For many decades, law enforcement has been directed to lock up anyone who tries to make a living in this field, especially if they are black. As criminal justice scholar Michelle Alexander wrote in a 2013 op-ed for The New York Times: “We’ve spent billions of dollars, arrested and caged millions of people, destroyed countless families and futures, and yet marijuana remains as popular and plentiful as ever. Why has this insanity continued for so long?”
Well, because racism. In Oakland, California, efforts are now underway to repair what the war on drugs destroyed through mass incarceration: In May 2016, the city amended its existing local medical marijuana regulation ordinance to provide more opportunities for people of color to open their own dispensaries. Most importantly, under the new equity permit program, people with prior convictions for weed-related crimes would have first dibs on getting a city license.
To flesh out the details for this program, the city commissioned a race and equity analysis report, to ensure that the new marijuana permitting process would benefit the right people. There is nothing more alarming in that report than the arrest data it relies upon for the program’s foundation: In 2015, African Americans made up 30 percent of the population but 77 percent of cannabis arrests, compared to 4 percent for whites.
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