Rick Fuentes headed the New Jersey State Police for 15 years before retiring in October. He was appointed by Jim McGreevey, a Democrat, and stayed through the administration of Chris Christie, a Republican.

"I always believed the state police should be apolitical," he said. "You serve both sides of the aisle."

He decided to retire almost exactly a year ago, he said, long before the eventual near-certain election of Gov. Phil Murphy began to take shape.

"I had an excellent cadre of lieutenant colonels," he said. "I thought it was time to give some of them a chance."

So, he didn't retire because of Murphy's promise to legalize marijuana. But had Fuentes not retired before the election, he would have done so right after.

That's how strongly he disagrees with the legalization of marijuana.

"I would have stepped aside," he said. "It would have been a moral compromise for me."

New Jersey State Sen. Ron Rice (D-Essex) also sees moral compromise in passing a marijuana legalization bill without "bringing all the issues to light."

Rice, a former Marine and Newark police officer, is the chairman of New Jersey Legislative Black Caucus.

He is reaching out to those members and the larger New Jersey Black Elected Officials Policy Alliance to discuss the ramifications of legalized pot on the black community. He is planning a series of town halls in urban centers, beginning with Jersey City on Feb. 21.

"Everybody says, 'Let's legalize pot because we're locking up more blacks -- three times more than whites -- on pot charges,'" Rice said. "Well, we can decriminalize. We don't have to legalize to turn those people loose."

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Rice and Fuentes said that the legal pot industry is targeting minority communities in Colorado.

"Look at where the stores are," Fuentes said. "Many are clustered in depressed neighborhoods."

"The last thing we need in Newark, which is finally starting to experience a comeback, is more stoned people on the street," Rice said. "I see this as big-money interests coming in to do harm to our community. Believe me, I've seen the effects of drugs on our streets. There are foreseeable consequences of legalization we would be negligent not to look at."

The two strongest arguments for legalization, both men said, are tax revenues and the disparity of arrests between whites and people of color.

"You can't make an economic argument when people's lives are at stake," Rice said.

Fuentes believes that any tax revenue will be negated by what it will cost to oversee and regulate implementation.

"For what the state will make, the social cost is too high," he said. "To legalize it, then spend the revenue on drug enforcement, education and treatment is like a dog chasing its tail."

Fuentes, 67, has vast experience fighting drugs, dating back almost 30 years.

It began with the discovery of a Sylmar, Cal., warehouse where two Colombian drug cartels stored 21 tons of cocaine to distribute across the country.

"Many of the trucks outside were registered in New Jersey, so we knew it was headed here," Fuentes said, who was on a joint anti-terrorism squad with the FBI in Newark at the time.

But the big California case made the New Jersey State Police realize they needed more resources on drug enforcement and Fuentes was pulled into the "war on drugs." Not at the street level. At the distribution level. Working with police in California, Texas, Florida and other states, he and state police detective Greg Wilson gathered intelligence to stop major supplies from coming into New Jersey. In four years, they intercepted 4,000-pounds of cocaine.

"I saw how enormous a problem it was," he said. "Before that (while in anti-terrorism), I had never even seen a crack vial. But then I saw the impact it had on the street level."

Fuentes became so intrigued with the enormity of large-scale distribution, it was the subject of his criminal justice doctoral thesis at City University of New York. With access to records of the Drug Enforcement Agency and interviews with cops and convicts alike, Fuentes researched the Cali drug cartel's business model, from the growing fields of Colombia to the streets of American cities.

Now he is taking the same "academic approach" to his personal war on the legalization of marijuana.

"I'm basing my opinion not on emotion, but science," he said. "There is evidence being overlooked by the pro-legalization side, or not brought into the discussion, that needs to be looked at."

For starters, Fuentes cites a 2015 report from the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Traffic Area, a group of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.

Among the findings are that marijuana-related traffic deaths rose 154 percent from 2006 to 2014, and marijuana-related emergency room visits climbed 77 percent from 2011 to 2014. The report also looked at high school suspensions and expulsions, which climbed 40 percent from 2008 to 2014. Colorado voters approved recreational pot use in 2012 and it was legalized in January 2014.

The report is controversial in that the pro-pot advocates say the language can be loosely applied. Marijuana "related" doesn't necessarily mean pot was the cause of the crash, the ER visit, or trouble in school. Pot advocates say THC, the psychoactive chemical in cannabis, can stay in the bloodstream long after the person is no longer impaired by its effects.

For Fuentes, those semantics are like playing with fire. Especially when it comes to cannabis users under the age of 21.

"Marijuana use by kids from 12 to 17 in Colorado leads the nation," he said. "And there are plenty of studies of the negative effect of marijuana on brain development in youth."

Because recreational pot is being sold in edibles, like brownies and cookies, Fuentes said, emergency calls to poison control are up 150 percent in Colorado.

Rice began his police experience in 1982, in the early days of the crack cocaine epidemic.

"I've seen it," he said. "I've seen what it does to a community. Now it's heroin, and opiates. Maybe you can't compare those to marijuana, but it is morally wrong for us to legalize any drug without fully understanding what we're getting into. There's a lot of problems with this and, to me, those problems are going to come down on the heads of the black community."

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Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com. Follow The Star-Ledger on Twitter @StarLedger and find us on Facebook.