American Civil Liberties Union Editorial
The Road to Reform
For advocates of marijuana legalization, news in recent years has been very good. Public support has risen to 66 percent.1 Since 2012, 11 states and Washington, D.C., have legalized recreational cannabis while another 22 have sanctioned its medicinal use.2 Five more states, including Mississippi, Montana, and South Dakota, had marijuana-related measures on the ballot in 2020.3 Legal markets are springing up around the country, early-adopting states are benefiting from the flow of new tax revenue, and dispensaries in many jurisdictions have been labeled essential businesses during the COVID lockdown.4 Marijuana has gone legit, and momentum is accelerating.
But the history of marijuana prohibition in America is ugly and complex, and legalization alone neither confronts the racist origins of drug criminalization nor addresses the systemic harms suffered by targeted populations for more than a century. It is essential that the marijuana reform movement center racial justice to make restitution to the Black and brown communities devastated by the War on Drugs and all its insidious ripple effects: mass incarceration, poverty, family separation, police harassment, and longstanding barriers to employment, housing, and financial assistance for anyone carrying a marijuana-related conviction on their record. The steps toward racial equity—expungement of criminal records, dedicated community reinvestment funds, guaranteed access to legal cannabis markets, removal of collateral consequences, changes in prosecutorial policy, and police divestment—are clear, achievable, and morally just. But there is much work yet to be done, and the ACLU continues to fight at the federal, state, and local levels to bring about systemic equality in marijuana reform.