Fifty years ago, our country declared the War on Drugs, and New York enacted the draconian Rockefeller drug laws, setting a dangerous blueprint for using drugs as a justification for targeting and criminalizing Black and Brown communities. The full-throttle drug war approach defunded vital community-led programs and weaponized the criminal legal system when a public health approach was needed.
Several years later, an uproar over excruciatingly long sentences for marijuana use — led particularly by suburban New York parents who decried how their teen and early adult kids’ futures were eclipsed by incarceration — created the political will in Albany to decriminalize personal possession of marijuana in 1977.
Flash forward a couple of decades to the height of the stop-and-frisk driven marijuana arrest crusade, and New York City alone arrested more than 50,000 people annually for low-level possession. There were more than 800,000 arrests for marijuana possession alone in the two decades preceding cannabis legalization for adult use — all arrested over a charge that wasn’t supposed to be illegal.
The vast majority of those criminalized were young Black or Latinx people, even though rates of use are quite similar across race and ethnicity. As a result, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers had their families and lives derailed. Beyond the criminal system, people criminalized for marijuana use faced dire impacts on their access to housing, employment, and education. They often were ensnared in the vicious family policing system (commonly known as child welfare) or immigration detention and deportation.
Marijuana prohibition created generational poverty and roadblocks to opportunity that continue to exist in families and communities today. As the city comptroller’s 2018 analysis showed, the New York City neighborhoods with the highest marijuana arrest rates are the same parts of the city with the worst socioeconomic indicators like unemployment rate, poverty concentration, low credit scores, and homeownership rates.
Hindsight is always 20/20; thankfully, humans can evolve, learn, and change. Every day presents us with a new opportunity to be better than the day before. In 2021, New York State passed the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act (MRTA) as a good-faith effort to begin the arduous process of repairing many of these tremendous harms. The MRTA set forth powerful retroactive justice provisions and forward-looking protections to build a foundation for New York rooted in personal and community safety and equitable access to necessities like housing, jobs, and education.
Despite the MRTA’s quiet but methodical and profound reshaping of how New Yorkers can access jobs, housing, and education and keep their families together with protections for parents who consume lawfully and safeguards against deportation, its broad impact on under-resourced and overburdened communities continues to be largely overlooked. The recent lawsuit settlement for the Conditional Adult Use Retail Dispensary licenses, dispensaries, and licensing has held the limelight for much of the media attention around the legalization rollout in New York.
Yet, as an accounting ledger tracks the nitty gritty gains and losses in business accounting, the MRTA is racking up gains by all measures. Just because the road has been bumpy and there are hurdles does not mean this is the time to lose our resolve. This is the crucial moment to redouble our efforts to enact the vision and the fully transformative opportunity that is a fundamental part of the framework within the MRTA.
As we kick off the year, because of the MRTA New Yorkers will not be faced with such horrors that were previously commonplace.
A year before statewide marijuana reform passed, a mob of police officers in Brooklyn swarmed a young Black teen outside of a park in Brooklyn, and video shows them viciously beating him as he pleads for his mother — all because officers claimed to smell marijuana. The MRTA ensures the police can no longer stop, search, question, or harass anyone, including minors, by using cannabis enforcement as the justification.
In the decade before legalization, the purported odor of cannabis had become one of the most oft-used reasons for the massively racially disproportionate marijuana arrests and enforcement by the NYPD and a fundamental violation of New Yorkers’ civil rights.
Students are not being strip-searched without their parent’s consent over suspicions of marijuana, as was the experience of four 12-year-old Black girls in Binghamton in 2019. Thanks to the MRTA, young people now have factual educational resources that underscore the risks of use — and it has created space for them to speak with knowledgeable and trusted adults without the fear that they will get in trouble.
A Black mother from the Bronx recently sued the NYC Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) for improperly sequestering her newborn from her at the hospital and subjecting her and her family to months of invasive investigations after she legally smoked cannabis. The MRTA gave her the means to advocate for her family, and ACS settled with her for $75,000. Now, there is a template for any future lawsuits needed to hold this and other agencies accountable under the protections in the bill.
Because of the MRTA, people are not facing eviction or permanent exclusion from housing over marijuana. Decade after decade, New York tenants were kicked out of housing or had to grapple with the gut-wrenching reality of not allowing family members who had a prior marijuana arrest even to come just to visit on public housing grounds. If they did, any family member resident could be evicted. No more.
The efforts leading up to the MRTA established a standard for expungement of cannabis convictions on which the MRTA expanded — and that freed hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers from the educational and employment burdens and barriers of a cannabis record. These provisions in our landmark legalization bill provided stepping stones for broader justice initiatives dealing with expungement, such as the Clean Slate Act, which was signed into law by Gov. Hochul.
For decades, New Yorkers applying for work and even those already in stable jobs were routinely required to submit to dehumanizing and intrusive drug tests to get or maintain work. Despite there being no the absence of proof that drug testing employees increases productivity or predicts impairment, millions of New Yorkers had their job opportunities blocked because of the widespread practice.
The marijuana justice campaign worked with the NYC Council to pass groundbreaking legislation limiting pre-employment cannabis testing for most positions in 2019, and the MRTA extended these protections for workers statewide and to existing employees who should not face penalties for lawful consumption off-the-clock. These protections now serve as a north star for other states and cities like California and Washington, D.C. to adapt their labor laws to follow New York.
We can’t snap our fingers and immediately undo the decades of damage wrought by punitive marijuana policies that have harmed people across nearly every aspect of daily life. Still, we were clear that the remedies for the devastation caused by New York’s marijuana arrest crusade needed to be just as comprehensive as the harm done to people and communities.
Additional relief for New Yorkers is on the horizon: The MRTA created a Community Reinvestment Fund, which will channel 40% of state tax revenue — set to be millions of dollars annually — to provide a mechanism to invest in communities disproportionately impacted by the drug war. It will be accessible to community-based nonprofit organizations for job training and placement, re-entry services, adult education programming, and other services supporting people and communities harmed by the marijuana arrest crusade.
The other large funding streams from the MRTA will go to the state Education Department (40%) and to a drug treatment and public education fund (20%). Additional allocations from tax revenue will cover the costs of conducting studies analyzing the impacts of marijuana legalization on public health, public safety, youth use, the state economy, the environment, and on the criminal justice system.
It’s easier to focus on a single complicated aspect of a new system, like dispensaries, than it is to zoom out and look at the full picture of all the damage that has not happened because of the far-reaching protections in the MRTA. More work lies ahead in establishing New York’s first legalized adult recreational cannabis marketplace. But let’s not forget how far we’ve come.
Frederique is the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, where Moore is the director of civil systems reform.
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