Claiming that it will only help white kids and that crack should be legalized to level the playing field for black kids is utter insanity.

Legalizing weed will eliminate this disproportionate amount of arrests. No one should have ever been arrested for it in the first place.

most of the Black population here is centered in Mpls and St Paul and that is where law enforcement concentrates it's efforts period

Even if you limit the enforcement to the Twin Cities there are lots of whites in the cities that smoke pot, in the suburbs there are lots of pot smokers as well and the large majority of them are white. There are plenty of cops in the suburbs so I don't buy that this is just because of the concentration of police in the city, this looks to me to be racial profiling.

what I meant was that for city cops Blacks are an easy target and that is racial profiling your right what I did leave out is that suburban and out state police will also target Blacks too, the fact that in MN Blacks are a tiny minority centered in the 2 major metropolitan areas should make that kind of obvious though

This is one of the primary motivations for many in the reform movement.

One of the 2 underlying reasons for the original passage of the "Marijuana Tax Act" in 1938 was the oppression of minorities (Blacks and Latinos). Much of the original debate on the issue FOCUSED on the proliferation of MJ usage in the Black and Latino communities of the 1930s.

The saddest part of this is that the racial motivations are actually the RUSE in this issue, as MJ prohibition was originally all about protecting timber, cotton, and nylon industries that were still mostly monopolies, and more powerful then than oil is now. It's horribly unfortunate that this has evolved now to be the seeming ONLY motivation of these laws (not to say that they were ever about anything but fascism).

It would take an executive order, that is all, to end MJ prohibition. We don't need the senate, the house, or the SCOTUS. All we need is one man to tell one department under his control to de-lilst MJ as schedule 1 and prohibition is over. It needs to happen.

Obama laughed when he was asked about legalization at the beginning of his first term, and he renominated that idiot Leonhart, who thinks that marijuana as a dangerous as heroin and is more focused on raiding dispensaries than targeting criminal gangs in states that have decriminalized marijuana, to be the head of the DEA.

He refuses to ever buck the establishment on much less controversial issues. There's no way in hell that he's going to do it on this one.

Racism is alive and thriving in the US of A.

Probably more like 10 to 1 given black targeting of those discriminatory laws.