The American public鈥檚 attitude towards drugs is notoriously finicky. Our views tend to swing drastically, from favouring heavily-enforced prohibition to laid-back, libertine consumption. More than any other drug, cannabis embodies this extreme shift.
In 1969, of Americans thought marijuana should be legal. By 2022, an of US adults believed the drug should be legal for medical purposes, recreational use or both. This about-face in public opinion is increasingly reflected in our drug laws: 23 states (and counting) have legalised recreational cannabis, and 40 states have legalised it for medical uses. Today, nearly live in a state where marijuana is legal.
It鈥檚 easy, then, to conclude that America鈥檚 long and futile war against cannabis is over. Marijuana won! Not so fast. Changing public opinion and laws is one thing, but actually implementing a fair and just transition to legalisation that corrects for past injustice is something else entirely. As it turns out, it鈥檚 no small thing to unravel the generational harms of prohibition.
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Injustices of the past still persist across two major realms. First, in drug enforcement, where stark racial disparities in arrests for marijuana possession remain stubbornly high. And second, in the promise of giving racially marginalised people (who were disproportionately criminalised during prohibition) a leg up in the new marijuana industry, which has largely gone up in smoke. Rather than reparations for casualties of the drug war, the new marijuana capitalism looks a lot like the old capitalism.
Let鈥檚 start with drug enforcement. Cannabis is currently listed alongside heroin and LSD as a Schedule I substance, which means it remains federally prohibited. As a result, are still arrested every year for marijuana. For decades, stringent marijuana laws were selectively enforced, and often used as a pretext, to . According to the , Black people are more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people, including in states with newly created legal markets (despite comparable rates of cannabis use across demographics). Even though legalisation has led to a steady decline in arrests nationally, there remains a long way to go. Old habits die hard, indeed.
Inequality also permeates the legal marijuana industry. Politicians and activists alike have as a 鈥済reen rush鈥�, a reparative project that would mend the multitude of racial and economic damages wrought by decades of racist drug enforcement. Whether through 鈥溾�� models that prioritise giving business licences to people who were targeted by the drug war or via mass record expungement of past marijuana offences, yesterday鈥檚 weed dealers were invited to hang up a shingle and become entrepreneurs in the newly-legal multi-billion dollar industry.
And yet, in state after state that has legalised , the same trend appears: the vast majority of licenced dispensaries are neither owned by people of colour nor victims of the drug war. One estimate clocks Black ownership across the entire industry, which is a staggering $13 billion. Deep-pocketed corporations run by white businessmen flush with connections and capital 聽have come out on top of the green rush. Chronicling the experience of Black marijuana entrepreneurs for The New Republic, the journalist Amanda Chicago Lewis that, 鈥淢arijuana legalization has been less a revolution and more a grim continuation of a deeply American form of inequality, in which prosperity and social mobility are technically possible but utterly unlikely.鈥�
The US isn鈥檛 the only country struggling to create a regulated marijuana industry that is fair and equitable. To date, only two other countries 鈥� Canada and Uruguay 鈥� have nationally legalised the drug, and each faces its own challenges. Canada legalised and regulated marijuana in 2018, but only 2 per cent of its companies are led by Indigenous people, and 1 per cent are Black-lead, according to a University of Toronto . In Uruguay, many consumers still on the black market as opposed to legal outlets.
The science of cannabis
As the use of marijuana and its compounds rises around the world, 快猫短视频 explores the latest research on the medical potential of cannabis, how it is grown and its environmental impact, the way cannabis affects our bodies and minds and what the marijuana of the future will look like.
Back in the US, the black market is also . In California, cannabis purchases are made illegally, resulting in a in state revenue. In New York City, the new legal market is being undercut by an estimated. Experts attribute the problem to steep taxes coupled with substantial barriers to entry for retail licences. For many, high hopes of a marijuana boom have been stymied, and dreams of building Black wealth deferred.
When President Joe Biden of federal marijuana convictions in 2022, he , 鈥淣o one should be in jail for just using or possessing marijuana.鈥� While the move represented a sea change in marijuana policy, there is still a long way to go before the US achieves a truly equitable market.
