New York State's Long-Running War on Weed

Tessa Stuart

A U.S. map that shows where pot is legal looks a lot like recent electoral college maps, except instead of blue, the liberal states are rendered in green: the entire West Coast (California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada), progressive mountain and Midwest states (Colorado, New Mexico; Michigan, Illinois), all of New England, plus New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and Hawaii. Twenty states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws legalizing medical marijuana; in two of them, recreational weed is all good, too.

Conspicuously absent from that map: New York.

How is it that one of the most liberal states, with a Democratic governor and a Democratic majority in the state assembly, a state where popular support for legalization is overwhelming — a February poll from Quinnipiac University showed 88 percent of New Yorkers are in favor of legalizing medical marijuana — how can such a left-leaning state lag so far behind its ideological peers?

Albany, replies Gabriel Sayegh, New York state director for the Drug Policy Alliance, is a place "fraught with drug war politics, and it lacks a coherent sort of frame-work to address these types of questions."

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2014/04/new_york_states_long-running_war_on_weed.php