How 1.2 Million Marijuana Arrests Will Shape New York’s Legal Market

For young black men like Justin Sullivan, growing up in Harlem in the 2000s came with frequent police harassment, making it risky to use marijuana. But when he started making white friends who also smoked pot, he discovered they weren’t under the same scrutiny.

“That’s when I started to see how I was being vilified because of cannabis,” Mr. Sullivan, now 34, said in an interview.

The legalization of marijuana in New York in 2021 came with a central promise to give back to communities most impacted by the war on drugs. Now state regulators have created cannabis an interactive map of 1.2 million marijuana arrests made across the state over the past four decades, as a guide to which neighborhoods qualify.

Mr. Sullivan’s troubling experience could give him an advantage as he seeks one of at least a thousand licenses that New York state cannabis regulators plan to hand out early next year as part of a broad expansion of legal market. Harlem, once a hotbed of drug arrests, is identified in the mapping tool as a prime candidate for redress.

New York set a goal that half of all permits would be awarded to applicants from the hardest-hit neighborhoods, along with women, applicants from racial and ethnic minorities, distressed farmers and veterans with disabilities. Regulators will use the map to help determine whether applicants qualify as belonging to a disproportionately affected community. And it serves as a stark reminder of how drug enforcement arrests in New York are concentrated in low-income, Black and Latino communities.

“These were not arrows on a wall,” said Tabatha Robinson, director of economic development, policy and research for the Office of Cannabis Management, the government agency that released the mapping tool last month and regulates the recreational marijuana market.

Across the country, from California to Massachusetts, similar efforts to make the industry more inclusive have struggled. It has been no different in New York, where a provisional licensing program for pharmacies has been halted since August by a lawsuit from veterans who say they were illegally locked out.

Researchers who put together the mapping tool analyzed the home addresses of all people arrested in New York state between 1980 and 2021. Enforcement in some neighborhoods was as much as ten times higher than it would have been if arrests had been evenly distributed across the state. according to Damian Fagon, the state’s chief equity officer for cannabis.

New York City was responsible for the most arrests: about 1 million. The places with the most disproportionate arrest rates were all in the city: a jagged stretch of Brownsville, an angular area with a large public hospital in East Flatbush, and a triangular area of ​​East Harlem around the Robert F. Wagner Houses.

The city’s arrest rate was at its highest in the 2000s and early 2010s, during the peak stop-and-frisk era, a period when police made millions of stops, many of them unlawful, against black and Latino men.

Researchers have found large racial disparities in arrests that could not be fully explained by persistent police claims that they were caused by 911 calls and community complaints and not racial bias.

While the sum of marijuana arrests contributing to the map is staggering, millions of encounters could still be missing. The data set does not include stops where officers issued criminal citations or tickets for minor violations, where they took no action at all, or where they used marijuana as a pretext but the stop did not result in charges.

Mr. Fagon acknowledged the limitations of the map, but he said he believed it still included the areas hardest hit by marijuana arrests and offered a path into the legal sector for people who have lived in those places.

The state has earmarked 40 percent of revenue from cannabis sales to fund reinvestment grants in places where arrest rates were high. People who have lived in these areas for certain periods can receive priority for business licenses, discounts that halve application and licensing fees, and financial assistance, training and assistance with operations.

The map not only serves as a guideline, but will also serve to monitor whether the state is meeting its obligations. Henry Louis Taylor, a professor of urban studies at the University at Buffalo, said the map will help determine whether business and employment opportunities in the cannabis industry are going where they are needed most. It will also be useful to assess whether future reinvestment initiatives, such as job training and health care programs, make a meaningful difference, he said.

“We will be able to see if and to what extent these communities will benefit from the legalization of marijuana,” he said. “So I think this is extremely important and significant.”

But the cannabis sales on which these initiatives depend have lagged behind New York’s slow and chaotic rollout. Only 27 adult-use pharmacies have opened across the state since December last year, although sales reached $83 million in the first nine months with the help of new farmers markets.

The new licensing round is separate from the previous interim program, which awarded 463 dispensary licenses to certain nonprofits and to people with previous marijuana convictions or their immediate family members, which is now suspended. Regulators also plan to issue licenses to growers, processors, distributors and artisan businesses that typically have five employees or fewer and can grow, process and sell their own products.

Mr. Sullivan, who plans to compete for one of 1,000 new licenses, said his family wants to open a pharmacy in a barbershop they have owned in Harlem for nearly 60 years. It would involve Frederick Douglass Boulevard in a part of Harlem where the cannabis arrest rate is four to six times higher than the state average.

Mr. Sullivan was never arrested. But because he has lived in Harlem for years, he qualifies for extra attention from cannabis regulators. He’s also what the state calls a “legacy” dealer, someone who was part of the marijuana industry before legalization — a group officials are eager to bring into the legal market.

Mr. Sullivan’s maternal grandfather opened the barbershop in 1964 after emigrating from Georgia. He became a successful businessman, bought several rental properties and opened the general store before being sent to prison for six years in the late 1970s on charges including marijuana distribution, his family said.

Harlem has changed since then, with famous landmarks like the Renaissance Ballroom and Lenox Lounge now home to chain stores, banks and luxury homes out of reach for many longtime residents. Mr. Sullivan’s family has kept the hair salon building, and they’ve turned a former speakeasy in the back room into a space for cannabis workshops.

“Our neighborhood is disappearing,” said Phillip Ellison, 37, Mr. Sullivan’s step-cousin and business partner and an entrepreneurship lecturer at Tufts University. “So we are fortunate that we have space.”