A Cosmic Shift in Marijuana

In November 2012, voters in Colorado approved Amendment 64 and recreational marijuana became legal in that state for the first time. I remember hearing about it and thinking: that's it. The country just turned a corner it's not turning back from. I didn't know it would take New Jersey eight more years, a governor who fought it at every turn, another who signed it into law, a ballot initiative that passed by a landslide, and a final push through the legislature — but here we are.

Part 1 of this series was about the arrests — the 33,000 marijuana arrests New Jersey made in the decade before legalization, including two of mine. This part is about the shift: how the country's thinking on cannabis changed, how New Jersey lagged behind it, and how we finally caught up. And I'm going to include a piece of personal history that I've never quite told in full: the time I almost became a dispensary operator in New Jersey, and why it didn't happen.

Colorado and the Turning Point

What Colorado did in 2012 wasn't just policy — it was a signal. When a state actually legalized recreational marijuana and the sky didn't fall, the cities didn't descend into chaos, and the schools didn't empty out, it became much harder for other states to argue that legalization was inherently catastrophic. The evidence was right there. Colorado started collecting tax revenue. Licensed businesses opened. The world kept turning.

The political cover that followed was significant. More states followed — Washington in the same election, then Oregon, Alaska, California, Massachusetts. Each domino that fell made the next one easier. The argument shifted. For decades, politicians who privately thought marijuana prohibition was absurd could hide behind "it's a federal crime" or "the public isn't ready." Colorado made both of those arguments harder to maintain.

New Jersey Had Already Started — and Then Stalled

Here's what many people don't know: New Jersey actually moved on marijuana before Colorado legalized it recreationally. In January 2010, Governor Jon Corzine signed the New Jersey Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana Act — making New Jersey one of the first states on the East Coast to create a legal medical marijuana program. Corzine signed it on his last day in office. It was literally one of his final acts as governor.

Then Chris Christie walked in.

Christie was not enthusiastic about the medical marijuana program he inherited. To put it gently. He delayed its implementation, added restrictions, limited the number of licensed dispensaries, and made the program so cumbersome that years passed before most patients could actually access the medicine they were theoretically entitled to under state law. A program that was supposed to help sick people find relief became a bureaucratic maze.

Christie also repeatedly stated his personal opposition to marijuana legalization during his tenure — even as neighboring states moved toward it, even as polling showed New Jersey residents increasingly supported it, even as the federal government shifted enforcement priorities. He was, on this issue, a wall. The program technically existed, but it was designed in a way that made it nearly inaccessible.

Phil Murphy changed that. Murphy, who took office in January 2018, came in with a campaign promise to legalize recreational marijuana. The legislature took longer to get there than expected — efforts to pass a bill in 2019 and 2020 stalled over details about equity provisions, expungement, and local control. So Murphy and the legislature did something relatively unusual: they put it directly to the voters.

A Timeline of the Shift

The Part Where I Almost Had a License

I need to tell you about the mid-2010s, when New Jersey was slowly expanding its medical marijuana program and the application window for Alternative Treatment Centers — ATCs, as the licensed dispensaries were called — opened up. I looked at it seriously. I did the research. I saw what was coming.

The non-refundable application fee was approximately $20,000. Not the license itself — just the application. You paid $20,000 for the right to be considered. If you weren't selected, you didn't get it back. I had a potential backer who was interested. We talked about it. We got close.

And then the backer said no.

I'm not bitter about it — or at least I try not to be — but I want you to understand what that "no" meant financially. New Jersey closed the ATC license window in February 2021. The original batch of ATC licenses that were issued during the Christie and early Murphy years? Those licenses are now worth millions of dollars. Some of them have sold for enormous sums as larger cannabis companies moved to acquire them. The difference between getting an ATC license and not getting one is, in some cases, the difference between a modest business and generational wealth.

METRC: How the State Watches Every Plant

One piece of the legalization story that doesn't get much coverage is the tracking infrastructure that makes the whole thing work. New Jersey uses a system called METRC — Marijuana Enforcement Tracking Reporting and Compliance — to track cannabis from seed to sale. Every plant in a licensed New Jersey cultivation facility is tagged. Every gram that moves from cultivation to processing to dispensary to customer is tracked. The state knows exactly how much cannabis is in the system at any given time.

This matters because it's the answer to one of the most common complaints about legalization: won't legal cannabis just end up on the black market? The seed-to-sale tracking system is specifically designed to prevent that. If a licensed operator's inventory doesn't add up — if more cannabis went in than came out through legitimate sales — regulators know. It's not a perfect system, but it's a serious one, and it reflects the level of oversight that comes with operating in the legal cannabis industry.

It also stands in stark contrast to the untracked, untested, unregulated products showing up in gas stations across South Jersey. But that's the subject of Part 3.