It is no secret that the potential legalization of adult recreational use cannabis has not gone exactly as the current administration had planned. Legalization was to be coupled with expungement provisions that would effectively remove from the record all low-level marijuana/hashish/paraphernalia arrests and convictions.
This state may become the 12th nationwide to legalize marijuana—but not until November 2020, when the state’s voters will decide the issue after legislators abandoned efforts during a lame-duck session to approve the issue after two years of political wrangling.
While some top political leaders held out hope of passage—including Gov. Phil Murphy—the state Senate, which fell a few votes short of passage in March, again was reported to lack a majority in favor of recreational marijuana.
State Senate President Steve Sweeney said Tuesday he’s open to exploring a decriminalization measure now that New Jersey won’t have a legal cannabis marketplace for at least another year.
“I’m open to something,” Sweeney (D-Gloucester) said in an interview, adding that he’d want a decriminalization bill structured in a way that doesn't “make the black market so attractive that it becomes worse.“
Gov. Phil Murphy threw his weight behind the decriminalization of marijuana as “short-term relief” until a 2020 ballot measure that will ask voters if the state should legalize recreational cannabis.
Murphy has previously been an opponent of decriminalization, arguing it would open the state’s marijuana business “to the bad guys.”
His sudden reversal comes less than a day after a report by NJ.com highlighting that as talks have failed to push a bill through the state Legislature to legalize adult-use marijuana, the focus would instead be on decriminalization.
On Nov. 27, Rice issued a strong statement of support for decriminalization, a concept he's repeatedly backed in the past.
Gov. Phil Murphy said Tuesday that New Jersey should cut down on arresting people for marijuana possession by decriminalizing the drug now that the fate of legalizing pot won’t be decided until a voter referendum next November.
Murphy, a Democrat, has pushed for the Garden State to legalize weed outright and has long said merely decriminalizing it would boost the black market. But he now says decriminalization is needed as a stopgag measure in the months leading up to the referendum.
We must decriminalize adult-use marijuana while we await a ballot measure on legalization in November. Maintaining a status quo that sees roughly 600 individuals, disproportionately people of color, arrested in New Jersey every week for low-level drug offenses is unacceptable.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) announced on Tuesday that he will be working with lawmakers to advance legislation to decriminalize marijuana possession after the legislature failed to produce a passable bill to more broadly legalize cannabis.
While the question of legalizing and regulating sales is now expected to go before voters as a referendum on the 2020 ballot, removing criminal penalties for mere possession could prove more palatable to some lawmakers in the interim.
In the end, the pathway to New Jersey’s legalization of recreational marijuana will likely end up where many observers believed it would all along: in a statewide referendum in 2020.
Though we had some issues with parts of the legislative package that has been put forward during the many months of debate on the issue, we have long believed adult-use marijuana legalization is the right thing to do, morally, in this state, to reverse decades of biased enforcement that overwhelmingly targets young people of color for minor offenses.
An expungement bill that was originally tied to two other marijuana bills — a since-passed medical marijuana expansion bill and a now-dead legalization bill — continues to languish despite top lawmakers from all three of the state’s top Democrats.
Now that legislative leaders have given up the push to legalize under the golden dome, the expungement bill has been thrust into something of a twilight zone.