Arrests

Two New York State legislators have proposed a simple, effective legislative fix to New York City's 15-year marijuana arrest craze. Senator Mark Grisanti, a white Republican from Buffalo, and Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, a black Democrat from Brooklyn, have together offered legislation that would strike from the law the misdemeanor for simple marijuana possession of less than an ounce. The NYPD made 50,000 of these marijuana possession arrests in 2010 and 500,000 arrests since 1997.

In a rare show of bipartisanship and upstate-downstate agreement, freshman state Sen. Mark Grisanti is co-sponsoring a bill with Democratic Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries to reduce from a misdemeanor to a violation public possession of small amounts of marijuana. The co-sponsors say many people, especially minorities in New York City, end up getting arrested for small amounts if they are stopped by a police officer and told to empty their pockets -- at which point the possession becomes public.

In a televised speech on the House floor about his arrest in Connecticut last Friday on driving-under-the-influence and marijuana-possession charges, House Minority Leader Robert A. Watson admitted to using marijuana to treat flare-ups of the pancreatitis that landed him in the hospital last November. Watson, R-East Greenwich, said he took a small amount of the drug with him when he went to Connecticut that day to help a friend move because he had had a pancreatic attack the day before, and wanted the drug handy if he had another severe one.

April 20 (4/20) -- the date unofficially recognized nationwide as marijuana day -- is probably as good a time as any to explore how marijuana arrests in the Unites States exemplify racially skewed policing tactics.

New York spends $75 million a year to lock up people caught with marijuana, a new study says, even though it's not technically a crime. The report by the Drug Policy Alliance says the NYPD spends that much on 50,000 annual marijuana arrests, in which 86% of those arrested are black or Latino. State law requires people carrying small amounts of marijuana to receive the equivalent of a traffic ticket, but critics say the NYPD arrests and jails them anyway - hurting their job and life prospects.

It’s a bit shocking to grasp the role that the Democratic Party, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have played in undermining the lives of hundreds of thousands of young minority men. In a very hard-hitting op-ed on October 24th, “Smoke and Horrors” New York Times Saturday columnist Charles Blow, citing the work of City University Professor Harry Levine, makes four truly mind-jolting points.