Search the name Silk Road and the first thing many people find is the website. It deserves a straight account, because the story of that market is part of why legal cannabis exists at all, and because Silk Road NYC, a licensed dispensary at 166-30 Jamaica Ave, gets asked about it every week. We are not connected to it. Here is what it was.
🛒 Shop Menu How Delivery WorksFeb 2011 to Oct 2013
Life sentence 2015; pardon Jan 21, 2025
Licensed by NY State, OCM-CAURD-24-000062
Accepted here since 2024
Silk Road launched in February 2011 as a marketplace reachable only through the Tor network, with payments in Bitcoin. Its operator used the name Dread Pirate Roberts. Most of what was sold was drugs, cannabis chief among them, alongside other contraband. Buyers rated sellers, disputes went to escrow, and the site ran on a reputation system that, in a strange way, anticipated how legal retail would later verify products and sellers.
On October 2, 2013 the FBI seized the site and arrested Ross Ulbricht in a San Francisco library. Prosecutors described roughly 1.2 billion dollars in sales over the site's life. A successor, Silk Road 2.0, was seized in November 2014. Ulbricht was convicted in February 2015 and sentenced that May to life in prison without parole. On January 21, 2025, after more than eleven years in custody, he received a full presidential pardon.
The market proved two things that the legal industry now takes for granted: that people would pay for tested, reviewed, consistent cannabis if a trustworthy system offered it, and that Bitcoin worked as money. Twelve years later, New York issues licenses to sell cannabis openly, every product is lab tested and tracked from seed to sale, and Silk Road NYC was the first dispensary in New York to accept Bitcoin at the counter. The demand the website exposed is now served in daylight, with an ID check and a receipt.
Silk Road NYC is a New York State licensed adult-use dispensary, license OCM-CAURD-24-000062, opened February 23, 2024, 100% owned by its founder. Everything on the shelf is grown and tested in New York and sold under state rules to adults 21 and over. We took the name for the ancient trade route and its camels, and we keep it because the name carries a lesson: the market always existed, and the only question was whether it would be legal, tested and safe. Here it is.
No. The website was an illegal online market shut down by the FBI in 2013. Silk Road NYC is a New York State licensed dispensary that opened in Jamaica, Queens in February 2024, named for the ancient trade route.
He was arrested in October 2013, convicted in February 2015, sentenced to life without parole in May 2015, and pardoned by the President on January 21, 2025.
Because it belongs to a trade route that carried cannabis for 2,500 years, and because the website's history is a reminder of why licensed, tested, legal cannabis matters.