Part 2: Cannabis Business

If we seek true equity within this new emerging cannabis industry, then we must allow for black-owned and -operated businesses to hold a large section of the federal legal cannabis industry. This means black Americans can start cannabis businesses in America that would be subsidized by grants from the federal government, with grant funding coming directly from the federal cannabis taxes. 

The federal government already subsidizes farms all over the U.S. So, this is not new. And there's already a precedent for it. The federal government has a history of direct discrimination and practices to overtly oppress and disadvantage black Americans through processes like redlining. But even on the state level, we see systemic oppression in Washington, where cannabis was legal and has been legal since 2012. The state has tracked over $8 billion purchases of legal cannabis in Washington since opening day on July 12th, 2012. However, there is a huge offset of white ownership within this industry. This offset is not just an oops moment, or system processing error. This is modern day systematic oppression. The process was set up to eliminate those who were not white males and had a legacy within Seattle. The cannabis industry in Washington was built without the thoughts, or proper participation of those most affected by the demonization of cannabis, the same people who would most likely be positively affected by the new emergence of a legalized cannabis market.

In fact, during the initial push for legalization here in Washington, which was the push for initiative 502 in 2012,the incredibly effective messaging that went out to potential voters promoted statistics of how black Americans were disproportionately arrested and jailed for possession of cannabis. For example, one piece of data that was used was how in 2017, we had more marijuana possession arrests in our country than all other violent crimes combined. 

So, the demonization of the plant was one of the major factors in developing the drug war. Yet, when it was time to build a new system to regulate and allow profit to be made from the plant, the system that was built was done in such a way to leverage white wealth and to cut out black Americans; a racist system does not build itself. These systems are built by those in power and privilege who continue to seek to redistribute power and privilege back to themselves, maintaining a racist system, and continuously oppressing and disenfranchising Black Americans. 

“...This has rendered a unique portrait of the U.S. prison system, which seems to have been designed almost exclusively with the intent to cage African-American and Latino drug offenders. Drug convictions ’account[ed] for two-thirds of the rise in the federal inmate population and more than half of the [soaring state prison population] between 1985 and 2000.’  In the early 2000s, the U.S. prison system held 792,000 African-American men, the same number as had been enslaved in 1820. The War on Drugs essentially ‘delivered the number of incarcerated African-American men to match the number that were forced into chattel bondage at slavery's peak, in 1860.’”

REEFER REPARATIONS -PROFESSOR JASMIN MIZE1*