Injustice for some is injustice for all
February is Black History Month, and as a magazine devoted to the culture of the medical-cannabis community, we think this a good time to remember that the history of marijuana laws in America is intimately linked to our nation’s long record of oppression of its nonwhite citizenry.
To help illustrate this reality, let’s consider the journey of a hypothetical medical-marijuana patient as he tries to navigate the country’s torturous patchwork of cannabis laws to legally obtain his medicine.
“John” is a 21-year-old African-American cancer patient whose doctor just advised that he use cannabis to relieve his nausea and increase his appetite. “John” is fortunate enough to live in Southern California, where he can legally obtain his medicine. Were he from a state without a medical-marijuana program, he’d have to either forego his cannabis or buy it illegally and risk becoming one of the estimated 114,000 African-Americans in U.S. prisons for drug convictions—45 percent of the drug prisoner population.
Were “John” a white American obtaining his cannabis illegally, his odds of remaining free would be much better: In 2005, only 72,000 U.S. drug prisoners were white, despite statistics showing whites are five times more likely to use illegal drugs than blacks. Further, white Americans are 13 times less likely to be sentenced to prison on drug convictions than African-Americans, according to Human Rights Watch.
When it comes to cannabis, “John” is really fortunate not to live in New York City, where African-Americans are three times more likely than white Americans to be sent to prison on marijuana-possession charges. Blacks represent 85 percent of all NYC arrestees for pot possession (according to the National Development Research Institute), but only 12 percent of the city’s general population.
Bizarrely, had “John” tried to buy so much as a joint for his nausea in 1971—before marijuana was decriminalized in California—he’d have risked serious criminal penalties, including imprisonment. But the very fact that cannabis needed to be decriminalized is frustrating to medical-cannabis users, who know that 74 years ago marijuana could be legally purchased in any drug store. And it’s particularly galling to “John,” who knows that the outlawing of cannabis in America was aimed squarely at people of color.
The motivation for banning cannabis in the U.S. was largely economic. Industrialists like Pierre DuPont and Andrew Mellon saw industrial hemp as a threat to their interests, and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst saw demonizing weed as a chance to sell more newspapers. But the vehicle for making prohibition happen was racism.
Led by Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger (a nephew to Mellon by marriage) and cheered on by Hearst’s many newspapers, Americans were fed a steady diet of sensationalized and frequently fabricated reports of marauding blacks and Mexicans hopped up on pot. Stories abounded of “loco weed” prompting Mexican nationals to rob and kill white property owners, of stoned black jazz musicians corrupting the morals of white women, of ordinarily complacent black men smoking joints and daring to look white citizens twice in the eye.
This patently racist propaganda campaign turned public opinion against pot and directly led to the Congressional hearings that resulted in prohibition. It should be noted that the immediate impact of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 proved the rule that injustice for some is injustice for all: The first American to be imprisoned for violating the Tax Act was white.
Given the despicable origins of anti-cannabis statutes and their continued disproportionate application to minorities, we can say without exaggeration that marijuana prohibition is perhaps the only Jim Crow law still openly embraced by the federal government. As we take time this month to remember the African experience in America, we should take care to remember that, too.
