A new map illustrating 42 years of marijuana arrests documents the way that New York disproportionately targeted working-class, Black and Hispanic people for decades.
For young Black men like Justin Sullivan, growing up in Harlem in the 2000s came with regular harassment from the police, making it risky to use marijuana. But when he started making white friends who also smoked weed, he learned that they were not under the same scrutiny.
“That’s when I started seeing how I was vilified for cannabis,” Mr. Sullivan, now 34, said in an interview.
Included with New York’s legalization of weed in 2021 was a central promise to give back to communities that were most harmed by the war on drugs. Now, state cannabis regulators have created an interactive map from 1.2 million marijuana arrests conducted across the state over the last four decades as a guide to which neighborhoods qualify.
Mr. Sullivan’s distressing experience could give him an advantage as he seeks one of at least 1,000 licenses that cannabis regulators in New York State plan to hand out early next year in a broad expansion of the legal market. Harlem, once a hotbed of drug arrests, is pinpointed in the mapping tool as a leading