After years of stalled attempts, New York State has legalized the use of recreational marijuana, enacting a robust program that will reinvest millions of dollars of tax revenues from cannabis in minority communities ravaged by the decades-long war on drugs.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the cannabis legislation on Wednesday, a day after the State Legislature passed the bill following hours of debate among lawmakers in Albany.

New York became the 15th state to legalize the recreational use of cannabis, positioning itself to quickly become one of the largest markets of legal cannabis in the nation and one of the few states where legalization is directly tied to economic and racial equity.

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State lawmakers finalized a deal on Thursday to legalize recreational marijuana in New York, paving the way for a potential $4.2 billion industry that could create tens of thousands of jobs and become one of the largest markets in the country.

Following several failed attempts, lawmakers in Albany struck an agreement with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to legalize cannabis for adults 21 and older, a move that officials hope will help end years of racially disproportionate policing that saw Black and Hispanic people arrested on low-level marijuana charges far more frequently than white people.

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ALBANY, N.Y.-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Tuesday that he would amend his proposal to regulate and tax recreational marijuana in hopes that the drug could be legalized as part of the state budget due by April 1.

The amended proposal would allow for delivery services and reduce the penalty for people who unlawfully sell marijuana to a person under the age of 21. It would also add specificity to a social-equity fund that the Democratic governor said would help revitalize communities that have been most harmed by the war on drugs. He said the amendments reflected conversations with lawmakers.

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Police officers can often justify a search with six words: "I smelled an odor of marijuana."

Courts in New York have long ruled if a car smells like marijuana smoke, the police can search it - and, according to some judges, even the occupants - without a warrant.

But in late July, a judge in the Bronx said in a scathing opinion that officers claim to smell marijuana so often that it strains credulity, and she called on judges across the state to stop letting police officers get away with lying about it.

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Even as states across the country have legalized marijuana, potentially opening the door to a multibillion dollar industry, the impact of marijuana criminalization is still being felt by people - mostly black and Hispanic - whose records are marked by low-level convictions related to the drug.

But on Wednesday, New York began the process of expunging many of those records, as part of a new state law to reduce penalties associated with marijuana-related crimes, a spokesman for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo confirmed.

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New York has decriminalised the use of marijuana - becoming the 16th US state to do so.

The move, which would make possession of a small amount of the drug a violation rather than a felony, was signed into law by governor Andrew Cuomo.

The measure also demands that criminal records of offences linked to low-level marijuana cases either be marked as expunged, or destroyed - an apparent reflection that in the past communities of colour suffered unduly from different application of the law.

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ALBANY - New York's plan to legalize marijuana this year collapsed on Wednesday, dashing hopes for a potential billion-dollar industry that supporters said would create jobs in minority communities and end decades of racially disproportionate policing.

Democratic lawmakers had been in a headlong race to finalize an agreement before the end of the legislative session this week. But persistent disagreement about how to regulate the industry, as well as hesitation from moderate lawmakers, proved insurmountable.

"It is clear now that M.R.T.A. is not going to pass this session," Senator Liz Krueger of Manhattan said in a statement on Wednesday morning, using an acronym for the legalization bill she had sponsored. "We came very close to crossing the finish line, but we ran out of time."

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Dr. James S. Ketchum, an Army psychiatrist who in the 1960s conducted experiments with LSD and other powerful hallucinogens using volunteer soldiers as test subjects in secret research on chemical agents that might incapacitate the minds of battlefield adversaries, died on May 27 at his home in Peoria, Ariz. He was 87.

His wife, Judy Ketchum, confirmed the death on Monday, adding that the cause had not been determined.

Decades before a convention eventually signed by more than 190 nations outlawed chemical weapons, Dr. Ketchum argued that recreational drugs favored by the counterculture could be used humanely to befuddle small units of enemy troops, and that a psychedelic "cloud of confusion" could stupefy whole battlefield regiments more ethically than the lethal explosions and flying steel of conventional weapons.

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Tens of thousands of low-level marijuana convictions could be erased with the OK of Brooklyn's top prosecutor, under a new plan for wiping records clean of offenses no longer being prosecuted in parts of the nation's biggest city.

District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced Friday he is inviting people to request conviction dismissals. He expects prosecutors will consent in the great majority of a potential 20,000 cases since 1990 and an unknown number of older ones.

To Gonzalez, whose office has stopped prosecuting most cases involving people accused of having small amounts of pot, it's only right to nix convictions that wouldn't be pursued now.

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A few years ago when I served on the board of the co-op building where I live in Brooklyn Heights - a fact suggesting a degree of squareness so profound it should discredit my authority to go on - my next-door neighbor came to me with recurring complaints that her apartment, at various points, but mostly in the evenings, reeked of pot (that, children, is what we of the Atari generation call it) so intensely that it seemed as if someone had come in and lit up right on her sofa. That her oldest daughter began to worry that she was getting a contact high while she was doing her homework made me despair for a generation and suggested that perhaps a certain unwarranted hysteria had taken hold. Then one night, at a moment of extreme fragrancy, my neighbor texted and asked me to come over and take a sniff for myself, and it seemed as if I had walked into a commune in the Redwoods sometime between the Tet offensive and the presidency of Gerald Ford.

