“[A]dvocates and defense attorneys said police still focus on the city’s poorer, mostly Black neighborhoods because that’s where officer deployments and investigations of violent crime are concentrated.“
washingtonpost.com/local/legal-is…
So again: cannabis-related encounters Black folks have with the police are just a pretext for more intrusive questioning and searches.
So for Black folks, weed is a gateway drug...into the criminal justice system.
One of the arguments for legalization is that you protect m a whole bunch of other civil liberties when you don’t arbitrarily prosecute cannabis offenses. it shuts off the rationale for all sorts of unnecessary and potentially catastrophic encounters with the cops.
So of course, the cops and prosecutor don’t want this. They don’t really care about weed per se; they care about anything that might curb their nearly limitless discretion to initiate contact.
So many typos
Even the nomenclature has a racist history: drug warriors in the federal government started calling it “marihuana” [sic] instead of “cannabis” in order to activate the xenophobia that white Americans felt about Mexican immigrants to the US.
In an episode we did about legal cannabis coming online in California, a Black woman who got popped for selling weed in HS could not apply for a license to open a cannabis-related dispensary; licenses were only open to people without felony convictions.
Which is to say: all the Black ppl singled out for arrest + prosecution for weed-related offenses when cannabis was illegal there are disqualified from participating in that economy now that *is* legal.
White people have eliminated their competition in the legit weed market.
And that’s before you get to the other racist shit that keeps Black people and Latinos out of the legal weed business. As a schedule 1 drug, the federal government forbids banks from participating in the weed economy. It’s a cash business.
Which also means: no small biz loans.
you have to come to the table with cash in your pockets.
Hello [Racial Wealth Gap], my old friend.
sweahtagahd this just landed in my inbox:
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