that let white folks go free, and even profit, from the same things they are putting black folks in jail for. They wrote laws that let white folks make a ton of new money, while barring many people with black skin from the same opportunities. Some even make money from the private prisons these good people are incarcerated in.
They are all ugly ass bigots and racists whether they have a Southern accent or not.Some people are ashamed enough at their actions to perform them behind closed doors and lie about it, some do it out in the open.
This is just one example, there are others.
The Failed Promise of Legal Pot
New laws on marijuana were supposed to boost tax revenues and free up cops to go after “real” criminals. But underground sales—and arrests—are still thriving.
...
Asking to be identified only by his initials, D.C., one of the young men on the corner, breaks it down. Business has fallen since the law passed, but enough people think they can score a bargain, or simply don’t trust the shiny new stores, to keep things moving. The police know about it—they always have—and they still bust dealers. Sometimes they do sweeps, D.C. says, referring to a well-publicized raid downtown. The cops are definitely more relaxed about it, he says, but sometimes they still show up and bust whoever’s around.
A few days later, the corner is empty. The reason is a Ford SUV, painted black, blue, and white, idling at the curb a few feet away; a police officer’s arm hangs out the window as he surveys the faces passing by. A few hours later he is gone, and the crowd is back. Mostly, the crowd is black. Mostly, the cops who will bust them are white. Mostly, on the corner it’s hard to see how anything was changed by a movement that aimed to change everything.
The dream of legal marijuana as it is being sold to the American public is that it will not only give states a chance to reap a tax windfall off of a drug millions of Americans already use; it will end the back-and-forth tussle among cops, users, and dealers, and shift police resources to more serious crimes. Most compellingly, advocates hold out the promise of a major step toward dismantling one of the pillars of racially biased policing—the war on drugs—and finally reeling in a legal net that has long entangled black men at vastly disproportionate rates.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/legal-pot-and-the-black-market/481506/
Michelle Alexander: White Men Get Rich from Legal Pot, Black Men Stay in Prison
For 40 years, poor communities of color have experienced the wrath of the war on drugs.
By April M. Short / AlterNet March 16, 2014
Photo Credit: By Miller Center [CC-BY-2.0 (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Ever since Colorado and Washington made the unprecedented move to legalize recreational pot last year, excitement and stories of unfettered success have billowed into the air. Colorado's marijuana tax revenue far exceeded expectations, bringing a whopping $185 million to the state, and tourists are lining up to taste the budding culture (pun intended). Several other states are now looking to follow suit and legalize.
But the ramifications of this momentous shift are left unaddressed. When you flick on the TV to a segment about the flowering pot market in Colorado, you'll find that the faces of the movement are primarily white and male. Meanwhile, many of the more than 210,000 people who were arrested for marijuana possession in Colorado between 1986 and 2010 according to a report from the Marijuana Arrest Research Project, remain behind bars. Thousands of black men and boys still sit in prisons for possession of the very plant that's making those white guys on TV rich.
“In many ways the imagery doesn't sit right,” said Michelle Alexander, associate professor of law at Ohio State University and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness in a public conversation on March 6 with Asha Bandele of the Drug Policy Alliance. “Here are white men poised to run big marijuana businesses, dreaming of cashing in big—big money, big businesses selling weed—after 40 years of impoverished black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their families and futures destroyed. Now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing...?”
Marijuana arrests more likely for African Americans
AP 9:28 p.m. EDT June 4, 2013
marijuana
(Photo: Elaine Thompson, AP)
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
About 14% of blacks and 12% of whites report using pot in the year prior
Blacks were 3.73 times more likely than whites to be arrested for it
Arrests of blacks were higher in counties with higher median incomes
WASHINGTON (AP) — Black people are arrested for possessing marijuana at a higher rate than white people, even though marijuana use by both races is about the same, the American Civil Liberties Union reports in a new study...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/04/race-marijuana/2389677/
= new reply since forum marked as read
