As California moves toward completely decriminalizing our multibillion-dollar marijuana economy, one cannot help but notice that many of the regulations are being written of wealthy white people, by wealthy white people, and for wealthy white people.
This is sadly not surprising, but it is both wrong and a lost opportunity, given the history of the disproportionate impact of criminalization on minority communities.
As a County Supervisor striving with my peers to craft sensible policy in the midst of a modern-day Gold Rush, it is my goal to ensure that the huge economic potential for legalization is shared equally with the communities who have suffered excessively during marijuana’s criminalization—Latinos and African Americans.
In the failed, decades-long War on Drugs, racial minorities have endured the majority of collateral damage.
According to data from the Drug Policy Alliance, in 2014, a little over 700,000 of the 1.5 million drug arrests in the U.S were made for the possession and distribution of marijuana—with Latinos and African Americans arrested and incarcerated at alarmingly higher rates than whites. Racial disparities in arrests are even increasing over the years in some cases, according to studies by the ACLU.
Surveys conducted in my home state of California have shown that although whites consume marijuana at higher rates, they are much less likely to be arrested and imprisoned for possession and distribution of cannabis than Latinos—with the arrest rates residing between 30 percent to 300 percent higher than whites, depending on the locale.
The price of being charged for possession of even small amounts of marijuana can lead to rippling effects in the lives of those charged. Young people of color are targeted most frequently. A criminal charge for possession can mean the loss of federal financial aid for college, public benefits, and a scarlet letter that could hinder a young person from accessing education or a better paying job.
One remedy to this inequity could come in the form of a program that is as old as the Drug War, and was ironically created under the same president, Richard Nixon. The Minority Business Development Agency, which operates under the U.S. Department of Commerce, gives benefits, guidance, and access to capital and government contracts to businesses that are owned and operated by people of color.
The U.S. Small Business Administration and local governments across the country, including my own, also have their own organizations and systems in place to assist minorities in creating and building their businesses.
In my county, I am proposing that we give minority-owned businesses preference when we allocate licenses to cultivate, manufacture, research, and sell marijuana—a policy that I hope will be replicated and implemented by other counties and states. These preferences will bring capital and business opportunities to minorities in a fast growing sector, which in turn could create more evenly distributed wealth in the long run.
Although these incentives don’t provide even a fraction of the reparations owed to minority communities for the injustices that occurred during the last fifty years, they would give a sense of fairness and new economic opportunities to people of color moving forward.