A Road Back to the War on Drugs? N.J. Cannabis Law Funds Controversial Police Methods
It was all going to hell on a balmy June afternoon.
Shouting from behind a podium into an animated crowd at Trenton’s Statehouse Annex, the Rev. Charles Boyer condemned the war on drugs to eternal damnation.
“To hell with the drug war!” he shouted. Earlier, he had demanded, “Let our people go!” and his audience echoed back with the same fire.
New Jersey Policy Perspective had just released a report detailing how the state had spent an estimated $1.2 billion per year from 2010-2019 to support the drug war here, where Black residents are 12 times more likely and Hispanics twice as likely to be incarcerated than white residents.
Many gathered in Trenton that day were people of color, activists, those who had been incarcerated or a mix of all three. The war on drugs, officially launched during the Nixon administration but perpetuated on a federal, state and local level over the ensuing decades, instead had been a personal hell for those gathered.
On that day, they wanted to damn it back.
Billions in revenue was generated from the drug war to the detriment of communities of color. At the statehouse, they wanted their voices heard in a legalized cannabis industry that could generate billions in the opposite direction.
After Boyer’s impassioned speech, people clasped hands to form a circle of healing. Another area was set aside for those who wanted to share their personal struggles in the form of an oral history — visceral evidence of collateral damage in the government’s decade-long, $11.6 billion failed campaign.
Rev. Charles Boyer speaks during a rally centering around drug and criminal justice reform on June 17, 2021 in Trenton.(Photo by Jelani Gibson | For NJ Advance Media)
New Blood
In September, patting people on the back with a broad smile, Brendon Robinson welcomed attendees who wanted to clear their records at an expungement clinic nestled in the lobby of the DoubleTree Hilton next to a bustling Newark Penn Station.
The next room over was the waiting area with tables partially shielded from view as lawyers sat with those in attendance.
Similar to the setting of a voting booth or COVID-era drive through confessional, there was a certain amount of intimacy to the setting. Many came in with folders, their hands clutched tight.
Robinson, along with his business partner Stanley Okoro, runs 420NJEvents — an organization doing cannabis education for those who want to get into a market that previously had been criminalized.
“It’s disgraceful,” Robinson said of the regulations allocating money to DREs. “The fact that people like me and my brother Stan are advocating for folks who have been directly impacted by the war on drugs and paying for this on their own dime and there’s state funding being done to lock more people up again for the same drug is redundant.”
Robinson’s father had been imprisoned for 10 years for the plant. Robinson himself, scarred by the ordeal, was a late bloomer who said he had smoked cannabis when he was in his early 20s.
“I had a love-hate relationship with the drug ... at the same time, it ruined my family,” he said.
The clinic took place in New Jersey’s largest city, which is also the home to one of the state’s largest concentrations of Black and Hispanic residents.
The police in Newark, folded into a newly branded Department of Public Safety, were put under a consent decree that identified patterns and practices of unconstitutional policing that had formed the backbone of New Jersey’s war on drugs.
Robinson’s expungement clinic and many others like it across the state would be eligible down the road for some of the cannabis law’s social impact initiatives. But for now, with a lack of infrastructure and the market opening up, Robinson took it upon himself to find funds elsewhere.
The legalized cannabis market has the ability to help — or harm — communities depending on how that infrastructure is set up, Robinson said.
“It starts with the government understanding that if we’re going to do this, we do it the right way,” he said.
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