Happy MLK Day!
Time to catastrophize just a bit. Last year at this time, I kicked off this post by writing:
If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, he would almost certainly advocate to end the War on Drugs. Dr. King never spoke publicly about drugs or cannabis in particular: he was assassinated in 1968, two years before President Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). But it is well established that the War on Drugs was and is a war on minorities and people of color. It is the antithesis of equality and justice. And it is still going strong.
Things aren’t looking much better in 2023. Recently released FBI marijuana and drug crime data, which are confusing, indicate that cannabis is still the drug war’s primary driver. This is true even if simple possession arrests may be decreasing. Conservatively, local law enforcement officials clocked over 170,000 arrests for possession of cannabis in 2021 (the most recent year of published statistics). Texas is the nation’s leading culprit, followed by Tennessee and North Carolina.
These arrests are not for cartel activity, or any form of distribution or marijuana “trafficking”. Many, many people are trafficking the plant nonetheless. My law firm
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