Trenton’s New Pipe Dream

By Al Alatunji

TRENTON.- The sale and use of marijuana in NJ is now legal. Mayor Walter Reed Gusciora and some city leaders as well as mayor and city leaders elsewhere are looking to see their local economics lit up from cannabis. The state’s new cannabis business is similar to its state lottery business. The lottery developed out of the numbers also known in its heyday as the policy business. After locking up Black and Latin people for years for engaging in the numbers business, NJ and other states decided to move into the numbers business. Unlike “Dutch” Schultz and other mobsters who tried unsuccessfully to take over the policy business, the states decided to declare it legal as long as they ran it. They reaped significant tax dollars with its legalization. NJ is attempting to do the same with cannabis. When measures were being pushed through the State Legislature the advocates for legalization of cannabis talked about how cities like Trenton would see significant economic growth and development from its passage. Mayor Gusciora and other city leaders jumped on the bandwagon and proclaimed cannabis would lead to the rebirth of Trenton’s downtown.

They talked about how Trenton, like the Biblical Lazarus, was going to rise from the dead and experience an economic boom to rival the great Gold Rush in the west during the 1800s. It seems too good to be true. It reminds some of how casino gambling was going to rebuild Atlantic City and make it a New Jerusalem paved in streets of gold. It might be useful to revisit that adventure. State and Atlantic City officials urged state voters to roll the dice and spend the wheel on a proposal to legalize casino gambling, claiming that it would boost tourism and jobs. police officials on information regarding their investigation of his daughter’s death. He was given none, not even a return telephone call back.

NJ voters approved casino gambling in 1976. Atlantic City got its casinos. However, it did not get the promised long-term economic benefits. At its highest peak in 1990, after slightly more than a decade of casino operations, the casinos employed 46,700 people. By 2019, Atlantic City claimed just 24,600 such positions, a drop of nearly half. Atlantic City had 3 percent fewer private-sector jobs overall in 2019 than in 1990.

Hyping cannabis as a powerful engine of jobs and tax-revenue growth for Trenton and other NJ towns is a notion not just economically absurd but depressing. What will these urban development advocates come up with next red-light sex districts?

Just think how many jobs would be created and the millions of tax dollars the state could collect. Perhaps, the state should reinstate the death penalty and do live execution that individuals can watch on payview. Now clearly that should be a Brobdingnagian money maker.

Perhaps, what Trenton and other cities down on their luck need is not cannabis and casinos. They need to do the hard work of cleaning up their downtown areas, significantly improving their public safety and insisting on their public-school preparing students to be responsible and productive people.

Mr. McCall mentioned on the podcast how he reached out to Mayor Walter Reed Gusciaro for assistance gaining information about his daughter’s death. He mentioned that Mayor Gusciaro gave Mr. McCall his word that he would get back to him with information about the police investigation of his daughter’s death.

Mr. McCall indicated just like the police who supposedly were handling the case, Mayor Gusciaro after giving his word that he would get back to Mr. McCall failed to keep his word.

NJ has seen a decline in drug-related overdose deaths with the possibility of having less than

3,000 drug deaths this year. It will be the first real year-overyear drop in at least a decade. However, the state has seen an increase in drug overdose deaths of Blacks and Latinxs in the last two years. Drugs including cannabis have been laced and cut with fentanyl and individuals have used these drugs unaware that they contained fentanyl and have died.

While drug-related deaths are trending downward overall this year among White residents, the picture is different for NJ residents of color, according to the State’s medical examiner data. In 2015, more than three-quarters of the fatal overdoses involved White people, while Black people accounted for 13% and Latinx residents 9%.

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