I have had countless conversations with colleagues in elected positions about their use of marijuana. I can say with confidence that many of my colleagues in Congress have tried marijuana. In my time in other privileged institutions like Stanford and Yale, marijuana and other drugs were used with little fear of consequences and were openly spoken about and joked about with little understanding of the painful fact: the War on Drugs in America has scarcely affected the lives of the privileged but has devastated poor communities and communities of color.

I have spent most of my adult life living and working in Newark, New Jersey. For the past four decades, Newark has found many of its neighborhoods, including the one in which I live, on the front lines of a war not on drugs, but on people individuals and families who are simultaneously over-criminalized and under-protected.

As a low income tenants lawyer, a city councilman, and as mayor, I saw up close how this war manufactured in Washington and state houses all across the country meant that the hardworking, brave officers of my police department were forced to spend their time enforcing drug laws that did not necessarily make our community safer and often worsened conditions that lead to greater poverty, greater suffering and less safety. During my time as mayor, my officers often decried the churn of people arrested again and again on nonviolent charges like possessing marijuana, deepening deficits of trust within the community and too often debilitating nonviolent offenders and those struggling with the disease of addiction from turning their lives around.

I continue to see in my community how the unequal application of these laws criminalizes large swaths of Americans poor Americans, black and brown Americans, addicted Americans, the mentally ill and disproportionately our veterans. As a result of these broken, inequitably applied laws, I have met countless good people who couldnt find a job, couldnt find a decent place to live, and couldnt support their family because they had a criminal record for doing something less serious than two of the last three presidents of the United States have admitted to doing.

It is clear to me that theres no easy way out of the injustice system we have created. Fixing our broken system will require painstakingly undoing decades of bad policy, addressing the persistent and systemic racial bias within our system, and rethinking how we treat those addicted to harmful drugs.

I believe it also requires legalizing marijuana.