Authored by Karen Robinson, Managing Attorney – VLJ ReLeSe Program
After New Jersey voters approved a marijuana referendum in November 2020, decriminalization followed in July 2021, and recreational sales began last month in April 2022. This month, we mark the two-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, and the societal reckoning of systemic racism and inequity that came in the aftermath of tragedy. With Black residents nearly three times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white counterparts (even though usage rates are comparable), the legalization and decriminalization of marijuana slowly bends the moral arc towards racial, social, and economic justice but more work lies ahead.
The legislature declared what VLJ’s ReLeSe program knows to be true: “A marijuana arrest in New Jersey can have a debilitating impact on a person's future, including consequences for one's job prospects, housing access, financial health, familial integrity, immigration status, and educational opportunities; and New Jersey cannot afford to sacrifice public safety and individuals' civil rights by continuing its ineffective and wasteful past marijuana enforcement policies.” New Jersey spent approximately $127 million per year on marijuana possession enforcement costs. The New Jersey courts have now automatically expunged more than 362,000 marijuana and hashish cases including distribution and possession charges (please visit the judiciary’s website here to learn more).
ReLeSe Managing Attorney, Karen Robinson, frequently presents on criminal record expungement panels alongside owner and founder of Blaze Law Firm, Chirali Patel, including most recently at the NJ Reentry Corp “Expungement to Employment” seminar in March moderated by former Governor Jim McGreevey. Chirali represents licensed operators and entrepreneurs seeking to enter an industry that prioritizes social equity businesses, licenses for women, minority and disabled-veterans, and targeted impact zones that Chirali shares, “were supposed to capture municipalities that met specific criteria based on the population of the township, high concentrations of law enforcement activity, rates of unemployment, and poverty—in essence, areas that were impacted the most by the war on drugs.”
However, the municipalities that met the criteria are not necessarily what one would consider an “impact zone.” For example, Chirali explains, “Wayne in Passaic County has been identified as an impact zone, but this is not only an affluent town, its neighbor is Paterson. An individual may be going into Paterson to pick up some marijuana, but gets pulled over in the town of Wayne because there is heavy policing to keep the town ‘clean’—what is the true impact zone, Wayne or Paterson? These impact zones will be recipients of large amounts of tax revenue that will be generated from the adult-use legal sales. Which municipality and its residents need the revenue the most—Wayne or Paterson?”
The Cannabis Regulatory Commission (CRC) may have recognized the deficiency with impact zones and based on their authority, they identified economically disadvantaged areas (EDA) based on zip codes in which the median income is 80% or less of the average median household income in New Jersey and has a health uninsured rate that is at least 150% of the health uninsured rate in the state. Individuals that have resided in an EDA for at least 5 out of the last 10-year period and meet the income requirements, can qualify as a "Social Equity" applicant and receive priority review for their cannabis license application. The overall process to obtain a legal license though, Chirali says, “Is inequitable to say the least, regardless of the impact zone or social equity designation. The intent of legalization and decriminalization was to alleviate the harms done by the war on drugs, but the individuals who have suffered the most have not been made whole and most of our state legislature does not seem to care. Our CRC is doing the best it can to work within the confines of the legislation set by our elected officials.”
Furthermore, marijuana is still a federally banned substance, making it illegal to transport outside the state, and there currently is no federal expungement law. There are 40,000 people incarcerated today in the U.S. for cannabis convictions and those with 1st and 2nd degree convictions are currently ineligible for expungement. And for those who are eligible for expungement, the backlog from the courts and New Jersey State Police is so severe that petitions are taking over a year to resolve, on top of the years-long waiting period required by the statute before filing.
VLJ’s mission is to ensure access to justice for people experiencing poverty, and we are committed to raising awareness of and fighting against systems, laws, and policies that create barriers to justice. Because, as Bryan Stevenson (founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative) concluded, “The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.”
If you would like to get involved with reentry legal issues and provide justice in this area, please become a volunteer with VLJ’s ReLeSe expungement program by signing up here or make a donation today to financially support our work by clicking here.