Happy Munkey: From 22 Arrests to NYC’s Most Authentic Cannabis Brand

I’ve visited my share of dispensaries across the five boroughs at this point. Walk in, browse the menu, chat up the budtender, walk out. Happy Munkey on Dyckman Street is not that experience. Within five minutes of stepping inside, I watched a middle-aged Dominican woman—someone you would not expect to see in a cannabis shop—tell a staff member this place was her “sanctuary.”

Ramón Reyes, co-founder, was standing next to me. He didn’t flinch. “It doesn’t matter if you’re blue-collar, white-collar, or a kid from the projects,” he said. “They all feel comfortable here.”

Happy Munkey—the first legal cannabis dispensary above 125th Street in Manhattan—sits at 151 Dyckman, in the heart of Inwood. Co-founders Vladimir Bautista and Reyes opened it in September 2024. A second location followed on Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn, though crushing rent and unlicensed competition forced a temporary closure. On January 30, 2026, Happy Munkey celebrated the Fulton Street grand reopening. These guys don’t stay down.

From Sugar Hill to the Studio 54 of Cannabis

Both men grew up in upper Manhattan—Vlad in Sugar Hill, Ramón in Harlem—during the crack epidemic. Vlad’s mother, a Dominican immigrant, raised him and his two siblings on 139th and Broadway on coupons and welfare. As a kid, he ran errands for the local drug dealers—going to the store, the cleaners—because they couldn’t leave the block.

“If you ever seen A Bronx Tale, I grew up in the Dominican version,” Vlad told me. “My area was like Walmart or BJ’s for cocaine and heroin. For the whole East Coast.”

Cannabis found him at 12 or 13. By 16, the entrepreneurial instinct kicked in. Nobody was servicing the weed market in Sugar Hill—the cocaine guys considered it beneath them. “I’m going to buy an ounce, and if it doesn’t sell, I’ll smoke it.” That ounce turned into a seven-days-a-week operation, noon to 5 AM. The authorities, though, didn’t look the other way. Twenty-two arrests. Time upstate.

Ramón’s path ran parallel—27 years in the legacy market. In 2017, the two high school friends merged forces. Ramón had visited Amsterdam and seen the café consumption model. They had a 5,000-square-foot recording studio on 38th Street, so they threw a party—weed instead of alcohol—and it took off. Once a month became once a week became seven nights, two to three hundred people deep. Forbes called it the “Studio 54 of Cannabis” in 2019.

Those rooms revealed something. Vlad would sit with guys from the West Village or Tribeca who had never once been arrested for smoking weed. Everyone he knew from uptown had been through the system multiple times. “People called it a broken system,” he says. “It wasn’t broken. It was working exactly the way they designed it.”

Fighting for the Bill—Then Coming Home

COVID shut down the events, but Happy Munkey pivoted to content—podcast, magazine, TV, merch—and fought for the MRTA, the Marihuana Regulation and Taxation Act, over a competing bill that would have handed licenses to the highest bidders. Thousands of petition signatures. “The big donors on the other bill were like, ‘Who the fuck is Happy Munkey?’”

Ramón frames the stakes: “If the worst that can happen is we get arrested for 24 to 48 hours for changing the trajectory of cannabis in the capital of the world forever, we were okay with taking that chance.”

The MRTA became law on March 31, 2021. Both men received CAURD licenses. Investors told them to set up in Times Square or SoHo. Ramón: “To them, it was ‘those people.’ To us, these are our people. If we didn’t do it, nobody else was going to bet their brand on a community like this.”

The Last Frontier

Education is the piece that makes Happy Munkey more than a retail operation. Vlad gave presentations at senior centers and testified before the community board’s aging committee. Ramón describes the daily reality: “The number one issue in this industry is education. We’re at the front talking to old folks that don’t speak English. They’re looking at us like, ‘Marijuana? No!’ But we’re saying, ‘Yes, cannabis, medicine.’ We give them that two-minute moment so they go home and tell their son, ‘Don’t buy at the corner, there’s a licensed place.’”

When I asked what barriers remain, Ramón didn’t hesitate: consumption lounges. “Consumption has to be next because that’s what New York is known for—the hospitality capital.” Vlad: “Nobody wants to be inside their apartments. Most of the city lives in NYCHA or co-ops where you can’t smoke. Where do these people go?”

Ramón’s advice for legacy operators trying to cross over is characteristically direct: “You have a PhD and a Harvard degree in cannabis. It’s impossible for any white-collar person to be more of an expert than you. Walk into these rooms understanding that you are the expert.”

Before I left, I asked the team what they were smoking. José, their lifestyle and promotions guy, kept it simple: “The Runts. My José Rose pre-roll.” Vlad rattled off a full schedule—Melted Strawberries by Skyworld for the wake and bake, Lemonati by Sizzle at lunch, Blue Nerds by Bouquet Flowers for the nighttime. Ramón: “Sizzle is hitting. Bouquet is hitting.”

If it’s New York cannabis, Happy Munkey knows.