Into the Weeds—New York City’s Attitude Towards Cannabis Legalization
Distillery on Film I Photo by Colby McCaskill
in 1,420 words
On March 31, 2021, pot began calling the kettle until it picked up the phone, then proceeded to announce that it had been legalized in the state of New York.
More than a year has gone by since the Marijuana Taxation and Regulation Act, commonly referred to as the MTRA, was signed into law. The changes have been seen as slow by some, nonexistent by others and irresponsible by more.
On a bright morning in early autumn, I set out with a mission to talk about weed legalization in New York.
And so, I found myself standing on an arbitrary corner, chatting with some local weed dealers. The air was rich with a sense of risk and legal ambiguity. An array of edibles, buds and blunts the size of premature carrots sat on a small metal table. One asked if I wanted to buy some. I told him no thanks.
“Sorry bro, I can’t. I’m not 21.”
“So what?” he replied. “I’m 19!”
“The dealers’ place of business” I Photo by Colby McCaskill
They laughed about how New Yorkers believe weed to be legal, but how in actuality only they knew the truth.
Leaning down to speak into my ear, one of them spit with such conviction. “This s**t not legal,” he confided. His hand nearly covered his mouth. He told me how he had “been to court four times for this s**t—since it’s been legal.” According to him, the police will still lock you up, they’ve done it before, and they’re not going to stop. I looked at him with a face filled with questions. He looked back with a face full of experience, eyes tired with understanding. At that moment, the question they were wrestling with clicked. Is weed truly legal?
In 2018, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio formed a task force to lay out a properly reasoned plan for the push to legalize cannabis. According to the report by the Mayor’s Task Force on Cannabis Legalization, legalizing weed would serve to amend the “disproportionate harms that criminalization of cannabis use has caused the City’s communities of color.” This report found that “arrests of Blacks and Hispanics accounted for between 86% and 89% of cannabis possession arrests in each of the years from 2013-2017.” Additionally, when broken down, the numbers show that “in 2017, of the 16,925 people in New York City arrested on the charge of Criminal Possession of Marihuana in the Fifth Degree, 48% were Black, 38% were Hispanic, and 9% were white.”
My immediate response to hearing such statistics was utter shock. Then, I began to wonder. Could it be that just fewer white people use weed? But according to the NYC Cannabis Use in New York City Data Brief of 2019, NYC Cannabis Use in New York City Data Brief of 2019, the opposite is true. Weed usage remains proportionately dominated by white users, between 2015-2016, both Black and Latino usage rates were under 15%, with white usage approaching 25%.
According to Juliet Miller, both a student at The King’s College and an advocate for recreational weed, disparate policing is “unfortunate and it's heinous… it’s about the right time in the right place; where you were, and what you look like. It's just back to the profiling.”
In the opening pages of the MTRA, New York’s state legislature wrote that the current criminalization of weed has “been ineffective in reducing or curbing marijuana use and [has] instead resulted in devastating collateral consequences including mass incarceration and other complex generational trauma…it is in the best interest of the state to regulate medical cannabis, adult-use cannabis, cannabinoid hemp and hemp extracts.”
In short, according to the MTRA, the licensed distribution of marijuana has been legalized to specifically bring about the end of unregulated black market cannabis, so that the New Yorker is less severely impacted by injustice evident in disparate weed usage and arrests.
At the beginning of the Fall 2022 semester, after the MTRA was passed, The King’s College formally updated the Student Handbook to reflect the changing reality of drug possession in New York City. The official marijuana/cannabis policy, found on pages 98-99, states that possession of cannabis on campus, including in student housing, is not permitted.
But as Miller, an off-campus student, points out, “I'm not a student-athlete, so I’m pretty sure it's fine.” To her, “It's just like drinking, you know, in moderation.”
King’s policy strikes the nerve of one of the main nuances of the legalization conversation. I’ve often heard New Yorkers tout the phrase, “weed is legal” but it is essential to understand that New York has not legalized all possession, all consumption or all distribution of cannabis. Nor has it legalized cannabis for all ages either. In many common scenarios for students, cannabis is still illegal by design. For the dealers, weed still isn’t legal for anyone. Yet, according to the NYPD’s own statistics, weed seems, at the very least, to be more legal for some than others.
After bidding the dealers farewell, I sought out some NYPD officers to strike up a conversation with them about weed. One said that determining if someone is high is much harder than if someone is drunk. He explained how it makes the city that much worse to live in.
“Think of the five-year-old that’s innocently walking through their puff. Now she's high.” Another told me that they see it as “kind of selfish.”
The cops had mixed responses on whether or not legalization could legitimately lower the disproportionate number of those arrested for possessing weed.
Regardless of the law, one said, “people are still gonna buy it off the street. And you can’t tell between weed and nicotine vape smoke. Just no regulation.”
Even so, they agreed that establishing legal dispensaries could possibly, eventually, get the stuff off the street and under regulation. After speaking with them, my big question was revised. It now asked, to what extent is weed legal?
The walk from the dealers to the cops was only three minutes. So, with the current lack of regulation, can legal marijuana truly turn the tide of injustice?
The King’s College’s position on this issue came from David Leedy, Dean of Students. “The college’s stance is contained in the Student Handbook policy,” Dean Leedy said. “I don’t have much to add other than that I have personally seen the detrimental effects of marijuana abuse.”
Dean Leedy also explained that “like other violations of college policy, we strive to take a Matthew 18 approach. We encourage individual conversations with the offending student and seek to clarify college and New York legal expectations for that student.”
As the MTRA points out, injustice has occurred because “existing marihuana laws have disproportionately impacted African-American and Latinx communities.”
Simultaneously, substance abuse in New York has been seen as one of the major causes of death in homeless populations. According to the NYC Department of Homeless Services, “among [homeless] men, the largest proportion [of deaths] was due to substance use.”
For Dean Leedy, “as one who has worked with students for 30 years, I want students to develop their own convictions and exercise discernment when it comes to matters such as this.”
Interestingly, Miller concludes that “nicotine is technically more addictive. The thing is that weed has been called the devil's lettuce for so long. So it's gonna take a long time to destigmatize.”
According to Dr. Timothy Fong, one of the lead faculty members of the UCLA Cannabis Research Initiative, “Cannabis is not as addictive as nicotine, but it’s not a zero percent chance.” Dr. Fong continued, saying, “With nicotine, there is about a 30% chance you get addicted. With cannabis, there is about a 9% chance.”
On the train home, I read through my notes. A weed dealer, only a year older than me, was convinced that weed still wasn’t legal. The cops, certain that it was legal, were upset at such legislation. Students at The King’s College were pitted between a city filled with weed and a handbook policy against it. In the midst of it all, the MTRA expressed its purpose to reconcile the racially disparaging damage of unequal policing of cannabis possession. In a very real sense, the MTRA is legislation born out of a response to the question of, to whom is weed legal.
My thoughts rumbled in my head like the subway under my feet. The legislation was passed, and yet the division still persisted. Does it just need more time? I asked myself. Even, just enough time for the smoke to settle?
Colby McCaskill is a freshman at The King’s College majoring in Journalism, Culture and Society. He loves to write and enjoys running in the rain.