( Otherwords.org) – The immediate impacts are modest, but the order marks a top-level recognition that 100 years of cannabis prohibition were a mistake. By Paul Armentano | October 10, 2022

Fulfilling a high-profile campaign pledge, President Joe Biden recently announced that his office will be issuing pardons to several thousand Americans with federal convictions for marijuana possession offenses.

“There are thousands of people who have prior federal convictions for marijuana possession, who may be denied employment, housing, or educational opportunities as a result,” the president said. “My action will help relieve the collateral consequences arising from these convictions.”

But almost all marijuana-related arrests are for violations of state and local laws, not federal law.

As a result, White House officials have estimated that the president’s directive will bring relief to an estimated 6,500 people — only a fraction of the nearly 29 million Americans who have been arrested for marijuana violations over the past several decades.

Nevertheless, Biden’s actions mark a seismic shift in the way those inside the Beltway talk and think about cannabis.

Via Pixabay.

Historically relegated as a fringe political issue, Biden’s foray into the arena of marijuana reform legitimizes legalization as a subject worthy of consideration — and action — by those at the highest levels of government. Further, it is a recognition — by the president of the United States, no less — that America’s nearly 100-year experiment with cannabis criminalization has been an abject failure.

Indeed, the administration’s actions acknowledge that arresting and criminalizing those who possess and consume marijuana does more harm than good.

This acknowledgement thus begs the question: Why are states and cities continuing to prosecute hundreds of thousands of people every year for behavior that most Americans no longer believe ought to even be a crime?

It’s a valid question. And it is one that leaders in Congress now need to answer.

By making the first move, the president has amplified the pressure on Congress — and Democratic leadership in particular — to respond.

According to polling data provided by Morning Consult, nearly half of registered voters — including majorities of younger voters and Democrats — believe that repealing federal marijuana prohibition ought to be a legislative priority for Congress. Nonetheless, for far too long, elected officials — and those in the Senate in particular — have provided little more than lip service.

Specifically, Senate Chuck Schumer pledged prior to the 2020 election, “If I become majority leader, I will put this on the floor and it’s likely to pass.” Yet in the nearly two years since then, no stand-alone marijuana legislation has made it through the Senate to the president’s desk.

But that could all now change.

By getting out in front of this issue, President Biden is now receiving well deserved attention and accolades. His actions are not only good policy — they are good politics. Polling finds that a solid majority of Americans support the expungement of criminal records for those convicted of marijuana-related possession crimes.

But ultimately the White House can’t repeal or amend federal marijuana laws unilaterally. Like it or not, Congress must eventually weigh in on the issue by passing legislation.

President Biden has demonstrated that the time to do so is now. And most Americans agree.

Paul ArmentanoPaul Armentano is the Deputy Director of NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) and co-author of the book Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?

Via Otherwords.org

The “Dark Brandon” reference is to an internet meme. Trumpist election deniers call Mr. Biden “Brandon,” and his young supporters turned the slight on its head by speaking of a cool, deadly effective side to Biden, which they called “Dark Brandon.”

ABC News: “Biden announces pardon of simple marijuana offenses”

Why was marijuana ever classified as a Schedule 1 drug in the first place? The answer is that it is not, unlike gin and whiskey, a white drug. In the first third of the twentieth century it was associated with Mexican-Americans, and when it was criminalized in the 1930s, racist language was deployed against those who used it as John Hudak has shown, even though all along, as many whites have been pot smokers as minorities. Later on white government officials connected it to “jazz culture,” by which they appear to have meant African Americans.

Although half of marijuana use in the US is by whites, African-Americans are arrested and incarcerated for its use at 4 times the rate of whites. There are 700,000 to 800,000 pot busts a year in the US. The latter would consist in 600,000 minority members and only 200,000 whites. As Biden noted today, such convictions, of using a small amount of marijuana, stay on a person’s record and can interfere with gaining employment. At least with regard to federal convictions, the president just expunged those records with a stroke of the pen.

First Arrests for Marijuana in southern Illinois, 1938. H/t Sangamon Link. .

