More than 31,000 people have been arrested in New Jersey on a marijuana-related charge this year.

That works out to one arrest every 14 minutes.

So as the effort to legalize recreational marijuana moves into the lame duck legislative session — a time to settle unfinished business — we should reiterate that our state arrests more people for pot than any other. Even though the Attorney General applied a six-week adjournment on minor possession cases for prosecutors in late summer, the number keeps rising year after year.

Result: Another 31,113 New Jersey lives – the disproportionate number of them minorities — tripped up, derailed, and perhaps ruined in the first 10 months of 2019.

That’s like taking every school kid in the city of Newark and arbitrarily slapping each one with a police record.

All for something that is done legally by 100 million other Americans in 11 U.S. states.

The outrageous criminal justice consequences alone are enough to support Sen. Steve Sweeney’s bid to end this stupefying waste of time, money, resources, lives, and law-enforcement manpower.

The Senate President is going to take another crack at legalization, and starting Wednesday he has six weeks to win the hearts and minds of a handful of people in his caucus who still blanch at misperceptions about the effects that marijuana has on the community and public health.

For them, we offer these reminders:

Prohibition has created urban devastation, and the absurd racial disparity in arrests has resulted in generations of children growing up fatherless. Legalization has done nothing to increase the rate of youth marijuana usage, multiple studies have shown. And decriminalization is not so much a half-measure as a worthless gesture, because as Amol Sinha of the ACLU points out, “It doesn’t undo the damage that the war on drugs has inflicted on our state, and it doesn’t create opportunities for the communities that were devastated by that war.”

Or, as Sweeney puts it, “All decriminalization does is validate the guy selling an unregulated product on the corner. Do we really want to risk that with the vaping thing going on now?”

Clearly, the age of marijuana prohibition is nearing its end. The question is which political leaders will cast their votes on the right side of history and how long will it take until we find out. https://t.co/qMlTt7By5k — NORML (@NORML) October 31, 2019

He and Gov. Murphy made these arguments in March and fell a few votes short. If Sweeney can’t summon enough votes among his members during lame duck, he will begin work on a constitutional amendment that will be placed on the ballot for 2020.

Of course there should be more discussion — about keeping edibles from children, about expungement, about purchase limits, about economic opportunity. Sweeney’s door is always open. But nothing can be gained by waiting until 2020, either: Fortunately, Bill Caruso of New Jersey United for Marijuana Reform, who helps whip the votes, senses that political minds have shifted since last March.

One thing that hasn’t changed is public opinion. The last Monmouth poll showed that 62 percent of the people in this state favor legalization. The other thing that hasn’t changed is that New Jerseyans are being arrested at ludicrous rate. Ask Newark public safety director Anthony Ambrose whether he wants his cops spending another 1,800 man-hours next year busting kids for carrying joints instead of fighting crime.

Only legislative action can fix this. Lame duck is a time for unfinished business. This session is best spent preventing social injustice and repairing fragmented lives.

NJ is set to vote on a marijuana legalization bill that has strong measures to reverse the damage of the War on Drugs.



I hope this bill passes & NJ can lead the nation on this. Marijuana legalization & social justice *must* go hand in hand. We can’t have one without the other. — Sen. Cory Booker (@SenBooker) March 22, 2019

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