Marijuana & the Genesis of the Black Lives Matter Movement
June 19, 2020
The War on Drugs has principally been an institutional war on racial minorities. The weapon of choice has been marijuana. Like other issues that disproportionately affect Black and Brown lives, it affects all Americans in ways both tangible and intangible. When you consider that Blacks are 3.6 times more likely than Whites to be arrested for cannabis possession despite equal cannabis usage among Blacks and Whites, it’s no wonder that the War on Drugs, and cannabis in particular, has disproportionately affected Black and Brown people. What you can’t see is that because the crime data from the LatinX community are often documented as White, the numbers are actually much worse for minorities.
In the arresting, incarcerating, and occasionally killing of Black and Brown people, cannabis has been used to take away someone’s access to a lifetime of opportunity that most people take for granted. Not having to actively think about this threat to ones life is, in part, the concept of White privilege. In this recent BLM movement, there has been an awakening of everyone to the fact that Black and Brown people have a target permanently affixed to their skin. The overly aggressive cops generally aren’t targeting Whites, thus, many Americans don’t believe that minorities experience the level of racism they do. The notion of the achievement of equality and a leveling of the playing field was reinforced for many after the election of a Black president. The playing field has in fact not been leveled. That revelation has resulted in protest crowds that are often predominantly White. Yesterday’s 15sec TV news stories with whitewashed police reports have given way to today’s 8 minute and 46 second long palpable images of stone-faced (not always White, btw) cops with knees on Black necks. You can see the racism is systemic because minority cops are often doing the same behaviors as everyone else. And everyone, even the policemen and women who find such actions reprehensible (the vast majority of cops are good people), toe the line for fear of repercussions — which are real. Just look at the 4 cops who stood by and watched a life be extinguished in Minnesota. They knew challenging a senior officer was taboo.
It has become easier for all Americans to imagine the options after our release from a marijuana conviction imprisonment at age 17, without even a high school diploma. As the prison gates slowly open, you see 10 foot high speed bumps labeled no education, no living wage employment, inaccessible student loans, often no driver’s license, not to mention the loss of a family unit as a father, brother, mother, sister, or kids. You’re a child whose life has been lost to the “system.” Recidivism is predicable. Make no mistake; the system is still working the way it was designed since the beginning of cannabis prohibition almost a century ago. Since Juneteenth, cannabis has been the most impactful weapon against minorities.
In every single state, Black people are more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession and, in some states, Black people are up to six, eight, or almost ten times more likely to be arrested. In 31 states, racial disparities were actually larger in 2018 than they were in 2010 despite the rising tide of legalization and decriminalization across states during that time. It has become obvious that it is no longer enough to not be racist, but rather there is the need for us all to be anti-racist. To express distaste for, and opposition to, racist behavior that is done behind closed doors. Because with Trump, it has become acceptable to some for those actions to visible on the street. Yes, all lives matter. But, as we watch people of all colors and creeds take to the streets to support Black Lives Matter, and we begin to recon with the implicit bias that is deep in our subconscious, we must first recognize and confront explicit bias; “‘Explicit bias’ refers to the attitudes and beliefs we have about a person or group on a conscious level. Much of the time, these biases and their expression arise as the direct result of minorities as a perceived threat — in part due to the crimes committed out of the need to survive without good opportunities. All the good in the minority communities, and there is a lot, isn’t sensational enough to report.
Let’s examine how cannabis went from a medicine available in pharmacies until the 1930’s, to an illegal substance used as a weapon against Black and Brown people. We can better understand how to reverse the policies that lead to mass incarcerations of minorities if we look at their origin. In 1933, Harry Anslinger, then the staunch racist head of Federal Bureau of Narcotics which would become the DEA, was confronted by the end of alcohol prohibition. Considering he and his men were charged with enforcing alcohol prohibition, he rightly worried that his team would soon be out of jobs. At that point, Anslinger began driving federal hearings that would eventually culminate in the passage of the Marijuana Stamp Act in 1937. During these hearings, pharmacists voiced their opposition because they saw the power that cannabis medicines had to improve people’s lives. The Stamp Act basically made marijuana illegal, thus creating a new mission for Anslinger and his men — marijuana prohibition. A quote attributable to Anslinger (and there are certainly more than these): “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, results from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and others.” Anslinger’s themes were replicated in the movie “Reefer Madness.”
Given Anslinger’s overt racism, marijuana prohibition became a tool to wrongly demonize and persecute Mexicans and African-American users in particular. This is also when the Spanish word Marihuana (easier to cast as anti-American) replaced Cannabis in propaganda like this 1930's poster spawning the gateway drug fallacy.
The crusade against ‘Marijuana’ began here, and as we know, still rages on today with devastating impact on minorities. President Nixon took things up a notch with his “War on Drugs.” Nancy Reagan had a “War on Drugs,” and we could go on with harsher mandates and sentencing right up to today. There was action by Obama to approach the opiod problem as a public health crisis. As Jeff Sessions said in 2016, “Good people don’t smoke marijuana.” An obvious structural, systemic bias at the policing and judicial levels exists. A system, by definition, is designed to produce the results seen. The outcomes we see today are predictable and do lifelong damage.
Imagine for a moment a world where more people could legally consume regulated, and precisely dosed, cannabis. Two-thirds of US citizens, republicans and democrats, agree that marijuana should be legal. A world where cannabis is a unifying force in politics is possible. [Given how little is getting accomplished in Congress, cannabis could only help! Just send a staffer down the street people, it’s legal in D.C.] Republicans and democrats could safely consume cannabis nationwide as we would have regulations to provide consumer protections like food safety laws. The U.S. could stop wasting precious limited tax revenues on the cannabis imprisonment machine. Instead, we could invest revenue from cannabis sales taxes on education, healthcare, addiction services, mental health, childcare, and providing plentiful cannabis jobs for everyone including fellow White brothers and sisters. In a world where more people have access to and consume cannabis in their daily lives; a happier, healthier, and wealthier society that can start to come together for the common good. Legalization of cannabis is socially just policy. Marijuana reform can help to un-do so much misguided waste. Socially just cannabis legalization offers an opportunity to especially improve Black and Brown lives (which some states are trying to do) — and indeed everyone’s lives.
In the next article, we will further discuss how to use marijuana taxes to invest comprehensively in Black and Brown communities most impacted by the war on drugs. Simply giving priority to minority applicants for dispensary licenses or even dumping money into minority communities most heavily impacted by bad marijuana policy without business training and supports will result in opportunistic extraction of said money using inevitable structural loopholes… as usual.
Adrian Adams, Ed.D. is the CEO of Ontogen Botanicals, a minority owned company dedicated to providing the highest quality CBD to physicians, patients, and the general public. As the Practice Administrator for his NYS Cannabis Certifying physician wife’s medical practice for two decades, he has witnessed the difference cannabis therapy can make in people’s lives.
