Coronavirus Won’t Stop New York From Trying to Legalize Marijuana

Despite the fact that New York state is on a fast track to becoming the new global epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic and politicians are locking horns over how to best respond to the crisis, some non-virus-related government business will continue as usual. And that will include marijuana legalization, Governor Andrew Cuomo told reporters this week.

“We will pass a budget and address the policy items that we laid out and discussed [in January],” Cuomo said during a press briefing on Monday. Those items include banning flavored e-cigarettes, tweaking certain cash-bail reforms and legalizing recreational marijuana. “We are going to pursue all of them,” the governor said.

New York state has a thriving cannabis market. But despite meaningful progress in marijuana-related policy reform, such as decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana in 2019, the state still lags behind many parts of the country in not only legalizing recreational marijuana, but accommodating access to medical cannabis.

Medical marijuana has been legal in New York state since 2014, but access is restricted only to seriously ill individuals meeting a list of strict criteria. As a result, there were only 98,101 eligible patients in the entire state at the end of 2018, data from New York State Department of Health shows. [Read more at The Observer]