“We worked really hard to make sure that we were educating our community about the changes in the law,” Katz said. “It was important for them to understand the nuances of the law, because the law is very confusing. And in order to comply with it, they first needed to understand it.”
Katz said he couldn’t speculate on whether the number of people charged with marijuana offenses so far this year is due to their ignorance of the law’s nuances, or simply making choices they would have made regardless of the new law.
However, Katz believes the new law is ill-conceived.
“I think the manner in which our legislature went about doing what they did was poor public policy. There’s no public marketplace for anyone to go purchase what they made legal, and that means that in order for someone to possess marijuana, they either have to grow it themselves or purchase it from a street-level drug dealer — and that’s what we’re seeing.”
“Unlike the lawmakers,” Katz added, “I’ve seen the fruits of search warrants [executed by his officers]. And I know that our meth dealers, our fentanyl dealers, our opioid dealers, our marijuana dealers are all the same people. And what we’ve done is, we’ve just opened up a black market for marijuana and we have enriched the criminal element. That’s a populist policy, but it’s dangerous.”
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