by Dave Maier
Previous installments: pt. 1, pt. 2, pt. 3
A few months back I wrote a letter to the editor of my local newspaper, the first time I had ever done that, and they printed it. A number of legislators in my state had held a news conference announcing their plan to legalize, regulate, and tax the sale and use of marijuana in New Jersey. Unfortunately for them, our state’s governor, Chris Christie, has made it perfectly clear that he would veto any such bill, so that plan is on hold for now. (There is a gubernatorial election this year to replace the term-limited and in any case unprecedentedly unpopular Christie, and the highly favored Democratic candidate, one Phil Murphy, has indicated his support for legalization.) As the reporter noted, the legislators had made a big deal about how much tax revenue this plan would raise, and had suggested that this might be part of a solution to the state’s pension crisis. Governor Christie had of course rejected the idea, citing his belief that marijuana is a “gateway drug”, that supporters of legalization are “just stupid liberals who think that everything is okay” and that, especially during an opioid crisis, such tax revenue would amount to “blood money.”
In my letter (they don’t allow you much space, so I had to be brief) I agreed with the Governor that if marijuana really is as bad as he believes, then we might very well be better off spurning the tax money that legalization would raise; but I also pointed him, and everyone else, to the online resources on the subject available at, for example, the Marijuana Policy Project (the paper doesn’t allow web addresses in their letters, but here I can link) – in particular, the careful refutation available there of the “gateway” theory (a theory which, one might note, even the DEA no longer endorses). I concluded with a plea that, given that this issue will (thanks to Murphy’s endorsement of the idea) be an important one in the fall campaign, we should all do our homework in order to show other states “how we do public policy in the Garden State.”
Alas, my plea has fallen on deaf ears. In the past couple of weeks, there have been in the Bergen Record two op-eds and a number of letters on the issue, none of which (even the sensible ones) show any evidence of a whole lot of homework-doing.