What's Up in New York?

After months of negotiations, an effort to legalize recreational cannabis via the legislature fell apart at the end of the 2019 legislative session. Compromise legislation that decriminalizes cannabis possession and expunges past cannabis convictions was approved instead.

Do you know where your state legislators stand on cannabis legalization? Ask them yourself!

Where Are Things Going? Recreational cannabis legalization appears unlikely to happen in 2019, but the debate will almost certainly continue during the 2020 legislative session. Where Are Things Now? While support for legalization is relatively strong in New York, there isn’t enough support in the State Senate to pass a bill.

Even among lawmakers who support legalization, there are disagreements on contentious issues like expungement, social equity, home grow, and taxes.

Cannabis legalization advocate Crystal Peoples-Stokes is currently Majority Leader of the State Assembly following the Democrats’ victory in the 2018 election. The legalization bill she introduced—the Marijuana Regulation & Taxation Act—included provisions that would direct tax revenue from cannabis sales to racial and social equity programs.

Medical cannabis has been legal since 2014, but only non-smoked forms of cannabis are allowed

Medical cannabis is available to patients with qualifying conditions such as AIDS, cancer, Crohn’s disease, PTSD, chronic pain, epilepsy, and opioid user disorder, among others.

Possession of small amounts of cannabis was decriminalized in 1977, but arrests for having cannabis in “public view” have been common since then, especially in NYC. Fun Fact: Famed NYC Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was an early proponent of cannabis legalization. In 1944, his LaGuardia Committee released the United States’ first-ever study on the effects cannabis. It determined that cannabis was not addictive or a gateway drug.