The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Dems pushing for legal marijuana sales
HARTFORD — State Sen. Douglas McCrory grew up in this city’s North End, where Albany Avenue is a boundary between inner-city isolation and the promise of higher education, with its accompanying upward mobility.
What residents of both sides of the border had in common was the use of marijuana, said McCrory, a graduate of the nearby University of Hartford in West Hartford. But urban residents of color were too often prosecuted for using the drug, while college students were left alone by law enforcement.
“I walk a quarter-mile down the street, I turn right, I go to college,” McCrory said Wednesday. “I turn left, I go on the Avenue. I grew up on the Avenue. I saw drugs. I saw marijuana. I went to college. I saw more drugs and marijuana than I ever saw in my life.
“I ain’t never seen one person in college get arrested for drugs. Why is that?” he said. “Why, when I turn left, my friends go to jail and get records and can’t get a job, can’t get housing because we have a policy that’s racist, but my friends on the right get a pass?”
At stake is the ability to heal communities, he said.
“We need to correct something that has destroyed, I say destroyed families, neighborhoods, communities for years, and now we have the opportunity to do something about it,” he said.
If the state, led by Gov. Ned Lamont, who made recreational marijuana an election issue, wants to legalize the cultivation, sale — and taxation — of the drug, McCrory and other lawmakers will demand an accompanying path to clear the records of those who have been caught in the mass incarceration of marijuana users.
Senate President Pro Tempore Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, says the nation never learned the lessons of Prohibition, the period between 1920 and 1933 when alcohol was banned and organized crime expanded into violent empires to quench the public’s thirst, at the same time fostering distrust in the government, law enforcement and even the criminal-justice system.
Marijuana has become the new target of prohibition.
“That whole enforcement apparatus then was turned instead to trying to treat marijuana the way alcohol was unsuccessfully regarded,” Looney said, noting that the current proposal would allow adults to grow plants in their homes, while establishing a commercial production and sales system within the state.
“We have an opportunity here in Connecticut to correct a wrong,” McCrory said, recalling the early 1930s campaign against marijuana use. “It continued all the way through the Nixon years ... when he needed a way to stigmatize black people and hippies.”
Legislative leaders admit that it is far too early for specifics on whatever cannabis-related legislation may emerge by the June 5 deadline.
But without some process to erase criminal records for possession, legalizing marijuana at a time when retail sales are already luring Connecticut buyers to Massachusetts could stall in the General Assembly, even while New York tries to fast-track it this year. And with an estimated $70 million to $150 million a year in possible tax revenue from cannabis sales, the stakes could be high.
Brian Essenter, the public outreach coordinator for the state chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said he’s optimistic that Connecticut can enact full legalization this year, building on the 2012 legislation that made the state’s medical-cannabis program a national model.
“It seems like there’s some general support, especially from the Democratic side, but there’s some support from Republicans — it doesn’t look like there’s much,” Essenter said. “It seems like many at this point are looking for information to be more educated, which is great. I think now they notice that the support is growing very quickly.”
State Rep. Vincent J. Candelora, R-North Branford, an opponent of the marijuana legislation, said Wednesday that there are too many possible unforeseen consequences if the state approves retail sales. “Let’s have a conversation within our behavioral health industry, our schools, with our police force, to give input on a better bill,” he said.