Although alcohol was briefly banned and then legalized again, that drug was largely associated with the white elite. It is clearly more dangerous than marijuana. Alcohol is associated with various cancers, including the deadly pancreatic cancer, with fatty liver disease and cirrhosis, and with heart arrhythmia. Drinking too much causes erratic behavior and blackouts. Of the 42,915 fatalities in automobile collisions in the US in 2021, about one third are attributed to inebriation caused by alcohol. That would be around 14,000 deaths by alcohol per year. About 1600 people a year die from alcohol overdoses.

Still, US corporations promote, and the US government tolerates alcohol use. All you have to do is look at the advertisements for it to see how it is firmly embedded in the white imaginary.

“1969 Smirnoff Vodka Advertisement Playboy April 1969.” .Flickr via SenseiAlam ; Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

No one dies from a marijuana overdose. It can actually help with the nausea from radiation treatments, and physicians are finding it useful in combating diseases of inflammation such as rheumatoid arthritis. On the other hand, it speeds up the heart rate for about 3 hours after use. If smoked, it can cause inflammation in the lungs over time. It can contribute to paranoia. When used by teens, it may in a small number of instances be connected to the onset of schizophrenia. And, it is estimated that 10 percent of deaths in auto collisions may be related to marijuana inebriation. In another ten percent of cases both alcohol and THC have been found in the bloodstream. However, there is no way to know when the marijuana was consumed, since THC stays in the system for weeks. In any case, if you have to be drunk, apparently it is better to be high on pot than on alcohol, though it isn’t risk free to be high on pot.

Me, I like being clear-minded and I get my high from meditation or scholarly discovery. It is a real thing. Look into the psychology of “flow.” Much healthier.

President Biden has, in any case, undone a massive racial injustice that dogged our country for nearly a century. Incredibly, this dimension of the issue was not even mentioned in most television news treatments of the story.

Medical marijuana is permitted in Israel, though people complain about the fewness of dispensaries. Recreational marijuana is forbidden. Marijuana is illegal in Israel not because of Jewish or Islamic law but because of the British colonial heritage. It is Western Victorian prudery.

Haaretz reports that MK David Amsalem, of the far right wing and racist Likud Party, ridiculed Abbas for changing his position: “You are trampling on Islam. They gave you a few dimes, promised you a few jobs and suddenly Islam permits it (cannabis).”

Amsalem, like most Israeli politicians, clearly knows nothing about Islamic law or Islamic history. In fact, the use of marijuana was widespread in the premodern Muslim world. If the United Arab List in the end balks at legalizing marijuana, it will be because of modern fundamentalism, not because of Islamic tradition.

The great tradition of medieval Muslim medicine valued marijuana. Avicenna in his classic Canon recommended it as an analgesic for headaches, and the great physician al-Razi (Rhazes in the Latin west) prescribed marijuana as a treatment for “ear problems, dandruff, flatulence as well as epilepsy,” according to Maziyar Ghiabi and his colleagues.

Avicenna’s Canon was central to Renaissance science in its Latin translation and its influence lingered in some medical schools in Europe and Russia into the nineteenth century.

Ghiyabi et al. also note that some groups of Muslims, especially the itinerant holy men called Qalandars, regularly incorporated marijuana into their spiritual practices, in the same way that some American Indians used peyote in their religious lives. In my research on Islam in premodern India, I found that marijuana or bhang was used by major Sufi orders such as the Suhrawardis. That is, there are major Muslim spiritual traditions of recreational use of marijuana.

The medieval Egyptian historian Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi (1364–1442) said that marijuana or hashish had first been brought to Egypt in 1230 or 1231 by a Sufi or Muslim mystic, and that it became wildly popular. He said he knew of no fatwa or considered religious legal opinion against it in his own time. Hashish came to be grown all over Egypt and even in parts of Cairo. The Mamluk government tried to set a minor fine for its cultivation, but apparently no one paid any attention to it. By 1412 it was widely used, and the upper classes took pride in consuming it, without there being any stigma attached to it. It continued to be grown after the Ottomans took Egypt in 1517. In medieval and early modern Egypt, recreational marijuana was a normal part of the life of Muslims.

It was only in the early 19th century in Egypt that the mercantilist, modernizing government of Albanian military man Mehmet Ali (Muhammad Ali) Pasha, who had become the Ottoman viceroy, tried to ban marijuana on the grounds that it reduced workers’ productivity and made them lazy.

