If New Jersey legalized pot, it would be impossible to stop people from bringing buds back to New York, unless the state restricted sales to residents only or police searched every single person coming through the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Penn Station, the PATH trains, and the six bridges and tunnels that connect it to Manhattan and Staten Island.
There is ample history of people crossing state lines to get legal intoxicants. The city of Port Chester, on the Westchester County side of the Connecticut border, blossomed with bars in the 1960s, when New York's drinking age was 18 and Connecticut's 21. Sunday beer runs to the New Hampshire border were common in Massachusetts before the state began letting stores sell it on Sundays, between 1990 and 2003.
“People want to buy from licensed dealers, and they’re willing to cross state borders to do that,” says Donna Kang Thomas, a Ph.D candidate at Columbia University who has researched the economics of the cannabis industry in Washington.
A University of Oregon study in 2017 found that after Oregon began legal sales of recreational marijuana in 2015, sales at pot stores in Washington counties along the border fell by 41%—and by almost 60% in the county across the river from Portland. Meanwhile, sales in the counties bordering Idaho were more than twice their share of Washington’s population.
New York also borders Massachusetts, which is scheduled to begin retail sales in July, and Vermont, which legalized possessing and growing small amounts in January, notes state Sen. Liz Krueger (D-Manhattan), who has sponsored bills for the last four years to legalize cannabis and regulate it like alcohol.
“We’re losing all this income,” she says, although she adds that the more important reasons to end prohibition are “economic and social justice, protecting young people, and rational thinking” about marijuana.