So even as we make progress, I still can’t bring myself to rejoice yet. In the days after the 2020 election, news articles and social media posts celebrated the legalization of recreational cannabis in multiple states: Montana, Arizona, New Jersey, and South Dakota. Then in late 2020, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation to decriminalize cannabis at the federal level. (The bill remains stalled in the Senate.) But while decriminalization and legalization are the first steps toward equality, they are not a complete solution.
To destigmatize cannabis for everyone, we must focus on restorative justice, a theory and philosophy of justice that focuses on rehabilitating and healing, rather than punishment. We need to establish policies that expunge arrest records for those who have been convicted of cannabis-related crimes and create pathways for them to access the developing new industry.
Research sadly shows that prosecutors are more likely to pursue a mandatory minimum sentence for Black people than their white counterparts. About 80 percent of people in federal prisons for drug offenses, and about 60 percent in state prisons, are Black or Latinx folx. We live in a society where a conviction can permanently alter the course of someone’s life; it can take away opportunities from voting to employment, education to housing. Even an encounter with the police force can be traumatizing in and of itself. Take, for example, Khalil from Massachusetts, who still gets rejected from job openings because of a 17-year-old cannabis conviction. NORML, a cannabis legalization advocacy group, told Vox that there are hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of people with similar experiences as Khalil.