road has a dope spot and the owner is an OG!!" The commenter has never been identified. The owner, Sohan Bashar, says he has no idea who it was. It remains the shortest and most accurate description of the store anyone has written, and it deserves the long version.

A clay house in Dhaka

Bashar was born on November 3, 1990 in a slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The family home had clay walls and a straw roof. The cockroaches, he says, were the size of a thumb and did not bother running from people. In the monsoon months the water rose past the doorway, and the only way from the house to the main road was by boat. A trip to buy rice was a boat trip. Nobody in the neighborhood thought of it as hardship. It was simply how everyone lived.

Queens at five

He arrived in New York at five years old and grew up in Jamaica, Queens, on the blocks off Hillside Ave that would later be known as Little Bangladesh. His parents worked long hours. He was outside. By eleven he had smoked cannabis for the first time. By twelve he was smoking every day and selling enough to pay for it, and by twelve he had also been stopped and searched by police on the street more times than he can count. He describes that, too, as normal. It was how every kid he knew lived.

He is not sentimental about the age, and he does not dress it up. He tells the story because it is true, and because it is the entire reason the license on the store's wall exists.

What the license was written for

When New York passed the Marihuana Regulation and Taxation Act in 2021, the state decided that its first retail licenses, the Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary or CAURD licenses, would go to people with a prior cannabis conviction and a record of running a business. Not to investors. To the people who had been arrested for the plant. The law said, in writing, that the people prohibition had hit hardest should own the first stores.

Bashar was one of the people it hit. He applied, he qualified, and on February 23, 2024 Silk Road NYC opened at 166-30 Jamaica Ave as the 75th licensed adult-use dispensary in New York State and the first owned by a Bengali-American. QNS covered the ribbon cutting under the headline "From Legacy to Legal." The license number, OCM-CAURD-24-000062, is posted at the door.

What OG looks like at the counter

It looks like a Queens dispensary run by a buyer who has been buying cannabis on these blocks since childhood and knows exactly what bad product is. Package dates are checked before anything reaches the shelf. It looks like a store where the kid who was searched at twelve now runs the only search that happens: an ID check at the door, 21 and over, every visit, no exceptions.

It looks like a business that is 100% his. No investor group, no chain office upstate, the founder on the floor most days, prices set in the building. It looks like the first Bengali-American-owned dispensary in New York, in a neighborhood where thousands of families arrived the same way his did, on the same kind of boat. That story has its own page.

What he built with it

He built the shelf he wished had existed. Flower from New York farms, checked for harvest dates. Pre-rolls from Jeeter, Florist Farms and Claybourne. Live resin vapes from Fernway, Turn and Olio, and a wall of distillate and rosin carts beside them. Edibles, THC drinks, tea and tablets. All of it lab tested, all of it on the live menu with today's price, all of it on same-day weed delivery to every Queens ZIP, Brooklyn and Nassau.

Then he built what the chains will not. The dab bar, the only one at a dispensary in Queens, with hash rosin from Jaunty and Erva, concentrates from Silly Nice, Olio and New York Honey, and the largest dab-gear wall in the area: Puffco Peak Pro and Proxy, quartz bangers, e-nails, torches, and glass from Illadelph, GRAV and MJ Arsenal. Every piece of accessory on that wall is something he uses. The Puffco guide and the rosin guide were written from that counter.

And he built the free community event space, the first at any Queens dispensary, because the neighborhood that raised him is the neighborhood that fills it: movie nights, game nights, dab education, art shows, all free, all 21+. Benny the Butcher filmed a video here. Bitcoin has been accepted at the counter since 2024. The full list of firsts is here.

The part he wants twelve-year-olds to read

Asked what he would say to a kid standing where he stood, Bashar does not hesitate. The legal market exists so that kid does not have to be there. Wait. The store will still be here. Everything on the shelf is tested, labeled and sold only to adults, and that, he says, is the version of this plant he wishes had existed when he was on the corner.

The last word goes back to Reddit

"The owner is an OG." Two and a half years, 600+ Google reviews at 4.8 stars, and a shelf that Jamaica, Hollis, St. Albans, Flushing and Fresh Meadows drive past newer stores to reach. The commenter had it right in five words. The best dispensary in Queens is not a slogan here; it is a standard set by someone who spent twenty years finding out what the worst one looks like.

Silk Road NYC is at 166-30 Jamaica Ave, Jamaica, Queens, seven minutes from the 169 St F train, one block from the Q17, Q30 and Q31, with parking at the Home Depot on 168th St. Store hours are Sunday to Wednesday 10 AM to 9 PM and Thursday to Saturday 10 AM to 10 PM; delivery runs an hour later. Directions from anywhere in Queens, this week's deals, rewards, and two years of receipts on the legacy page.