In New York in 1977, possession of marijuana up to 25 grams was decriminalized — criminal penalties were replaced with an infraction, punishable by a $100 fine. However, the law created a second provision of marijuana possession: smoking marijuana in public or having marijuana visible in public, a class B misdemeanor and an arrestable offense.

In 1996 then-NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani’s quality of life (QOL) policing, in a radical deviation from the previous decade, prioritized arresting people in possession of marijuana for having marijuana visible in public (MPV) rather than issuing them a citation The arrest statistics say it all: from 1985 to 1996, there were 35,000 arrests for marijuana possession in New York City; yet from 1997 to 2008, there were 430,000 arrests for marijuana possession in New York City – a more than 12-fold increase.

These marijuana possession arrests cost taxpayers up to $90 million a year; generate an uncalculated social and economic cost for those arrested; and force thousands of young men – 87% of those arrested are men of color -- into the system, where they are fingerprinted, photographed, and increasingly submitting DNA samples. What’s worse, a recent report indicates that most of these arrests are not even legal—that police are charging mostly Black and Latino young men with marijuana in pubic view even when those young men don’t possess marijuana or have it stored—legally—in their pockets, out of public view.

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