Racial Arrest Disparities Got Worse After Legalization

Discussion in 'Marijuana Legalization' started by Vee, May 24, 2019.

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    Cannabis legalization has dramatically reduced the number of marijuana arrests in Washington, Colorado, and other adult-use states. But as the overall number of arrests plummeted, the racial disparities within those numbers remained stubbornly intact. In fact, the disparity has gotten worse.

    That’s the finding of a new report published this week in the journal Substance Use & Misuse, which found that cannabis arrest rates in Washington, post-legalization, were five times higher for African-Americans than for whites. Prior to legalization, black people were getting arrested for cannabis at a rate 2.5 times that of whites.
    The study was led by Caislin Firth, a researcher at the University of Washington’s Department of Public Health.

    Fewer Arrests, Greater Disparities
    This week’s report points to the incredible stickiness of racism in policing. In recent years both Colorado and Oregon have reported similar results. Two reports, one in 2015 and another in 2018, found large decreases in cannabis arrests in Colorado after adult-use legalization, along with continuing disparities for black residents. In Oregon, overall cannabis arrests plummeted but black people still faced much greater odds of arrest than white people.

    Here’s the good news: Overall arrests have plummeted since adult-use legalization took effect in Washington in January 2013. A year earlier, the state’s arrest rate for cannabis crimes stood at 9 per 100,000 residents. That rate plummeted to near zero in January 2013 and has remained there ever since.

    Underage Arrests Down 66%
    Arrests continue to be a problem among underage residents, though. Cannabis arrests among Washington state residents ages 18 to 20 dropped from 60 per 100,000 to around 20 per 100,000 by the end of 2015.
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    Illegal Sales Still a Problem
    The data regarding people arrested for distributing or selling cannabis outside the state-licensed system, though, is the real eye-opener. “The number of arrestees associated with an incident for distributing/selling dropped among Whites by 67%” following adult-use legalization, the researchers found, “but showed little change among African-Americans.”

    That disparity is captured in this table:
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    Note the enormous percentage drops for both white people and black people in nearly all categories. Arrests for possession, consumption, illegal purchase, cultivation, and transportation fell 44% to 100% for both racial demographics, and at similar levels. In other words, possession arrests fell 85% for whites, and 79% for blacks. Consumption arrests fell 77% for whites, and 80% for blacks.

    The clear outlier is the data on illegal sales. Arrests of white people fell from 124 in 2012 to 41 in 2015, a drop of 67%. But arrests of black people remained nearly unchanged. 43 people were arrested in 2012, and 41 in 2015. That’s a drop of only 5%.
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    Same Trend in Colorado
    Washington isn’t the only state to experience this dynamic.

    A 2015 study found that marijuana-related charges in Colorado dropped 80% between 2010 and the end of 2014. (Colorado’s adult-use legalization law took effect in early 2013.) But the racial disparities within those arrests did not change. In 2010, black people in Colorado were 2.4 times more likely than white people to be arrested on a cannabis charge. In 2014, after the implementation of adult-use legalization, the arrest rate for black people remained 2.4 times higher than the rate for white people.

    A later study, published in 2018, found a slightly less pronounced disparity—but a widening gap. Colorado’s cannabis arrest rate for black people in 2012 was 1.9 times the rate for white people. In 2017, three years into the state’s adult-use era, black people were arrested for cannabis crimes at 2.0 times the rate of white people.
    (Racial Arrest Disparities Got Worse After Legalization, Study Finds)

    Shame the lawyers
     
  2. This is interesting. What are the arrests for, just selling without a license?

    I wonder how the arrest rate has changed nationwide since these few states went legal. Are the prohibition states ramping up arrests? I notice locally that people are speaking out on social media, which surprises me. I see also that the headlines are saying “drugs” and not marijuana.
     
