With the recent passage of ballot initiatives in the states of Washington and Colorado legalizing marijuana for recreational use, it’s a fair bet that more than a few individuals in the Garden State probably feel the same way as voters in those states; marijuana is more and more becoming an accepted form of relaxation, not unlike the use of alcohol has been for decades across the United States. As New Jersey DWI-DUI defense attorneys, we know that just believing something is benign, harmless or just plain “okay” is not a sufficient defense in a court of law.
Law is the key here. Even if states do begin to loosen up their legal restrictions on the use of cannabis, weed, hash or whatever one chooses to call it, legal use of marijuana on a national scale make take longer. And, while the significance of these two separate state referendums should not be underestimated, experts tend to agree that this was just the first major victory for the marijuana legalization advocates in what will likely be a long battle. The sticking point is that marijuana is still illegal under federal law, which overrules these states’ rights.
So we’ve established that marijuana may have a future as a legal substance, but here in New Jersey, as in most every other state, it is still a controlled dangerous substance (CDS) in the eyes of the government, and state and local law enforcement. Regardless of its status as one of the most commonly used drugs, at least that we have seen in our work as drug DUI defense lawyers, marijuana remains an illegal substance that can really cause a driver problems if convicted of driving while impaired by the substance.
