Asbury Park has been so heavily impacted by marijuana prohibition and the drug war that it was the first community in the entire state of New Jersey to pass a resolution calling for the legalization of marijuana. Marijuana prohibition heavily factors into Asbury Park having nearly twice the per capita rate of police as New Jersey’s largest city, Newark. Previously the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office under Luis Valentin stated that Asbury Park had as many as 50 gangs operating within this small community of 15,000 people – one of the rationale criteria for impact zones. Asbury Park is also a community that was definitively stigmatized in the media with the sensationalizing of the drug war and the “Jump out Boys,” a narcotics unit renowned for human rights abuses.
Additionally, marijuana prohibition is a legacy policy of racism. The Asbury Park Community has had to endure institutionalized racism since its founding by a nationally renowned racist, James A. Bradley. Bradley is known as the “Original Jim Crow” for implementing segregation laws decades before Jim Crow. Asbury Park has a poverty rate 4x the county average and twice the national average with blacks constituting 35% of those living under the Federal Poverty Line. The Asbury Park Community still bears the marks of racial segregation which are reinforced largely through prejudicial policies like disparate enforcement of marijuana prohibition.