Joe Biden, Legalize Marijuana in 2022 and make a meaningful change with your presidency. 

The racial justice argument for cannabis legalization:

Connecting cannabis to issues of race and justice is not difficult. Despite usage rates between whites and non-whites being at parity, people of color are much more likely to be arrested for a cannabis-related offense. A 2020 report from the ACLU shows that Black Americans are 3.64 times more likely to be arrested for a cannabis-related offense than white Americans. Those racial disparities are meaningful on their own but are particularly alarming in the context of how many drug arrests occur each year. Between 2018 and 2019, for example, data compiled by the FBI show that there were more than 1.2 million cannabis arrests across the United States.

And while in states where cannabis has been legalized, there have been significant drops in the number of cannabis arrests, racial disparities in arrest rates endure. Per the ACLU, among states that legalized by 2018, Black Americans were 2.2 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis in 2010, and that figure only dropped to 1.72 times in 2018. While legalization significantly reduces the magnitude of cannabis arrests, racial disparities in cannabis enforcement are institutionalized and affect every state.

The racialization of cannabis enforcement was not accidental. The entire foundation of the War on Drugs was built on racial resentment and outgroup targeting by the government. In my 2020 book “Marijuana: A Short History,” I trace the history of federal and state efforts to outlaw cannabis as a means of dividing white Americans from racial and political minorities and to remove people of color from society via incarceration. In her groundbreaking 2012 book “The New Jim Crow,” Michelle Alexander describes how the use of mass incarceration that disproportionately impacts people of color in the United States has been used to dilute voting rights, economic achievement, wealth building, and educational attainment. And work by my Brookings Institution colleagues, including Andre Perry, has examined the connection between the criminal justice system in the United States and concepts of economic inequity, including the racial wealth gap.

Cannabis policy in the United States was designed and has been implemented to harm communities of color for generations, and given that intent, it has been a wildly successful policy endeavor. However, many Americans and people from both sides of the political divide see drug policy broadly and cannabis policy specifically for what it is, and that has led to a decades-long effort to step away from drug prohibition and criminalization and find a different policy path forward. In today’s policy conversations, that path typically centers on cannabis reform and now is the time to get it done. States are legalizing every other week it seems like amd there is bipartisan support. End the political games and pass legislation that will help us reverse decades of unfair and unjust cannabis laws.