Don’t delay justice. Only legislation can end the injustices of marijuana prohibition, ACLU says
In the campaign to legalize marijuana, one statistic has stood out for years: Black people in New Jersey are arrested for marijuana possession at a rate three times higher than white people, despite similar usage rates.
The severe disparities have persisted, but the number of arrests has skyrocketed. When the ACLU-NJ released a report three years ago analyzing marijuana arrests between 2000 and 2013, marijuana-related arrests were at an all-time high of 27,923 annually. In 2017, that number was 37,623 arrests, as documented in a newly released ACLU-NJ data brief.