Thread by @NBCNews

Decades after her mother's pot conviction, Nafeesah Goldsmith is fighting for marijuana reparations in New Jersey. nbcnews.to/3mfy89f

#NBCNewsThreads (1/10)

In Feb. 1990, Berneice Evans was a single mother working at a dry cleaner when police officers bashed open the door of her apartment in Neptune, New Jersey.

Raising guns at her 2 young daughters and their elderly babysitter, they announced a raid. (2/10)

Evans, who earned a couple of hundred dollars a week at her day job, sometimes sold small bags of pot — a side hustle that she and others in economically depressed neighborhoods pursued to help pay bills. (3/10)

She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to probation, a punishment that would plague her for years, locking her out of higher-paying jobs, making it harder to find decent housing and sending her youngest children on dark trajectories. nbcnews.to/3mfy89f (4/10)

Since the war on drugs ramped up in the 1980s, studies have shown how people of color are disproportionately targeted with marijuana enforcement — and how convictions prevent people from finding jobs, getting into public housing, and maintaining custody of their children. (5/10)

The racial discrepancies exist despite data showing Black people and white people use marijuana at similar rates — and persist even in places that have legalized recreational marijuana but still criminalize some types of possession and sales, according to an ACLU study. (6/10)

One proposed solution is to channel marijuana tax revenue into social services, health programs and economic development initiatives that might help people like Evans and her family.

Some advocates call it reparations for a form of racial oppression. (7/10)

The debate is unfolding in New Jersey, where state lawmakers have until Jan. 1 to pass a law that will outline how the new pot industry will operate.

Among the sticking points is how to direct part of the money into communities where marijuana crackdowns proliferated. (8/10)

"The only right way and just way to do legalization is to make sure a decent amount of the revenues go back to communities impacted by this injustice," said Rev. Boyer, founder of Salvation and Social Justice, a coalition of religious leaders. "Anything less is injustice." (9/10)

Goldsmith sees the drug raid, her mother's conviction and its ripple effect on her family as an example of how marijuana enforcement blocks people from upward economic mobility.

"What it took from her and what it did to us, you can't fix that," she said. (10/10)