Weehawken Mayor Richard Turner informed residents that the local zoning board has amended their laws, banning the commercial sale, growth, distribution and use of marijuana in retail/commercial establishments in a letter sent out this week.Â
By John Heinis/Hudson County View
“This amendment bans the commercial sale, growth, distribution, and use of marijuana in retail/commercial establishments ONLY. The township has not banned nor would it ban the personal use of prescribed medical marijuana or any personal use that may be passed through subsequent State legislation,” Turner wrote in a letter dated Wednesday.
The longtime mayor further stated that due to the township’s close proximity to New York City, many in the marijuana industry have inquired about both sales and converted storefronts and/or property into marijuana dispensaries.
In January, Gov. Phil Murphy (D) signed an executive order calling for a 60-day review of the Garden State’s medical marijuana program.
On the campaign trail, Murphy called for legalizing marijuana for recreational use to bring much needed added revenue into the state, but that effort appears to be stalled as both Democratic and Republican lawmakers remain unconvinced this is the right move to make (h/t NJ Advance Media).
“The applicant must show to the highest standard that the proposed use will not result in substantial detriment to any neighborhood or the Township as a whole. It is the best way to protect our neighborhoods from any potential intrusive activity.”
Last month, Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop took a nearly identical stance on the subject at a Ward F community meeting, a stance he later explained in further detail on our live show.
One week prior to Fulop’s Ward F community evening, the New Jersey Legislative Black Caucus hosted a hearing in Jersey City to weigh the pros and cons of marijuana legalization.
You can’t legislate the laws of physics or supply and demand. Banning gravity won’t make things float and banning weed sales won’t stop people from buying weed as it hasn’t for the past 80 years.
Folks in Weehawken smoke weed which means they buy it or grow it. So either they’ll continue to buy it from their criminal supplier or they’ll buy it legally somewhere else and deprive Weehawken of tax revenue.
Let’s all stop pretending that banning sales is a thing. It’s a fiction.
Does Mayor Richard Turner think he is the Harry Anslinger of Weehawken?
“It would not be an overstatement to say that Harry Anslinger was one of the primary individuals responsible for creating the stigma surrounding cannabis. Hired as the first director of the recently created Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930, Anslinger launched a vigilant campaign against cannabis that would hold steady for the three decades he remained in office.
In the 1930s Anslinger’s articles often contained racial themes in his anti-marijuana campaign:
Colored students at the Univ. of Minn. partying with (white) female students, smoking [marijuana] and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result: pregnancy.
Two Negros took a girl fourteen years old and kept her for two days under the influence of hemp. Upon recovery she was found to be suffering from syphilis.
Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.
That is just the tip of the iceberg in how marijuana has been mischaracterized over the last 80 plus years in the country. Our war on drugs is based on prejudice and has effectively been an an apartheid system that has unnecessarily incarcerated minorities with defacto discriminatory prosecution and sentencing. It is beyond a joke that cannabis is still a class 1 drug which has absolutely no foundation is science. Alcohol and cigarettes are few more deadly than reefer and yet they are legal.â€
Source: https://www.leafly.com/news/cannabis-101/where-did-the-word-marijuana-come-from-anyway-01fb
Both Fulop and Turner are weak kneed NIMBYists with their stance on banning marijuana sales in their municipalities if ever legalized. They are in bed with the Jeff Sessions antiquated notions of the destructive war on drugs and enabling the same injustices on minorities to continue unabated and disproportionately effecting those residents. Shameful political cowardice in my humble opinion.
I thought Turner was a democRAT. I am a medical maijauna patient in NJ and still forced to buy my medicine in the street, as government prices are too high, no pun intended. I tried organizing a union while working for the WPA, and was told unions are bad,MMMK,. I was assaulted by my supervisor while working in Weehawken and he was found Guilty by a judge in Union City. yet he was merely transferred because of his union rights.
Turners new pick to run the 3rd ward knows full well how the marijuana trade works on the streets of Weehawken. Now is the time RAUL to stand up to this prick and the people will respect you for being independent from the rubber stamp mafia which Turner controls.