Here’s what New Jersey governor Phil Murphy wants to see in a legal weed bill.

“Overwhelmingly any bill that I’m gonna sign is gonna have to have a very robust element of social justice,” he explained. “That’s the first, most important, far and away, most important reason we’re doing this.”

Murphy said New Jersey has one of the widest white/non-white gaps in persons incarcerated in America. So he believes if the legislation does not speak directly, with strength, to that problem he doesn’t care about the other benefits.

“We have to do something about the young person, typically of color, who got in trouble on Friday for doing something that someone else on the next Monday did that was legal. We cannot sort of turn a page and leave, you know, thousands behind,” he explained. “And that has to be done carefully. That’s not an easy thing to accomplish.”

Another concern Murphy has, in terms of cannabis law, is that it is one of the “whitest industries.”

“So we’re gonna have to make sure that we have not only a lookback element to this, so we’re not leaving thousands of folks behind, who are invariably more often of color, but we also have to, if we’re gonna birth a new industry, let’s be smart about that, and make sure that we’re standing up on behalf of women and minority owned stakeholders as part of that,” he explained.