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New York City's Police Department suffered a major embarrassment this spring when a New York Times investigation demolished the department's claim that people of color were more likely than others to be arrested on petty marijuana charges, because citizens in their communities complained more about pot smoking. The investigation found that even when complaints were factored in, the police nearly always arrested people at a higher rate in black areas.

A new policy Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Tuesday will lead to fewer people being arrested for smoking marijuana in public. But the new approach - in which officers would usually issue summonses instead of hauling people off to jail - does not address the core problem of racial inequality and poses new dangers.

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A marijuana user poses a joint over some ground marijuana Thursday, Nov. 4, 2010 in Tempe, Ariz. Arizona voters were literally split evenly on the issue of allowing marijuana use for medical purposes, leaving the proposition far too close to call.

A marijuana user poses a joint over some ground marijuana Thursday, Nov. 4, 2010 in Tempe, Ariz. Arizona voters were literally split evenly on the issue of allowing marijuana use for medical purposes, leaving the proposition far too close to call. (Matt York / AP)

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ALBANY -- A Cuomo administration panel will recommend New York State legalize recreational use of marijuana, the state's health commissioner said Monday.

But the long-awaited report by the group has still not been released as the State Legislature looks to end its 2018 session on Wednesday -- leaving action for this year on the matter all but impossible.

Dr. Howard Zucker, the state's top health regulator, said public health, law enforcement and others inside and outside government, have been examining the issue of marijuana legalization since Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo asked for a study on the issue in January.

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The district attorneys in Manhattan and Brooklyn are weighing plans to stop prosecuting the vast majority of people arrested on marijuana charges, potentially curbing the consequences of a law that in New York City is enforced most heavily against black and Hispanic people.

The Brooklyn district attorney's office, which in 2014 decided to stop prosecuting many low-level marijuana cases, is considering expanding its policy so that more people currently subject to arrest on marijuana charges, including those who smoke outside without creating a public nuisance, would not be prosecuted, one official familiar with the discussions said.

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If you've walked around New York City lately, there's a good chance you've smelled weed. People smoke walking their dogs in the West Village, and they smoke in apartment building lobbies in the South Bronx. They smoke outside bars and restaurants and in the park.

White people largely don't get arrested for it. Black and Hispanic people do, despite survey after survey saying people of most races smoke at similar rates.

So after a senior police official recently testified to the City Council that there was a simple justification - he said more people call 911 and 311 to complain about marijuana smoke in black and Hispanic neighborhoods - we decided to dig into the numbers the New York Police Department gave lawmakers to support that claim.

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After years of halting steps, top prosecutors and elected officials in New York City on Tuesday made a sudden dash toward ending many of the marijuana arrests that for decades have entangled mostly black and Hispanic people.

The plans, still unwritten and under negotiation, will rise or fall on the type of conduct involving marijuana that officials decide should still warrant arrest and prosecution. The changes appear likely to create a patchwork of prosecution policies across the city's five boroughs, and are unlikely to restrict police officers from stopping and searching people on suspicion of possessing a drug that is now legal in a number of states.

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They sit in courtroom pews, almost all of them young black men, waiting their turn before a New York City judge to face a charge that no longer exists in some states: possessing marijuana. They tell of smoking in a housing project hallway, or of being in a car with a friend who was smoking, or of lighting up a Black & Mild cigar the police mistake for a blunt.

There are many ways to be arrested on marijuana charges, but one pattern has remained true through years of piecemeal policy changes in New York: The primary targets are black and Hispanic people.

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The New York Police Department has claimed that more black and Latino people are arrested for petty marijuana offenses because complaints are more voluminous in neighborhoods where black and Latino people predominantly live. That excuse was blown apart this weekend by a Times investigation showing that the complaints about marijuana use do not fully account for the racial arrest gap - and that, when complaints were held constant, "the police almost always made arrests at a higher rate in the area with more black citizens."

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NEW YORK -- CNN's medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta has taken the unusual step of publicly urging Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reconsider his opposition to medical marijuana, particularly as a way to fight the opioid epidemic.

Gupta wrote a public letter to Sessions, saying that he had changed his mind on the use of medical marijuana, and he's certain Sessions can, too. Research and talking to people who say marijuana has eased pain and weaned them off opioids convinced him.

It's an unusual step for a journalist to move into advocacy, by sending a letter to the attorney general. But Gupta says he believes this falls into the category of telling truth to power.

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A week after telling two interviewers her support for legalizing recreational use of marijuana in New York was revenue-based, Democratic candidate for governor Cynthia Nixon said Wednesday that it's now foremost a racial justice issue for her.

The "Sex and the City" star posted a 90-second video on YouTube in which she stated that it's time New York joined eight other states and the District of Columbia in legalizing recreational use of marijuana.

"There are a lot of good reasons for legalizing marijuana, but for me, it comes down to this: we have to stop putting people of color in jail for something that white people do with impunity," Nixon said.

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