For advocates, New York's new legal weed bill is a major victory against racist drug sentencing
New York's new marijuana bill puts jobs, student loans, and child custody back on the table for countless Black and brown residents whose lives were derailed by low-level marijuana convictions.
As a public defender, Eli Northrup and the organization he works for, the Bronx Defenders, represented thousands of young Black and brown community members facing life-altering marijuana possession charges. Northrup joined the fight to legalize marijuana in New York after witnessing countless lives destroyed over minor marijuana convictions while "mothers in the Upper East Side and Park Slope were blogging about how marijuana made them better parents."
"People across races use marijuana at equal rates, but only people of color were being punished," he told Insider.
But the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act, will change that. The bill creates a regulatory framework for a legal marijuana industry in New York while attempting to rectify the harm done by marijuana policing to Black, brown, and low-income communities. All minor marijuana convictions will automatically be cleared from criminal records.
"The great thing with the MRTA is that it allows for automatic expungement," Anne Oredeko, supervising attorney of the racial justice unit at the Legal Aid Society of New York, told Insider. New York governor Andrew Cuomo signed the bill into law on March 31 after years of advocacy work by organizations like the Drug Policy Alliance and Vocal-NY.
Oredeko added that marijuana possession will no longer be grounds for deportation, denying someone public housing or student loans, or separating people from their children. One of the biggest wins, according to Oredeko, is that the bill prohibits police from searching people on the basis of marijuana odor.
"We see every single day that police use marijuana odor as a defacto excuse after stop and frisk was outlawed. It became stop, sniff, and frisk," Northrup said. He called the bill a big step in the right direction even if it won't undo all the harm already done.
New York State decriminalized marijuana in 2019, but according to NYPD data, New York City alone had still summoned more than 10,000 people to court for marijuana-related charges the following year. Of those, only 3.84% were white. Nearly 60% (59.2) of summonses were of Black residents and 33.9% were Hispanic — even though those groups are only 14.1% and 29.1% of the city's general population respectively.
Jawanza Williams, the director of organizing at Vocal New York, told Insider the bill's passage acknowledges decades of state violence against Black, brown, and low-income communities, calling it "an example of how we should be crafting legislation" and how "to account for the violence of problematic politics in the past."
"This kind of policymaking in tandem with communities in tandem with progressive movement is exactly what we should be doing," Williams said.
Williams said the New York state bill is designed to avoid gentrifying the newly legal marijuana market and to account for the community cost of marijuana criminalization. A mandated 50% of marijuana business licenses will be reserved for social equity applicants and 40% of tax revenue from legal marijuana sales will go toward investment funds for communities most impacted by marijuana policing. That investment fund will also include small business loans for marijuana ventures — ensuring that people who made their living selling marijuana when it was illegal can continue to do so under legalization.
Williams is thrilled that the bill carves out a permanent percentage of tax revenue for impacted communities rather than simply including a one-time payment as Cuomo's previous proposals suggested. "As the marijuana market grows, the amount of money that goes into the security funding pool grows proportionately," Williams said.
However, the bill doesn't mean amnesty for everybody. While convictions will be expunged at the state level, that won't translate to federal immigration court. Northrup said people currently facing immigration litigation related to marijuana convictions should still seek legal aid.
Oredeko also urged state government officials to act quickly on behalf of people currently serving time for marijuana offenses, arguing their "freedoms are being reduced" even as recreational marijuana use is "no longer a crime." The biggest challenge moving forward for everyone, she said, is making sure the state actually enforces the law's goals of advancing racial equity in the criminal justice system and the emerging legal market.
For now, advocates celebrate the victory but warn Black and brown communities to stay vigilant. Amid continued calls for reform, Oredeko and Northrup say they're on the lookout for law enforcement's next stop-and-sniff-and-frisk effort.