It’s only January, but 2019 could be the year that a Green Wave of marijuana legalization sweeps across the country. Will it finally hit Washington, D.C., and force Congress to reform the nation’s woefully outdated marijuana laws?

New York and Rhode Island are on the cusp of making recreational marijuana legal under their states’ laws after Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Gov. Gina Raimondo announced this week that they’ll present plans to allow the sale and adult use of recreational marijuana in their states.

This is significant for several reasons.

It’s a sign of the momentum, even the inevitability, of legalization that Cuomo and Raimondo — both longtime skeptics of loosening the prohibition of recreational pot — are leading the effort to create legal, regulated marijuana marketplaces that flout the federal strictures.

Raimondo essentially said her state had little choice but to end prohibition.

“I will say, I do this with reluctance,” Raimondo told the Providence Journal last week. “I have resisted this for the four years I’ve been governor. … Now, however, things have changed, mainly because all of our neighbors are moving forward” with legalization. [Read More @LA Times]