Amanda Lewis for Buzzfeed, on the “green boom” in states where recently-legalized marijuana sales are leaving some folks behind:
For most jobs, experience will help you get ahead. In the marijuana industry, it’s not that simple. Yes, investors and state governments are eager to hire and license people with expertise in how to cultivate, cure, trim, and process cannabis. But it can’t be someone who got caught. Which for the most part means it can’t be someone who is black.
Even though research shows people of all races are about equally likely to have broken the law by growing, smoking, or selling marijuana, black people are much more likely to have been arrested for it. Black people are much more likely to have ended up with a criminal record because of it. And every state that has legalized medical or recreational marijuana bans people with drug felonies from working at, owning, investing in, or sitting on the board of a cannabis business. After having borne the brunt of the “war on drugs,” black Americans are now largely missing out on the economic opportunities created by legalization.
I would hasten to add that the burgeoning marijuana industry isn’t the only one in which a decade-old felony conviction disqualifies candidates. That’s not a knock on Lewis’s reporting. Her article is flat-out amazing, and if she interviewed non-white people from every corner of the American economy with lives shattered by war on drugs convictions, she’d never finish.
Which reminds me of the New York Times, In Heroin Crisis, White Families Seek Gentler War on Drugs:
When the nation’s long-running war against drugs was defined by the crack epidemic and based in poor, predominantly black urban areas, the public response was defined by zero tolerance and stiff prison sentences. But today’s heroin crisis is different. While heroin use has climbed among all demographic groups, it has skyrocketed among whites; nearly 90 percent of those who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white.
Some black scholars said they welcomed the shift, while expressing frustration that earlier calls by African-Americans for a more empathetic approach were largely ignored.
“This new turn to a more compassionate view of those addicted to heroin is welcome,” said Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, who specializes in racial issues at Columbia and U.C.L.A. law schools. “But,” she added, “one cannot help notice that had this compassion existed for African-Americans caught up in addiction and the behaviors it produces, the devastating impact of mass incarceration upon entire communities would never have happened.”
And hey, one more for the road: the head of the Women’s Tennis Association thinks that Maria Sharapova “made an honest mistake” and Nike sounds willing to forgive her.