Part 1: Cannabis History

Did you know the founding fathers grew hemp? It’s true! Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington not only grew hemp, but they promoted the growth of hemp during the early foundations of the American colonies. In addition, in Virginia in 1619, it was illegal to not grow hemp.

So, who was really doing the planting? 

And the answer as we all know would be the African slaves who were brought over here in 1619, not just to grow cotton like the history books tell us, but to grow hemp as well. Another thing the history books didn’t teach us was that hemp (also called cannabis/Marijuana which we have called it since the 1930’s) was one of the big three crops within the colonies.

Black Americans’ ancestors were brought here to grow cannabis, which is now the leading cause of incarceration of nonviolent offense and arrest of Black Americans.  These numbers were further increased because of the war on drugs which was started by Ronald Reagan in 1970. One of his aids in 1994 revealed the true nature of the war on drugs:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. Do you understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.” 

– Nixon’s Chief Domestic Advisor, John Ehrlichman, Harper’s Magazine, 1994

So, let’s get this straight. Our Black American ancestors were brought here to grow a plant to make this country rich and build the foundation, literally, of America's wealth. Then in 1937, it became illegal to grow, taking the plants away from the crop cycle for many Black American farmers and landowners, whose family had been growing it since 1619. They made it illegal even though the 1972 Shafer Commission clearly stated that cannabis did not have harmful effects on users and society. Yet the government still started a drug war. When you start to ask why, the answer becomes clear: to put millions of black and brown people in jail for a plant that their ancestors were legally forced to grow. 

The picture becomes even more bleak when you start to consider that the privatized jail systems, making revenue and profit off of those individuals’ work without payment, is just a continuation of Black America’s slavery. From 2012 to present, when cannabis became legal in many states, and many states have already generated billions in revenue through the sales of cannabis, African Americans are nowhere to be found within this booming industry, an industry that was built, literally, off the backs of their forefathers and ancestral lineage. This needs to change. We need to put equity into the foundation of this new cannabis legal market  as cannabis is primed to become legal on a federal level within the next two years.  We must start the conversation about equity not only in the social view, but we need to have a real conversation about how to acknowledge the plant's history, as well as the history around the utilization of the plant as a government-sanctioned tool for oppression. We must acknowledge that the government has received free labor as well as to prevented progression and wealth building within Black American communities.

We must also recognize the laws that are preventing those from participating in the American dream of owning and operating businesses. We must propose a solution, which I am stating very clearly in this article below.

Future federal taxes on cannabis should be used directly to support Black Americans who have been historically displaced and oppressed through the use of this plant, and the policies and legalities surrounding this plant. To put it simply, the federal marijuana tax revenues should be allocated through a form of reparations to all African Americans. I would expect this to be very similar to the Casino Model where revenue from Casinos is controlled and allocated to people of indigenous descent.  In this case, the ones receiving allocated money are those who have been historically oppressed by this plant, and its legal definition. We must remember legality does not mean morality: slavery was legal. At one point in this country, Jim Crow was legal. America has created reparations for its action against indigenous people, Japanese Americans for the internment camps during WWII, and others. Now is the time for Black reparations, and the federal tax revenue from legal cannabis will be the necessary taxation and funding needed to solve it. Before these funds get allocated to other government projects and agendas, we should make sure to allocate those “new funds’ to those that have been historically oppressed by the legal system through the association of the plant. 

250 years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. 35  years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole. 

-Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2014