ASBURY PARK, NJ – This weekend at the annual Sea Hear Now festival, one human sense took center stage, smell. While the festival lineup of top-shelf bands allowed patrons to see and hear some of the best artists in the world, you could get a contact high three blocks inland from the sheer amount of weed being smoked at the festival.
Dozens of websites and social media posts encouraged fans to bring their weed to the concert because after all, New Jersey is a weed-free state. Except, it’s illegal to smoke cigarettes or weed, on the beach in New Jersey, but that rule was essentially unenforced.
Heck, you can’t blame the city or cops from making a marijuana arrest and then being sued for violating somebody’s Constitutional rights.
While you expect a concert like this to be full of weed, here’s what you don’t expect. Young teens and children who are watching the shows getting contact highs from the inconsiderate ones who seemingly chain-smoked weed so much that the National Weather Service thought the Canadian fire smoke has snuck back in at the Jersey Shore.
This isn’t to criticize the potheads. Heck, their governor champions legal weed, but like everything else Phil Murphy does, it’s all half-baked, forgive the pun.
It is totally legal to smoke weed in New Jersey. He signed that into law. It’s also totally illegal to smoke on the beach in New Jersey. He signed that into law too.
Two years after enacting the smoke free beach law, Murphy’s administration banned cops from making marijuana arrests.
So, essentially, you can be charged for smoking a Camel on the beach, but not for smoking weed.
The problem isn’t the weed, or the smoke, or the smokers. The problem is a governor who is routinely inconsistent in everything he does.
Police are expected to enforce beach no-smoking laws, but barred from enforcing the beach no-smoking laws. Cops who do can be subject to scrutiny by the governor, so cops are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. So they don’t.
And nobody can blame them.