Legal cannabis is now growing faster than any other industry in the U.S. The enterprise deemed the "next great American
industry" by the ArcView Group, a
California-based investment and research firm, has grown from $1.5 billion in
2013 to $2.7 billion in 2014, the Huffington Post reported. This emerging market, however, seems to be
benefitting all but the people who have been most impacted by draconian anti-drug laws in the United States.
Marijuana legalization efforts reveal the ways
entrenched ideas about race and class impact the public's
perception of users and sellers, and the state and federal policies established to
criminalize them. Take, for example, the ways "drug dealing" is often talked about in public — especially when the dealer is imagined as black or Latino — but cannabis
pushing has now been recast
as a hip and lucrative business endeavor and no longer a sign of degenerative morals.
The faces behind the policies: The facts are telling. Twenty-three states and
the District of Columbia have ratified
laws legalizing cannabis in some form. In four of those states and the
District of Columbia, recreational use of cannabis is legal.
Marijuana was the most commonly used illicit drug in the U.S. in 2013, accounting for 19.8 million people who reported using in the month before they were surveyed, according to data from the National
Survey on Drug Use and Health. The Washington
Post reported comparable usage among black and white people between
2001 and 2010. Yet, the Post reported, black people were arrested
for marijuana possession at rates disproportionately higher than their white
counterparts during the same time period.
The consequences of the longstanding "war on drugs" are complex. Those who are able to join the burgeoning marijuana
boom are benefiting while the economic and social deficits left from decades of overpolicing and marijuana
criminalization impacting
black and Latino communities remain. The second episode of Mic's original series The Movement examines this tension.
Addressing forms of racial, socio-economic and
gender inequity present in the cannabis industry is a core aspect of the work of one black woman, business owner and
marijuana advocate: Wanda James.
In the episode, I interview James — who, along
with her husband, Scott Durrah — is a co-owner of Simply Pure, which is the only black woman-run cannabis dispensary in Colorado — a state where marijuana has
been legal since Dec. 10, 2012, when the voter-sanctioned Amendment 64 was
approved. Since ratification, Colorado has been a major epicenter of the "green
rush" sweeping the country. James has been a vocal proponent along the way.
The limitations of the marijuana economy: There's money to be made in the cannabis business. In
2014 medical and recreational marijuana brought
in $63 million in tax revenue for Colorado, according to the Washington Post. The projected worth of the retail market for 2016 is $1 billion, with a tax revenue set to hit $94 million. In Colorado, $386 million of medical marijuana was sold, and the recreational industry sold $313 million in 2014, the Post reported. The
increased revenue is a clear sign a consumer base exists.
Between 2012 and 2013, the period marijuana was
legalized in Colorado, monthly marijuana use increased to 12.7%, up from
10.4% between 2011 and 2012, according to the Denver Post. Despite the seemingly progressive moves to decriminalize marijuana use and distribution, the
arrest rate for marijuana charges remained 2.4 times higher for black people than the arrest
rates for white people in both 2010, before the laws changed, and 2014, after
the laws took effect, according to a report by the Drug
Policy Alliance, a leading national drug policy organization.
If
marijuana legalization presents the possibility of economic relief — or dare I
say, reparations — to those overcriminalized over the years for marijuana use and
sale, like black Coloradans, that possibility is far from a realization. Colorado
issued
833 recreational licenses (322 for stores) and 1,416 medical licenses (505 for medical
marijuana dispensaries) as of December 2014. Yet, James is the only black woman
in the game. Clearly, the "green rush" is still too
white.
"Here are
white men poised to run big marijuana businesses, dreaming of cashing in
big — big money, big businesses selling weed — after 40 years of impoverished black
kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their families and futures
destroyed," Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration
in the Age of Colorblindness, shared
with Drug Policy Alliance's Asha Bandele during a talk published on the DPA's website. "Now, white men
are planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing?"
James is
attempting to reverse the cycle of inequity Alexander called out. Her work is
vital. At its heart it is committed to bringing attention to the routes that public
policy can take — depending on the imagined winners and losers.
What was
once a war on marijuana largely impacting black communities is now a
race to the mighty dollar. And black people still don't figure as
winners.
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