Boehner Benefits From Weed. Blacks Are in Prison for Using It.

By Vincent M. Southerland and Johanna B. Steinberg

Mr. Southerland is the executive director of the Center on Race, Inequality and the Law at New York University Law School. Ms. Steinberg is the director of impact litigation at the Bronx Defenders. They were attorneys at the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

April 19, 2018

A 56 year old inmate in California who has been to prison four times for possession of marijuana.CreditAndrew Burton/Getty Images

If you want to see an example of staggering hypocrisy in the criminal justice system, consider the contrast between Fate Vincent Winslow, a prisoner in Louisiana, and John Boehner, the Ohio Republican who is a former speaker of the House of Representatives.

A decade ago, an undercover police officer approached Mr. Winslow, a homeless black man, and asked for help buying marijuana. Mr. Winslow desperately needed the money, so he helped the officer buy two dime bags for a $5 profit. For that, he is serving life without parole for distribution of marijuana in the infamous Angola prison.

Last week, Mr. Boehner announced that he will join the board of Acreage Holdings, a marijuana cultivation and distribution company, citing the drug’s therapeutic benefits for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. This is the same John Boehner who declared himself “unalterably opposed” to legalization in 2011 and who voted to prohibit medical marijuana in the District of Columbia in 1999.

The tide has turned. Thirty-nine states have legalized marijuana for recreational or medicinal purposes. The legal marijuana industry raked in $9 billion in sales last year and is expected to bring in $11 billion this year. Nevada netted $30 million in tax revenue in the first six months of legal sales, while Colorado has earned more than $500 million in tax revenue since recreational marijuana sales became legal there in 2014.

John Boehner recently announced that he will join the board of Acreage Holdings, a marijuana cultivation and distribution company. In a statement the former speaker of the house said he was joining the company, "in pursuit of their mission to bring safe, consistent and reliable products to patients and consumers who could benefit.”CreditAlex Brandon/Associated Press

The problem here is not Mr. Boehner’s evolution in thinking on marijuana. Drug policies should be informed by science, and Mr. Boehner’s shift on marijuana mirrors that of a majority of Americans who now support legalization.

The problem is with race. As white people exploit the changing tide on marijuana, the racism that drove its prohibition is ignored. So are the consequences for black communities, where the war on drugs is most heavily waged.

In the early 20th century, the campaign to prohibit marijuana was built on racist myths and xenophobic propaganda. Henry Anslinger, the head of what was, in 1930, called the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, reportedly said that “reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.”

Richard Nixon’s war on drugs continued the trend. Consider what his former aide John Ehrlichman told Harper’s Magazine: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” he said. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”

This narrative, reinforced over decades of marijuana prohibition, is reflected in racial disparities in marijuana arrests. In 2010, black people were nearly four times as likely to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession as whites, even though they use the drug at about the same rate.

Legalization has barely made a dent in those disparities. As of 2014 in Colorado, the marijuana arrest rate for black people was almost three times that of whites. In New York City, the marijuana arrest rate for black people in New York City was over four times that of whites; the Bronx has one of the country’s highest rates of marijuana arrests. Meanwhile, black people make up an estimated 1 percent of marijuana dispensary owners, owning less than three dozen of the 3,000 or so retail shops nationwide.

Too many people have been deported, made homeless, lost financial aid, levied fines and fees or had their children taken away from them because of marijuana arrests.

White entrepreneurs who are cashing in on legal marijuana must work to reverse these trends. People in the marijuana industry, and the lawmakers who help it flourish, should highlight the racist history of marijuana prohibition and acknowledge its continuing impact.

The cannabis industry must also press for policies to decriminalize marijuana. It should call for the release of people like Mr. Winslow who sit in jails and prisons for the mere use, possession or sale of marijuana. And it must push legislators, prosecutors and law enforcement officers to throw out convictions derived from marijuana offenses.

Cannabis profiteers and customers should also push their lawmakers to emulate Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Florida and the city of Oakland, Calif., each of which has enacted policies, in some cases described as “marijuana reparations,” that encourage and give priority on retail licenses to people of color and those who have been disproportionately harmed by marijuana prohibition and enforcement.

More white people should do what Mr. Boehner did and publicly announce their support of sensible marijuana policy. They should draw on their own experiences to undermine the racialized stigma the drug was long tagged with. The reality is that when a problem has a white face, the government and law enforcement agencies are more likely to react sensibly to that problem.

As white people make money from marijuana, black people languish in jail for smoking it.