This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
Weed in New York: good intentions, bad behavior and bureaucratic incompetence
Dear Reader,
I remember the day that Andrew Cuomo, then Governor of New York, was first accused of sexual harassment.
I texted a friend, “So I guess we’re getting legal weed now?”
New York and California are yoked together in the public imagination as two bastions of coastal progressivism, but on the issue of weed legalization California moved much faster.
California voted for the legalization of medical marijuana in 1996, although it took nearly a decade for the state to start issuing the necessary paperwork. Proposition 215 allowed for weed to be prescribed for “cancer, anorexia, AIDS, chronic pain, spasticity, glaucoma, arthritis, migraine, or any other illness for which marijuana provides relief”.
That last clause opened a loophole through which many a perfectly healthy person would march, head held high, with the leash of an emotional support iguana in one hand and a doctor’s note for chronically bad vibes in the other. This pantomime was allowed to continue for nearly a decade before weed became legal for recreational use by adults in 2016.
Legalization has long been fairly popular in New York City, which first partially decriminalized weed in 1977, but the structure of state government means that the city rarely gets its own way in Albany. It doesn’t help that the state’s alcohol distributors and retailers represent a powerful and well-funded political lobby.
In 2014 Cuomo legalized medical marijuana, but with a much stricter set of qualifications than those which applied in California. You basically had to prove that you had a condition that was not treatable in any other way meaning, for example, that if you had Stage 4 cancer you had to demonstrate that you could not tolerate traditional narcotic painkillers before getting relief from weed. It was needlessly bureaucratic and cruel, but that’s New York in a nutshell.
In 2018, under pressure to at least be seen to be doing something in response to progressive demands for legalization, Cuomo directed the state Department of Health to study the issue. The study recommended the legalization of recreational weed for adults and was promptly ignored.
Progressive legislators kept pushing and Cuomo kept stalling, right up until the moment when his Covid-boosted popularity took a hit and he needed to shore-up his political support downstate.
The first woman to accuse Cuomo of inappropriate behavior emerged in December 2020, the second in February of 2021. In March, the floodgates opened and another half dozen women came forward. Attorney General Letitia James launched an inquiry, and the state legislature opened an impeachment investigation.
In a complete coincidence, the legislative obstacles to weed legalization suddenly dematerialized and Cuomo signed the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act into law on March 31, 2021. It was too late to save his Governorship, but the state finally had legal weed - at least in theory.
I’ve always believed that we would probably be better off legalizing most drugs.
My operating theory was that most people who want drugs can already get them illegally, so legalization would have little or no impact on usage while allowing us to tax and regulate drugs the same way we do alcohol. This would raise revenue, make the drugs cleaner and safer, and reduce the amount of violence associated with the drug trade, which would be a boon to both the US and our neighbors to the south.
I think I still believe that, but the mess we’ve made of weed legalization in New York is giving me some serious pause for thought.
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