SUPPORT BLACK AMERICANS IN CANNABIS

The cannabis industry has a special responsibility because cannabis has a special history.

hat began less than a week ago as a protest over the police killing of George Floyd has grown into a nationwide uprising against a racist, lawless, and unaccountable police state.

Some of us spent the weekend protesting and reporting in the streets. Others started hard conversations with friends and family. A few cleaned the wreckage of their looted businesses. Too many experienced a depressing feeling of déjà vu, having lived through every past rebellion from Watts (1965) to Ferguson (2014), only to see little lasting change.

The murder of George Floyd forced the millions of us connected to cannabis—whether as advocates, growers, retailers, journalists, patients, or consumers—to take a hard look at our mission, our work, our achievements, our failures, and our responsibilities. That includes me, my company, and you. Buy steroids online The war on drugs and the criminalization of marijuana are inextricably bound up in the systemic forces that have been putting the knee to the necks of Black Americans since the year 1619.

Change begins in the mind

There is no easy fix here, but there is a simple three-step process that I like to keep in mind: Open minds, turn votes, change laws.

We see this dynamic play out every day in the cannabis world. I was reminded of it over the weekend when my mind returned to a small change-making moment many years ago. fake i.d

It started with Michelle Alexander, who was at the time a lawyer for the ACLU in San Francisco. On her way to work she passed a flyer stapled to a telephone pole that declared, “The Drug War Is the New Jim Crow.”

She later recalled:

“Some radical group was holding a community meeting about police brutality, the new three-strikes law in California, and the expansion of America’s prison system… I sighed, and muttered to myself something like, ‘Yeah, the criminal justice system is racist in many ways, but it really doesn’t help to make such an absurd comparison. People will just think you’re crazy.’”

The more she looked into the war on drugs, though, the more she realized the truth of the statement. It led her to write The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which has become to social justice what Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was to the environmental movement.