  3. Well to be fair many police tactics were developed during slavery. The overseers and the slave patrols became organized police during reconstruction. The plantation owners repurposed their land to be a prison that prisoners could pick cotton on:
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    The 13th amendment has a loop hole: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
    Slavery officially ended 1865 (1863 Emancipation Proclamation, Southerners did obey)with the 13th amendment federally, however on the state level States like Mississippi, Georgia, passed Black code laws, peonage laws, collectively called Jim Crow laws. Up to 50% of the former slaves were arrested within the first year of freedom. The laws said things like anybody with out a permanent residence is subject to arrest and a fine. A former slave has no permanent address... This is how free blacks were reintroduced to slavery through prison. Slavery in another form will continue for over 100 years 1863-1964.
    Black boys in prison 1800's:
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    Black inmates in the1950's picking cotton[​IMG]
    In 1964 The Civil Right act was pass. This ended many of the blatant acts that imprisoned Blacks disproportionately. 101 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

    However modern day police tactics still seek Blacks as perpetrators disproportionately.
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    Popular slave catcher trap, its called entrapment today. Bait Truck:
     
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  7. I don't like cops at all. But it takes a serious dumbass to defend criminals stealing from a bait car. Fuck thieves every bit as much as cops. If they didn't steal from a fake truck they'd steal from someone for real. How can you possibly defend that. They chose to steal. Nobody made them do it. Fuck them. And fuck anyone dumb enough to somehow use mental gymnastics to make them the victims.
     
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  8. For-profit prisons=sanctioned slavery.
     
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  9. Not for nothing, I'd be willing to bet that if you were able to look at each case individually... Other drugs were being sold, possibly illegal weapons involved and priors. But it's not PC to say that.

    Many times these "studies" aren't so much studies, as they are meant to stir the pot of division.

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  10. This is the problem with legalization. It just enforces systemic racism and perpetual slavery that we’ve been tricked into believing we are moving away from. Legalizing cannabis and regulating the industry as it is being done in most states is nothing more than financial discrimination. Some states have economic advancement initiatives where it will reduce your costs and sometimes completely remove your fee costs for starting a cannabis buisness but you still have to worry about overhead and renting a location but most people don’t want to work with cannabis businesses so you’ll end up paying 300-500 percent property overhead because of bullshit social bias/ discrimination.

    So these people that are still growing their own and selling their own cannabis outside that system are being burdened with the definition of criminality for growing and selling a natural commodity that has a pretty high demand.

    The war on drugs is an illegal and unconstitutional violation of our rights. Roe vs Wade was decided upon the 9th amendment definitions of bodily autonomy and privacy also supported by the 14th amendment. It pushes the moral ideologies of white Anglo Saxon Puritanism, temperance and modern conservative evangelical Protestantism upon our way of life. In clear violation of the first amendment, also stifling our ability to associate and have social relationships with other like minded individuals. Its a contested piece of history that Nixon wanted to heavily criminalize psychoactive substances to find a way and stifle Vietnam war dissent and the civil rights movement but he knew he couldn’t legally do that by targeting people for their political beliefs so he targeted the population upon their drugs of choice and now we are a nation of idiots who guzzles a toxic solvent hydrocarbon and inhales plant matter grow grown with radioactive fertilizer, sprayed with glyphosate and soaked in a chemical solution of over 2000 carcinogens and other addictive disgusting cancer causing chemicals. Meanwhile Portugal has had massive success decriminalizing, there are diacetyl morphine maitence clinics in multiple European cities and a few parts of Canada like Vancouver BC. Decrimjnalization harm reduction and full legalized regulation are the only true remedies for the malevolencies of drug use. Most of which are a direct result of the environment prohibition creates.

    These multi million dollar tobacco and alcohol lobbying firms paid for and representing companies like Philip Morris and anhueiser Busch are trying to gain control of the industry and eliminate the ability for anyone to profit or enter the industry who doesn’t have massive amounts of disposable income. In my state our own governors husband is a benefactor of the largest medical cannabis production facility and she is considering legalizing but outlawing home growers. that is just nothing but disgusting corruption that we have come to allow and accept in our society because the war on drugs has desensitized us to the violations of our rights and corrupt quid pro quo business as usual politicians bought and sold by Wall Street and other trans national entities.

    We can’t sell drugs but it’s ok for billion dollar companies to pollute our groundwater with pfas, glycol ethers, hydrocarbons and tons of other things we don’t know about, now our rights to posses guns are being stripped but it’s ok for the global military industrial complex to have dropped over 2050 nuclear and atomic weapons on the planet, in our oceans and above our atmosphere?

    Drug prohibition isn’t keeping us safe, or enslaves us and turns out suffering and mental health issues into commodities for the prison industrial complex.


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