Pot legalization campaigns aim to throw out old convictions

OAKLAND – Rob Jenkins tried for four years to find a job, scouring the internet for anything that seemed at all appealing – a maintenance position at a Chevron refinery, a counselor for foster kids, a clerk at Hertz.

Some employers seemed interested, until they found out about his 2008 misdemeanor conviction for growing marijuana.

“I was stuck,” recalled the 37-year-old college graduate. “No job opportunities were coming in.”

He found himself in the same situation as hundreds of thousands of others across the country whose prospects for the future were diminished by criminal records for marijuana cultivation or possession.

Now a new movement accompanying the widespread push for pot legalization may give them a second chance and help black and Latino neighborhoods that have been the focus of drug law enforcement. The aim is to wipe records clean and help people put their formerly illicit skills to use in the booming industry of legal cannabis.

It started in California in 2016 when voters approved Proposition 64, which not only legalized recreational marijuana but also made it easier for people with pot convictions to expunge their records. Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco have started giving people with prior convictions – or those from neighborhoods that were once heavily targeted for marijuana-related arrests – priority for licenses to start pot businesses.

New Jersey, North Dakota and Michigan may soon follow suit, with advocates for pot legalization measures under consideration this fall making social and economic justice the centerpiece of their campaigns.

It’s a decisive shift from the traditional rationales for legalization – evolving public attitudes about the drug and the opportunity to tax it.

“In New Jersey, black residents are three times more likely than white residents to be arrested for marijuana offenses,” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, said in an email explaining his support for a marijuana legalization bill that lawmakers are expected to pass this month.

The law would “help Rob Jenkins works at a cannabis nursery in Oakland, planting and tending to various strains. He was recently laid off with 30 other employees, however, because he said the company was having financial problems.

break the cycle of nonviolent, low-level drug offenses that prevent people, especially people of color, from succeeding,” he said.

Research shows that whites, blacks and Latinos use and sell marijuana at similar rates, but that blacks by far are the most likely to be arrested in connection with the drug. One California study found that African Americans make up 6 percent of the state’s population, but are nearly

a quarter of those serving time in jail exclusively for marijuana offenses.

In Oakland, where Jenkins grew up, blacks and whites each make up about 30 percent of the population. But 77 percent of the people arrested in connection with marijuana in 2015 were black, while just 4 percent were white, according to a recent report

Jenkins, who is black, remembers watching marijuana sales as a child.