America’s lucrative new weed industry should compensate the black victims of the country’s war on drugs

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The racial inequities in the new marijuana economy are particularly egregious considering the US’s decades-long war on drugs, which disproportionately punished African Americans for petty drug crimes. A 2013 report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) found black people are almost four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people, despite similar usage rates. The war on drugs has always been sanitised shorthand for: The War on Non-White People, With a Particular Emphasis on Black People.

The US’s racist approach to marijuana – both past and present – is hardly news. But what do we do about it? Well, I’ve got an idea: reparations. Every business now exploiting the legalisation of marijuana should forfeit at least 50% of their pot-based profits to a fund that gives reparations to people whose lives were destroyed by the US’s discriminatory war on drugs.

 

The US’s war against drugs, I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say, was state-sponsored racial terrorism. The only reason it’s not widely recognised as such, and there isn’t a compensation fund, is because racism is one hell of a drug.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/27/americas-lucrative-new-weed-industry-should-compensate-the-black-victims-of-the-countrys-war-on-drugs#comment-104239814

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With all this whining, nobody should be compensated.