The people with money are doing all they can, you see.
Michelle Alexander: White Men Get Rich from Legal Pot, Black Men Stay in Prison
For 40 years, poor communities of color have experienced the wrath of the war on drugs.
But the ramifications of this momentous shift are left unaddressed. When you flick on the TV to a segment about the flowering pot market in Colorado, you'll find that the faces of the movement are primarily white and male. Meanwhile, many of the more than 210,000 people who were arrested for marijuana possession in Colorado between 1986 and 2010 according to a report from the Marijuana Arrest Research Project, remain behind bars. Thousands of black men and boys still sit in prisons for possession of the very plant that's making those white guys on TV rich.
“In many ways the imagery doesn't sit right,” said Michelle Alexander, associate professor of law at Ohio State University and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness in a public conversation on March 6 with Asha Bandele of the Drug Policy Alliance. “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. Now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing?”
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http://www.alternet.org/drugs/michelle-alexander-white-men-get-rich-legal-pot-black-men-stay-prison
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A few days later, the corner is empty. The reason is a Ford SUV, painted black, blue, and white, idling at the curb a few feet away; a police officer’s arm hangs out the window as he surveys the faces passing by. A few hours later he is gone, and the crowd is back. Mostly, the crowd is black. Mostly, the cops who will bust them are white. Mostly, on the corner it’s hard to see how anything was changed by a movement that aimed to change everything.
The dream of legal marijuana as it is being sold to the American public is that it will not only give states a chance to reap a tax windfall off of a drug millions of Americans already use; it will end the back-and-forth tussle among cops, users, and dealers, and shift police resources to more serious crimes. Most compellingly, advocates hold out the promise of a major step toward dismantling one of the pillars of racially biased policing—the war on drugs—and finally reeling in a legal net that has long entangled black men at vastly disproportionate rates.
Proponents of legalization make this case explicitly. In factsheets and reports, the American Civil Liberties Union describes marijuana laws as generating “staggering” racial bias. And the statistics do paint a stark picture: Although whites are as likely to use marijuana as blacks, nationally black people are almost four times more likely to be arrested for possessing the drug. In some states, it’s closer to nine times. Those arrests in turn show up on background checks for everything from apartments to jobs, and despite the courts’ presumption of innocence, arrests are often treated by society as de facto markers of guilt. So in one fell swoop, voters are told, they can balance government budgets, begin to close a pipeline that sends one in three black men to prison, and free up the cops to chase real criminals. Plus, now it’s legal to get stoned.
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http://www.alternet.org/drugs/michelle-alexander-white-men-get-rich-legal-pot-black-men-stay-prison
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