STROINSKI: Specter of weed monopoly

Last Sunday, funnyman John Oliver spoke, in great detail, about the gray area of marijuana legality in the United States. It was a fantastic bit and I urge you to check it out.

Like Mr. Oliver, I want to talk to you about weed. I, however, want to focus on an entirely different facet of this incredibly complex and controversial issue — the class and race aspect of growing, distributing and consuming marijuana.

In any popular industry, the specter of “monopoly” looms large, and the pot industry is by no means immune to it. So when we talk about legalizing and regulating marijuana, we have to at the same time talk about bureaucracy and business, and about potential trusts and industry conglomerates. We must commit, always, to protecting consumers and small businesses from horizontal integration, labor maltreatment and malignant entrepreneurship.

In 2016, Ohio had the pot conversation, but strategically steamrolled over the business part of the issue. The state wrote the question, known as Issue 3, so that wealthy investors, and only wealthy investors, could pocket the cash made from marijuana. Essentially, the referendum called for a cannabis monopoly and handed over the rights to weed cultivation and distribution in Ohio to top percenters, effectively freezing out small businesses and individual pot growers. Luckily for us, the referendum failed. But the question still looms large: how do we implement marijuana legalization and how do we make sure that revenue doesn’t accumulate at the top?

Here’s why answering this question, and answering it comprehensively and carefully, is important. There were approximately 210,000 people arrested for marijuana possession in Colorado between 1986 and 2010. Yes, many of them were arrested after medical marijuana was made legal in the state in 2000. Additionally, black men and women are four times more likely to be arrested because the war on drugs, which, beginning with Richard Nixon in the 1970s and intensifying under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, disproportionately targeted these communities. And here’s a crazy statistic for you: as of 2011, there were more black men behind bars today than there were enslaved during the height of the Civil War. Most of these men are in jail for minor drug possession and distribution charges.

On the other end of the spectrum, rich white dudes get off pretty easily on drug charges. First and foremost, they don’t get arrested for it, and here are some stats: way more white men aged 18-25 have used marijuana than black dudes. Arrest rates, though, do not reflect these statistics. You know what else is pretty messed up? White arrests have stayed about the same since 2001 while black arrests have increased exponentially from 2001 to 2010. Second, even if white Americans are arrested, they have an easier time posting bail and getting off without jail time. It’s black Americans who serve the long and harsh sentences.

So, yeah, there is something incredibly messed up about handing this thing to rich, white males. It’s definitely not fair, and it destroys business opportunities for regularly disenfranchised groups. It might be hard, according to Oliver, to manage a successful marijuana business once you’re up and running. But getting in the game is much harder. The face of recreational weed is almost always a young, white and relatively well-off man.

Marginalized communities, the ones most affected by the war on drugs, ought to reap the benefit of marijuana legalization. We ought to make it easier for recently released inmates to engage in a business they have already been involved in, and we ought to safeguard against handing the blossoming marijuana industry off to a few people at the tippy-top of the class pyramid. Saying this is great but doing it is another story. Luckily, there are real, grassroots initiatives to level the playing field. There’s the Minority Cannabis Business Association, a fantastic organization that lobbies state houses for better and more inclusive legislation on pot, and a number of progressive politicians within state governments who are promising to make weed and all of its facets entirely intersectional and even legal. There’s a way to do right by people, and we can do it if we try.