So, yes, anti-marijuana attitudes are in part a reflection of modernist concerns and have nothing to do with medieval Muslim practice. Fundamentalist Muslim legislation against marijuana is largely a modern phenomenon.

The Qur’an does not mention marijuana or hashish. It does discourage alcohol, though since the Muslim scripture does not specify any punishment for its use, many Muslim jurists over the centuries declined to punish its use.

Some Muslim thinkers wanted to forbid marijuana on analogy to alcohol, since both are intoxicants and both affect moral judgment. This analogy, however, was rejected by most jurists, as Maziar Ghiabi and his colleagues point out.

Some clerics did rule against the use of marijuana as an intoxicant. But as Ghiabi et al. note, Islamic law permits believers to do what they urgently need to do (darura). If you are thirsting to death in the desert and the only drink available is wine, then it is permitted to drink it. Likewise, even some medieval thinkers admitted that if someone had an urgent medical need for marijuana,, that would be permitted.

Contemporary Muslim jurisprudence notes that there are two substances in marijuana, CBD and THC. It is the THC that gives you the high. Legal thinkers urge that marijuana high in CBD and low in THC be used for pain killing, but say that if there is a medical need that can only be met (e.g. nausea from chemotherapy) by marijuana high in THC, that would be permissible.

So the joke is on David Amsalem, who just spoke out of ignorance of the finer points of Islamic law and of the actual history of the Muslim world. If Mansour Abbas and his party, which is influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood, do end up supporting the legalization of marijuana, they would be in the long tradition of Islamic medicine going back to Avicenna. And note that al-Maqrizi said there was no fatwa at all against marijuana use in the 1200s to the 1400s, which was ubiquitous in medieval and early modern Egypt, so the great Muslim jurists of that era appear not to have even attempted to forbid it.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

i24 How Israel is Getting High (Medical Cannabis Revolution)

The city creates a “social equity” tier of applications who will receive priority for marijuana business permits.

Decades of marijuana prohibition in California are coming to an end thanks to ballot initiative Proposition 64, or the Adult Use of Marijuana Act. Approved by a majority of voters in November 2016, Prop 64 reduces criminal penalties for various marijuana-related offenses for adults and juveniles and allows marijuana entrepreneurs to participate in the recreational sale of cannabis to adults.

Yet Californians didn’t just legalize marijuana. In Los Angeles, the City Council went one step further, enacting some of the most progressive criminal justice reforms in the country to rectify the disproportionate effect the war on drugs has had on minority communities.

“We are L.A. We are leaders. We take on the tough issues,” City Council President Herb Wesson said Dec. 6 right before the bill passed, reported the Los Angeles Times.

Proposition 64 legalizes a marijuana industry that experts estimate will add $4 billion to $7 billion to the state economy that, if California were its own country, would be sixth largest in the world. And within that huge economy, L.A. has become the world’s largest market to approve the sale of recreational cannabis.

California was on the front lines of the war on drugs for decades. The state experienced nearly 500,000 marijuana arrests between 2006 and 2015, according to the Drug Policy Alliance.

The new ordinances in L.A. create a “social equity” tier of applicants who will receive priority for licenses to own and operate marijuana businesses. These are people who have past convictions for marijuana-related crimes, or who live in an L.A. neighborhood that was a verifiable target of enforcement during the drug war. It’s an attempt at restorative justice for the minority communities most negatively impacted by marijuana prohibition.

The law takes effect even as Attorney General Jeff Sessions reverses U.S. Justice Department guidance to leave enforcement of marijuana laws to the states. It’s unclear yet what effect new federal policies would have.

L.A. resident Donnie Anderson plans to remain vigilant during the city’s implementation of the rules. As chairman of California Minority State Alliance, Anderson advocated for the social equity program that they hope will play a major role in deciding which marijuana businesses will be allowed to open.

“The difference is justice is at the forefront,” Anderson says.

Anderson and Virgil Grant own MedEX, a medical cannabis dispensary in South L.A. Since 1996, when medical marijuana was legalized in California, 135 shops have been licensed to sell cannabis to patients.

According to the proposed rules, medical dispensaries will be first in line to receive a license to expand into recreational sales. However, Anderson and Grant and other groups like California NORML and the NAACP fought to ensure people with previous convictions wouldn’t be disqualified.

