New pot laws seek to level playing field
Minorities get a boost in legal cannabis industry
Fourth-generation Oakland native Tucky Blunt grew up around weed. His grandmother used it. So did his parents and his friends. ❚ Blunt (yes, that’s his real last name) started selling to friends in the neighborhood when he was 16. He was usually careful, buying in bulk from a trusted supplier and selling to customers who’d call him to meet up.
After nearly a decade of illegal sales, it was $80 worth of pot that got him in trouble. He was found with a handful of baggies stashed in his pants when police officers came for him, tipped off by someone Blunt thought was a friend.
“We were out there trying to make money to help support our families at a time when people didn’t have a lot money. We didn’t think we were hurting anyone,” said Blunt, now 39. “I liked weed. I knew people who liked weed. Why not facilitate them getting good weed? That’s how I looked at it.”
His arrest in 2004 and his conviction left Blunt with a 10-year felony probation, allowing police to stop and search him anytime, for any reason. Meanwhile, all around Oakland, young black men like him were getting arrested while most of the white guys who were selling weed were left alone, Blunt said.
“It affected everybody in my circle because it was only targeted to us. I knew white people that was selling weed that never went to jail,” he said. “The war on drugs was just about putting as many of us in jail as possible. It tore up a lot of families.”
The war on drugs has for decades disproportionately devastated minority communities by punishing people like Blunt and creating a cycle of poverty, incarceration and
Tucky Blunt
limited employment options, legal and social justice experts say.
Now, lawmakers and legalization advocates across the country are demanding not just cannabis legalization but remedies to address decades of demonstrably racist polic-
“The war on drugs was just about putting as many of us in jail as possible. It tore up a lot of families.”
ing, from laws that automatically expunge criminal records for marijuana dealing and possession to policies that would help minority communities build cannabis businesses.
The same year as Blunt’s arrest, Oakland’s voters ordered police officers to make marijuana enforcement their lowest priority, below even jaywalking. But a decade later, the problem was laid bare: Officers were still arresting black men for marijuana crimes at rates staggeringly higher than for whites.
According to the city’s own statistics, 77 percent of the marijuana arrests in Oakland in 2015 were of African-Americans. Whites represented just 4 percent of those arrests, even though the city’s population is about 30 percent white and 30 percent black.
Similar data have been reported throughout the U.S. While marijuana legalization has reduced the overall number of marijuana arrests, people of color are still being targeted by police.
Even in states with largely white populations, black people using or selling marijuana still face high arrest rates.
In Colorado, which in 2012 became the first state to legalize marijuana, the total number of marijuana arrests decreased by 52 percent between 2012 and 2017, from 12,709 to 6,153, according to state statistics. But at the same time, the marijuana arrest rate for AfricanAmericans – 233 per 100,000 – was nearly double that of whites in 2017, and that’s in a state that’s 84 percent white.
Years of uneven enforcement
California has taken the lead in trying to amend years of racially disproportionate drug policies.
In 2016, the state approved legal recreational marijuana in a ballot measure that also allowed people with pot arrests to get their records expunged. So few people took advantage of the opportunity, however, that state lawmakers passed a new law last fall ordering prosecutors to automatically review and potentially reduce or dismiss sentences and records for low-level marijuana offenses.
Though such efforts have the potential to make a difference, advocates say, it would have been better to include, from the very start, automatic expungement and other provisions to aid minority communities.
“Once the train has left the station, it’s hard to attach new boxcars,” said Christine De La Rosa, who owns marijuana businesses in California and Oregon and is lobbying to pass legal recreational pot in New York state. “People are starting to understand and to put the pieces together: This child’s father has been in jail for 16 years on a minor possession charge, and then right across the street at the marijuana convention you have a bunch of white guys in ties getting rich.”
Similar debates over social justice reform and marijuana laws are unfolding in cities and states with legal marijuana and those without it. In Seattle, prosecutors have sought to abolish hundreds of convictions against people arrested with small amounts of pot. In New Jersey and New York, lawmakers are looking to legalize pot and expunge marijuana records once they do.
In Baltimore, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby argues that police and prosecutor resources are better spent focusing on the city’s high murder rate than on marijuana cases. Last month, Mosby announced that her office would no longer prosecute any marijuana possession cases, regardless of amount or prior criminal record, unless there was demonstrated intent to distribute. And she announced her office would vacate about 5,000 marijuana-related convictions dating back to 2011.
Drug laws have been “disproportionately enforced in communities of color, and that’s creating an erosion of public trust,” Mosby told USA TODAY. “We’re moving toward legalization, and it makes absolutely no sense as the top prosecutor to be complicit in that discriminatory enforcement.”
As a prosecutor, Mosby said, she’s all too aware of how a criminal record can hurt someone for decades, even generations.
“When you think about those collateral consequences, it’s got impacts on housing, employment, adoption, mobility, property rights,” Mosby said. “It’s a greater realization that these failed policies did not work and we need to take a different approach.”
Kevin Sabet, CEO of the anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, said states should decriminalize marijuana, but he doubts that will help people who have been shut out of the legal weed industry because of their records. His group argues that the licensing systems created to sell marijuana are primarily benefiting companies racing to become the next Big Tobacco.
“The pot industry is largely rich, white, male, and despite lip service by some legalization advocates, this won’t change anytime soon,” he said. “The pot industry requires major institutional capital, and unless a state is handing out seven-figure checks to certain populations, license preference programs won’t make a dent.”
A first-of-its kind survey by Marijuana Business Daily in 2017 found that whites made up 81 percent of people who had either started a marijuana company or had an ownership stake. New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, cited those statistics at a hearing earlier this month, suggesting that most marijuana legalization systems actually were compounding the racial wealth gap.
A need to ‘overcorrect’
For many marijuana legalization activists, it’s now up to local governments to diversify the legal pot industry by clearing conviction records and handing out subsidies. If white men have unfairly benefited from marijuana legalization, then it’s only fair that minority communities be given extra help now because they suffered more, the thinking goes.
“We actually do have to overcorrect,” said Kassandra Frederique, 32, the New York state director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which is lobbying to legalize marijuana in the Empire State. “People from our communities, black and brown communities, were the one first ones to be criminalized. Why shouldn’t we be the first ones to benefit?”
In California, several cities have created cannabis equity programs to help former drug dealers go legal. The programs include business development, loan assistance and mentor relationships. In September 2018, former Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation to partially fund such programs. The bill stated it would help ensure “that persons most harmed by cannabis criminalization and poverty be offered assistance to enter the multibillion-dollar industry as entrepreneurs or as employees with high-quality, well-paying jobs.”
Years after he was arrested, Blunt is now the first Oakland resident to benefit from the city’s license preference program. Under the equity program, longtime Oakland residents who were hurt by the war on drugs are getting priority, preference and special assistance to open up marijuana stores so they can sell cannabis legally. Blunt, who got his criminal record cleared once he finished his sentence, actually had to get it temporarily reopened so equity program managers could verify his arrest.
The program helped him launch his marijuana store, Blunts+Moore, in November. He sees the national push for more equity programs as a key component to easing the damage caused by the war on drugs.
“We’re not just budtenders, not just security guards anymore. We’re owners now,” he said. “To be able to sell this legally in my city, literally 10 blocks from where I caught my case, I’m fine – I wasn’t going to let anything stop me.
“I’m the new kid on the block, and I’m here to change the game.”