Don’t forget: Flip your ballot for legal weed | Editorial

Medical marijuana rally at Pa. Capitol

A ballot question would legalize marijuana for those age 21 and older in New Jersey. (Dan Gleiter | dgleiter@pennlive.com)

A solid majority of New Jersey voters support the ballot question to legalize marijuana, polls show.

They’ve seen that like the prohibition on alcohol in the 1920s, our war on weed is nonsensical and destructive. Black people are arrested disproportionately, deepening inequality; it’s an extraordinary waste of law enforcement resources, and a boon to the criminal black market.

We are long past the tipping point on this, with two-thirds of voters now backing legalization, and it’s on the ballot only because of a failure of political courage.

Let the people decide, our great leaders ultimately said.

Yet even public approbation does not guarantee that this will pass, so here is a pro tip: Dude, turn your ballot over.

“Our biggest fear is somebody who intends to vote yes, but either neglects to turn the page over or has some unforced error. They don’t sign in the right place or seal the envelope properly,” says Amol Sinha, head of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.

Polls don’t mean much if those people don’t vote. The weed question is on the backside of about 99 percent of ballots, and in some counties, looks like the fine print of a credit card agreement.

That doesn’t bode well for the roughly 4.5 million New Jerseyans voting by mail for the first time in this election. Previously, the biggest vote-by-mail election was the recent primary, at 1.5 million people. Even in a typical election, 30 to 40 percent of people don’t get to the public question, Sinha says.

So the ACLU and its partners are launching a digital ad campaign called #TurnthePage – turn the page on marijuana prohibition, and literally, turn the page of your ballot. “We believe that this is going to be more of a turnout campaign than a persuasion campaign,” Sinha predicts.

But here’s why it’s so important to legalize weed, anyway.

We are still arresting about 32,000 people a year in our state, solely for pot possession – which has a massive ripple effect in lost jobs, missed schooling, even losing your housing or custody of your kids.

The racial disparity is staggering. A few years ago, black people in New Jersey were 3 times more likely to be arrested than whites, even though they use pot at similar rates; now it’s as much as 3.45 times more likely, the ACLU found.

This, at a moment when more than half of American adults admit to having smoked pot, including presidential candidates like Kamala Harris, Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, and our governor, Phil Murphy.

In fact, surveys show the U.S. has nearly as many marijuana users as cigarette smokers. It’s a mild drug that is less harmful than booze. Not only is it much less addictive, and usually consumed in much smaller amounts – it’s not associated with violence or accidents the way alcohol is, and you can’t die of a weed overdose.

Lawmakers would have ended these pointless arrests long ago, if only they could agree on how to proceed. As recently as last week, two state senators – Nicholas Scutari, a former municipal prosecutor, and Ron Rice, a former police officer – almost got into a physical scuffle over it during a legislative caucus.

Scutari was taking off his jacket. “Troy intervened and just separated us,” Rice said of his colleague, Sen. Singleton.

At issue was whether to move forward a decriminalization bill while the legalization question is pending. The fact is, we need both: Even if we vote yes to legalization on Nov. 3rd., police could still be making arrests on Nov. 4th. It will require an act of legislation to enable the constitutional amendment to legalize weed.

And in the meantime, decriminalization would prevent police from making arrests.

Yet most New Jerseyans realize that it doesn’t go far enough. They want the illicit market eliminated, and they recognize the economic benefits of full legalization – hundreds of millions in revenue for our hard-up state, some of which could go to places like Newark or Camden, which have suffered the most economically because of over-policing.

Legislators have made a circus out of this issue for far too long. Get out and vote, and end the reefer madness.

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