The social equity program offers minorities in L.A. a chance at justice, equity and fair development.

“[They] fought for cannabis to make sure we can build generational wealth from this plant,” says Walter Lance Edwards, who has a past drug-related conviction and plans to open a cannabis delivery service.

Anderson is helping Edwards obtain a fair shot at reaping the rewards of an industry that experts predict will bring in over $50 million in local tax revenue in 2018.

“We’ve been the ones going to prison for it,” Edwards said. “Now it’s time for us to own it and operate it in a business.”

As the nation’s attitudes toward marijuana shift—eight states have legalized recreational pot so far—Anderson believes the social equity program offers minorities in L.A. a chance at justice, equity, and fair development.

“It’s about those who’ve been harmed by the failed war on drugs,” Anderson says. “Our goal is about the socio-economics, and that’s what social equity really means.”

Because federal law still prohibits marijuana, federally insured banks won’t lend to marijuana businesses or handle cash from the proceeds of marijuana sales. This would place Edwards and other would-be entrepreneurs on unequal footing when competing with well-funded cannabis operations that have pockets deep enough not to need the assistance of commercial banks.

L.A.’s plan is to waive or defer fees and provide startup loans at low interest rates to create equal opportunities for social equity applicants. It’s a move Edwards calls “a good start.”

Another component of the new regulations would ensure that people with low incomes, residents of neighborhoods heavily affected by marijuana arrests, or those who have been convicted of marijuana-related crimes make up at least half of the workforce in the city’s new cannabis businesses. Both Edwards and Anderson grew up in South L.A. neighborhoods that were hotspots for drug arrests.

“I’m still rising out of the ashes from this, and the effects are still here,” Edwards says.

In ’82 and ’83 you saw Black “fathers in the household, mothers working,” Anderson says. The war on drugs, he says, “took the man, took the woman, and put the children in foster care. It created a warfare that I’ve never seen in my lifetime and I never want to see it again.”

Taxes from legal cannabis will also go to community-based legal service providers.

Edwards says that over the years, as good industrial jobs abandoned the neighborhood, few options were left other than selling marijuana. “What do you got to do to feed your family?” he says. “It’s by all means necessary.”

Decades of independent studies confirm Edwards’ firsthand experience—while people of every race are equally likely to buy, use, and sell drugs, Black people are more than three times as likely to be charged, convicted, and harshly sentenced.

Instead of crackdowns, under the new equity program, the L.A. city council set up a neighborhood health fund that will direct a portion of city revenue from taxing marijuana businesses to pay for community beautification, addiction treatment, youth extracurricular education, and mental health services in areas affected by the war on drugs.

Taxes from legal cannabis will also go to community-based legal service providers that have already helped at least 4,500 people petition to have their convictions for low-level nonviolent crimes, such as drug possession and petty theft, changed from felonies to misdemeanors.

That reclassification of most drug- and theft-related crimes is a result of Proposition 47, which went into effect in 2014. As a result, the number of drug arrests in Los Angeles County has dropped by a third and, according to the Washington Post, it’s led to hundreds of thousands of people applying to get their previous drug convictions revised or erased.

Eunisses Hernandez, policy coordinator for the Drug Policy Alliance, organizes expungement clinics where translators and attorneys working pro bono help 50–100 people file the paperwork to remove those convictions.

“They’re coming, many of them with months or years of struggling to get a job or housing, and just that weight is really heavy, and you can sense that weight in the room,” Hernandez says.

What’s happening in L.A. and across California echoes a movement to atone for harsh penalties during the war on drugs. At least nine states, including Maryland, Oregon, and Vermont, have passed laws expunging or reducing marijuana convictions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, even while the sale, transportation, or possession of marijuana remains illegal under federal law.

Getting those stains removed from their records is something most people expected never to happen after their experiences during the years of marijuana prohibition.

“People leave [the expungement clinics] crying because they never thought they could get these offenses taken care of—especially for free,” Hernandez says.

“The point of this is to repair the damages caused by marijuana prohibition … for the people who’ve been most severely impacted,” she says. “We wanted to be that resource to repair those harms.”

Kevon Paynter wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Kevon is the Surdna reporting fellow for YES! Follow him on Twitter @KevonPaynter.

Via Yes! Magazine

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