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(RACISM IS ANOTHER REASON MARIJUANA SHOULD BE LEGAL)

-Dennis Levy

If you don’t want marijuana legalized for medical or recreational reasons just listen up to what is happening in our communities. One evening, two friends and I were walking down Lenox Ave. in Harlem. We had just left the “House of Justice” on 145^th street. We were talking, watching the people and cars go by, enjoying the evening when suddenly, out of nowhere, squad cars pull to the curb behind us.  A policeman yelled from the window, “Get on the ground!” We looked around and saw several young black men looking stunned. Before I could grasp the situation the young men were on the ground and policemen with guns pulled were going into there pockets. A white officer asked the youth if they had any marijuana. He removed and search the youth shoes and patted down there socks. The cop looks and found some marijuana in one youth’s sock. “Ha. We got one,” the cop said sarcastically “this one has got marijuana”.

This made me angry. Cops were making there arrest quotas at the expense of these young black men’s future lives. Police know the most popular drug used by young black men is marijuana. But, many young black men fail to see marijuana use as a major criminal act. The shocking fact here is that the police officers are being deployed in poor communities of color and patrolling streets targeting Black youth with illegal stop and searches in the hope of finding marijuana. Truth be told, arrests of young black men for small amounts of marijuana are the number one reason for arrest in New York City. Indeed, under Mayor Bloomberg, New York City's police have arrested more young black men for marijuana than they did under Mayors Koch, Dinkins, and Giuliani combined.

. An old report documents the hard facts. .“Young black people are arrested at seven times the rate of young white people for marijuana. But every government survey on this issue has shown that young white people use marijuana more than blacks or Latinos,” said Harry G. Levine, professor of sociology at Queens College. Levine, who has extensively researched racial-bias in marijuana arrests, explained that drug laws are not discriminatory, “it’s the enforcement that’s skewed.” Of the tens of thousands of people arrested for possessing small amounts of marijuana each year, 86% are Black or Latino while just 11% are White — even though White people use marijuana at higher rates. See the 108-page report titled "The Marijuana Arrest Crusade in New York City: Racial Bias in Police Policy 1997-2007.

 Based on the facts NYPD cops are disproportionately arresting black youth for possession of small amounts of marijuana. Everyone knows this. Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s modest initiative to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana in plain sight represents a political move to address the controversial ‘stop and search’ problem in the black community. But anybody with street smarts knows, Cuomo’s and Bloomberg’s initiative  is not enough to stop cops from arresting black youth with marijuana in plain sight because truth be told most cops are willing to lie to make an arrest quota and if that means putting some unlawful marijuana on a black youth so be it. The NYPD arrested more than 350,000 people for misdemeanor marijuana possession over the past decade, a tenfold increase achieved by systematically targeting young black and Hispanic men and stopping them without cause to search for marijuana. The NYPD said it does not engage in racial profiling. I beg to differ.  Many young black and Latino men are being harassed, said Robin Steinberg, director of Bronx Defenders, which provides free legal representation.” Those same police forces are not being deployed on the Upper East Side of Manhattan waiting outside privileged, overwhelmingly white private schools to stop and frisk young white men and have them put on the ground and searched.

The solution to this problem is legalizing marijuana. It’s true; many people considering the question of legalizing marijuana don’t know the history of marijuana in the U.S.  In 1970, Congress classified cannabis and THC (one of the active compounds in cannabis) as Schedule I drugs under the Controlled Substances Act. Schedule I drugs are defined by Congress as having no medicinal value. This is one of the biggest lies and frauds in American history i.e. that the Cannabis ‘Plant’ is a ‘drug’ like cocaine or heroin with no medicinal benefit. But, almost just as important is the evil way some racist police are using the marijuana laws to arrest and send young black and Latino men to prison. If for no other reason, let’s legalize marijuana and take away the major reason cops are arresting them. A few years ago in 2010, the NAACP cited higher marijuana arrests for Blacks than Whites for its “unconditional endorsement" of an initiative in California that would legalize the recreational use of marijuana. The group's president, Alice Huffman, said marijuana laws are a means of “criminalizing young black men”.  She said, "It is time for them to stop using my community to fill the prisons."

Dennis Levy is President of ‘The American Pot Smokers Association’. There mission is to get marijuana legalized in New York. For more information: e-mail americanpotsmokers@gmail.com