'Justice involved' demands judicial discretion

Editorial: March 17, 2022

Mjbizdaily.com – yes, there is a trade journal for all things marijuana – reports Otsego County as one of three north of New York City with more than 75 percent of its localities opting in to allowing retail pot dispensaries within their borders. And whether those jurisdictions opted in actively through an affirmative vote or passively – as Cooperstown’s Board of Trustees did when they completely took a walk on voting up or down on the touchy issue – they’re bound by the regulations New York’s Office of Cannabis Management issued last week.

We report this week on the details of those regulations, including the requirement that for the as-yet initial batch of licenses, at least one person in the application must be “justice involved.” In this case, that’s the term for someone convicted of a pot-related offense prior to March 31, 2021, when the state Legislature and then-Governor Cuomo legalized recreational pot with the “Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act.” A licensee also is eligible if he or she had a family member convicted of a pot-related offense prior to that same date. The language of that law awards one-half of all adult-use licenses to “social and economic equity applicants.”

We support its good intention – historically, New York’s drug laws had a disproportionate, punishing impact on minority communities, one so steep that even the Republican state legislators who pushed them into law back in the early 1970s returned to Albany two decades later as private citizens to lobby hard, and successfully, to undo them.

We’d like to think that the “justice involved” layaside for retail licenses, then, would go to those who felt that disproportionate punishment the most – say, perhaps, the now-adult who got sent up for