America has
long been high on its own endless supply of hypocrisy. The “land of the free”
has the largest prison population in the world; the “home of the brave” has
elected a coward to the White House. The United States, it has become clear, is
still a divided country with different rules for its different coloured
citizens. And, arguably, nowhere are those double standards more bluntly black
and white than when it comes to the corporatisation of cannabis.
In recent
years, the US establishment has gone from piously advising people to Just Say
No to drugs, to saying “yes, please” to profiting from pot. To date, eight
states have legalised recreational cannabis. Some colleges, such as the
University of Denver, have introduced Business of Marijuana courses into their
curriculums. Hordes of bright, mainly white, young things have launched
lucrative cannabis startups and there’s an interminable stream of trend pieces
in the US media about everything from cannabis-kale to how “bud bars” are the
fashionable new fixture at white weddings.
Blue-chip
companies are also benefiting from the green rush: Scotts Miracle-Gro, a
lawn-care company, saw its shares rise 31% last year, after buying up lots of
companies that provide supplies for hydroponics, the favoured method of
cultivating cannabis. Guess how many people of colour are on the Scotts
leadership team? None.
So while
legal marijuana money has started pouring into the US economy, there’s ample
evidence that it’s largely white people profiting. A Buzzfeed investigation
last year, for example, estimated only about 1% of the storefront marijuana
dispensaries in the US are owned by black people.
A
billion-dollar industry, a racist legacy: being black and growing pot in
America
Read more
The racial
inequities in the new marijuana economy are particularly egregious considering
the US’s decades-long war on drugs, which disproportionately punished African
Americans for petty drug crimes. A 2013 report from the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) found black people are almost four times more likely to
be arrested for marijuana possession than white people, despite similar usage
rates. The war on drugs has always been sanitised shorthand for: The War on
Non-White People, With a Particular Emphasis on Black People.
The US’s
racist approach to marijuana – both past and present – is hardly news. But what
do we do about it? Well, I’ve got an idea: reparations. Every business now
exploiting the legalisation of marijuana should forfeit at least 50% of their
pot-based profits to a fund that gives reparations to people whose lives were
destroyed by the US’s discriminatory war on drugs.
Advertisement
If this
sounds fanciful, it shouldn’t. There is a longstanding debate in the US about
whether the government should compensate African Americans for the legacy of
slavery – and the war on drugs is very much part of that legacy. Indeed,
slavery was never entirely abolished in the US, it simply evolved, as white
America found less overt ways to beat down its black population. Slavery 2.0
was the Jim Crow laws, that segregated and disenfranchised black people from
around 1890 to the early 1950s. Slavery 3.0 took the form of what has been
described as the “new Jim Crow”: the mass incarceration of black people. In her
highly influential 2010 book, The New Jim Crow, legal scholar Michelle
Alexander explains that “rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice
system to label people of colour ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the
practices we supposedly left behind … employment discrimination, housing
discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity
… are suddenly legal ... We have not ended racial caste in America; we have
merely redesigned it.”
There has
been a lot of pushback against the idea of reparations for slavery. In a poll
conducted last year, 81% of white people opposed the idea. Arguments against
reparations for slavery tend to focus on the fact that slavery is a long time
past. A National Review article entitled The Case Against Reparations argues,
for example, that: “The people to whom reparations were owed are long dead; our
duty is to the living, and to generations yet to come, and their interests are
best served by liberty and prosperity, not by moral theatre.”
You can’t
argue any of these counterpoints when it comes to the case for marijuana
reparations, however. Many of the people whose lives were ruined by
disproportionally harsh punishment for petty drug crimes are still alive and
suffering the consequences. What’s more, it’s hard to talk about moral theatre
when you’re taking money from people who are currently profiting from drugs and
giving it to people who were incarcerated for attempting to profit from drugs.
Reparations
only seem to be contentious when the people receiving money aren’t white. In
2015, for example, a bill signed by Barack Obama established the US Victims of
State Sponsored Terrorism Fund. This uncontroversial fund seizes assets from
terrorist financiers and uses the money to compensate US victims of terrorism
by state sponsors of terrorism. Much of the money for the fund has come from
French bank BNP Paribas, which was fined $9bn in 2014 for violating US
sanctions against Iran, Cuba and Sudan. Earlier this year the criminal division
announced that more than $800m (£621m) had been paid out from the fund to
individuals such as the Iran hostages held from 1979 to 1981.
The US’s war
against drugs, I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say, was state-sponsored
racial terrorism. The only reason it’s not widely recognised as such, and there
isn’t a compensation fund, is because racism is one hell of a drug.
Guardian
0 Comments