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A few days after protests started in Baltimore over the suspicious death of Freddie Gray while in police custody, the website Heavy.com posted his arrest record.
As no surprise to anyone with understanding of socio-economics in low-income communities (or folks who have watched a couple of seasons of “The Wire”), most of those arrests were for intent to sell/unlawful possession of controlled substances, including marijuana
A mere 187 miles up I-95 North, the New York State Department of Health has begun accepting applications for licenses to legally grow and distribute medical marijuana in that state. And also of no surprise to anyone with understanding of how capitalism truly works to disenfranchise the most vulnerable of society, those licenses aren’t cheap.
According to Fusion.net:
“Applicants will have to plunk down a non-refundable $10,000 application fee along with the $200,000 registration fee to enter the program. The registration lasts for two years. After that, growers have to pay again, according to the New York State Department of Health. The state will award five licenses for its highly regulated medical marijuana program. Each registered grower will be allowed to open up four dispensaries, which is roughly one dispensary per million residents in the state.”
It was on July 7, when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the state’s medical marijuana bill into law, making New York the 23rd state in the country to legalize the controlled substance. As Democrats & Chronicle fills in the story: “After the law was approved, it started an 18-month clock for the health department to have the program up and running. The program will allow state-certified doctors to prescribe the drug to patients with cancer, epilepsy and other serious diseases and conditions. Medical marijuana advocates have been clamoring for the state to speed up the process, saying patients, particularly sick children, need the drug as soon as possible”
Government sure knows how to work fast when it really wants to, eh? And as The New York Times reports in this article from last October entitled, For Pot Inc., the Rush to Cash In Is Underway, government isn’t the only entity in New York trying to get a jump on the medical marijuana greenbacks. Groups of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have been meeting and strategizing about how to get their hands on one of those lucrative and high-cost licenses since the bill was first signed into law. One of those people is a 30-year old former financial adviser, who told the Times that he had been meeting with “a group of investors who were eager to sink tens of millions of dollars into the New York cannabis trade.”
If the diverse interest in the drug trade surprises you, you should know that in Colorado, which legalized marijuana for all uses, including recreational back in 2012, both sellers and the local government are making so much money, the state has returned more than $30 million in tax revenue to its citizens.
Meanwhile, on the socioeconomic disenfranchised blocks behind Wall Street and around the corner from the Main Street in New York City, de Blasio and NYPD Commissioner William Bratton have begun arresting less people for possession of marijuana (less than 25 grams) and instead issuing misdemeanor citations The same effect has also happened in Colorado where arrests for marijuana have dropped by 95 percent.
But according to this article from last November in Capital New York, Blacks and Latinos are still disproportionately represented among those who are both cited and arrested (five times more than our White counterparts to be exact) under this new, softer marijuana law. And according to this article from last month in the International Business Times, the rate of arrest for Blacks still remains 2.4 percent higher than it is for Whites. It should also be noted that Blacks only make up 4 percent of the total population in Colorado.
Elsewhere in the country, Black farmers in Florida are crying foul over that state’s new Compassionate Medical Cannabis Act, which was signed into law last year by Governor Rick Scott. According to ThinkProgress.org, “those who qualify for licensing must have operated as a registered nursery in Florida for 30 consecutive years — a criterion that many, if not all, black farmers in the state can’t meet. Farmers of color say they’ve been hampered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s past discriminatory practices that have made it difficult for them to thrive in the industry.”
If you haven’t yet cued in on what I’m trying to say here, let me make it simple: despite our people being most likely to be negatively affected by these draconian drug laws, it seems like we are also the least likely to profit off of the end of its legalization. Old Kanye tried to tell us “Drug dealer buy Jordans, crackhead buy crack. And a White man get paid off of all of that…” But we didn’t hear him tho’. And that is why he is crazy now.
