Law & Politics

Pot Arrests Generate Bank for Law Enforcement, Have Racial Bias, Source: http://rollingout.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/miami_police.jpg“Barack Obama is the only black man in America for whom it is safe to openly admit that he has not just smoked pot – but inhaled it, too.”

That is the closing line from an interesting article put out by The Guardian. The piece focuses mainly on the staggering racial disparity found in drug arrests, particularly marijuana arrests. Latino and Black people are over 3 times more likely to suffer harsh judicial consequences for cannabis possession than Caucasians, even though the rate of consumption is more or less the same.

A young black man was pulled over in Iowa on the charge that he was playing his music too loud. His car was then searched and a small amount of cannabis was discovered. I can’t really get into whether or not the search was legal, it does seems suspicious that loud music seemingly provided probable cause to search for drugs. His life was forever changed. He was arrested, given 30 days in jail, lost his job, lost college credit, lost his license for 6 months and now has a criminal record for the rest of his life. It’s hard not to see racial injustice at work here. That white kid in Texas actually killed 4 people while driving drunk and got little more than house arrest. Cannabis still carries more punishment than alcohol, and even harsher if you happen to be a shade other than white.

Additionally, the Guardian’s piece touches on why I really think weed is still illegal: it just generates too much damn money for the police departments.

“Ever since, the ACLU and many, many others have been calling for an end to the arcane reality that is America’s prohibition of marijuana, which nearly 40% of the US population admit to having tried – and which a majority of Americans now support legalizing. This past week, the New York Times has been pushing the cause with a series of editorials not just calling for a federal repeal of the ban on pot but also, importantly, calling out the injustice of marijuana arrests. And that’s the rocky part of the path toward legalization: it’s not going to happen until police departments across the country stop relying on pot arrests as a means of generating money for themselves – and of ensuring that minorities get ensnared in the criminal justice system.

If white people generally, and affluent white people in particular, were not largely exempt from law enforcement’s weed trap, it might be easier to believe lawmakers when they claim pot is a dangerous substance that must be suppressed at all cost. But marijuana arrests now account for 52% of all drug arrests in the United States – 88% of those were for simple possession. And as Ezekiel Edwards, the chief author of the ACLU report, told me this week, “These arrests were never about marijuana being a gateway drug. They are about controlling communities of color and maintaining a steady flow of federal and state funds into local law enforcement efforts. Our multi-billion dollar war on drugs hasn’t just morphed into a war on marijuana – it has become predominately a war on occasional pot smokers of color … and a cash-cow for cops.”

We have a black president who openly admits to using weed and has flatly stated that he doesn’t think marijuana is more dangerous than alcohol. It would be nice if the rest of the government would follow suit (or if the President has some ability to force their hand, he should do so). Drug arrest numbers play a big role in getting grant funding and potheads are notoriously docile and peaceful, making for easy arrests that yield big gains. We need to reschedule weed off Schedule I and/or see some top-down directives that will address this terrible racial bias. My solution is just to fully legalize weed, at least that way racist cops will have a harder time picking on people of color.