During Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s tenure New York City spent over a million police hours processing misdemeanor marijuana arrests due in large part to the controversial stop and frisk policy that targets minority communities. According to the findings of a new report by the Drug Policy Alliance, from 2002 to 2012 roughly 440,000 low-level misdemeanor marijuana [...]

In the New York State assembly, a bipartisan team of legislators have introduced a bill to reduce the penalties for marijuana possession found in public view. From the Times Union: In a rare show of bipartisanship and upstate-downstate agreement, freshman state Sen. Mark Grisanti is co-sponsoring a bill with Democratic Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries to reduce [...]

While opposition to marijuana prohibition has risen in recent years; yet under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration New York City has dramatically stepped up its marijuana arrests. The NYPD now spends a huge amount of police time and money arresting people for low-level marijuana offenses. Not surprisingly given the racist ways drug laws have been applied in this [...]

One of my first observations about the defeat of California’s Proposition 19 was how important turnout demographics were to the final outcome. Now, a poll for the Drug Policy Alliance by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research provides further insight. From the Report: If youth had comprised the same percentage of the electorate on Tuesday as they [...]