The Scandal of Racist Marijuana Arrests—and What To Do About It | The Nation

The insidious effects of marijuana criminalization.  Continuation of this policy in the face of all the facts and the damage done is evil. Full stop. 

It is long past time for the full legalization of marijuana.  End this wasteful, destructive and ultimately racist policy once and for all.  Regulate and tax it analogous to the far more harmful yet legal alcohol and tobacco categories.

 Most people arrested for marijuana possession were not smoking it: they typically had a small amount hidden in their clothing, vehicle or personal effects. The police found the marijuana by stopping and searching them (often illegally), or by tricking them into revealing it.Police departments concentrate their patrols only in certain neighborhoods, usually ones designated as "high crime." These are mainly places where low-income whites and people of color live. In these neighborhoods, police stop and search the most vehicles and individuals while looking for "contraband" of any type to make an arrest. The most common item that people in any neighborhood possess that will get them arrested—and the most common item that police find—is a small amount of marijuana.Police officers patrolling in middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods typically do not search the vehicles and pockets of white people, so most well-off whites enjoy a de facto legalization of marijuana possession. Free from the intense surveillance and frequent searches that occur in other neighborhoods, they have little reason to fear a humiliating arrest and incarceration. This produces patterns, as in Chicago, where whites constitute 45 percent of the population but only 5 percent of those arrested for possession. The result has been called "racism without racists." No individual officers need harbor racial animosity for the criminal justice system to produce jails and courts filled with black and brown faces. But the absence of hostile intent does not absolve policy-makers and law enforcement officials from responsibility or blame. As federal judge Shira Scheindlin recently determined in two prominent stop-and-frisk cases, New York City's top officials "adopted an attitude of willful blindness toward statistical evidence of racial disparities in stops and stop outcomes." She cited the legal doctrine of "deliberate indifference" to describe police and city officials who "willfully ignored overwhelming proof that the policy…is racially discriminatory and therefore violates the United States Constitution."