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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