http://www.slate.com/articles/life/counter_narrative/2014/01/david_brooks_smoking_pot_should_black_kids_pay_for_his_pothead_sins.html
If you missed it, I apologize in advance. This week Brooks responded to Colorado and Washington state’s recent decriminalization of marijuana with a retrospective on his own experience smoking the wacky tobacky. In “Weed: Been There. Done That,” Brooks makes a case for a “moral ecology” that curbs individual freedom for the collective betterment of potheads who would be better served devoting their energies to higher aspirations like running track.
If you think I’m minimizing his argument to be glib, I dare you to read his piece. That is his argument. He is dismayed by legal marijuana’s base “moral ecology,” arguing that a healthy government “encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.”
It’s typical PREAM linkbait. But in linkbait there are often unexamined body counts, and the bodies are often brown.
Last summer the ACLU released a report, based on federal arrest data and self-reporting, that examined racial disparities in marijuana arrests. It found that more than half of all drug arrests in 2010 were for marijuana possession. Self-reports of drug usage show that whites use marijuana just as much as blacks, yet blacks are more than 3.5 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana use.
this argument and facts have been in the news of late behind the total inequality of everything this nation has to offer. they counter citing a few that got through but the one that got through to the WH well you know what his last 5 years have been like also the inequality of treatment his predecessors never saw, that were all White.
Michelle Alexander does a great job of detailing the devastating effects of this racialized and classed distinction on African-American communities.) But the racial discrepancies in marijuana arrests are just as significant.For example, the ACLU makes a passing mention of the link between federal student aid and drug convictions in its report—African-Americans, particularly African-American men, are more likely to be arrested for recreational drug use and consequently barred from receiving financial aid to pay for college after paying their debt to society.We can thank Bill Clinton for that.In 1998 the president who had coyly admitted to getting high (“I didn’t inhale”) saw fit to sign a bizarre drug-conviction restriction into federal student aid policy. I say “bizarre” not only because the law would have disqualified him from taking out a student loan to go to Yale had he been arrested with his un-inhaled joint back in the day.It’s also bizarre because there was no huge social clamor for the amendment. It’s not as though roaming bands of potheads were banging down the doors to financial aid offices, leaving seeds and stems on the office furniture. The amendment was purely a moral invective from a single House member: Republican Mark Souder.
lots of laws and legislation back in the day was perpetrated on the misinformation that drug use was a Black thing, they therefore thought they were sticking it to us and denying paths to the Middle class in effect MR.JAMES CROW lives. but in the fervor to keep us down theyexposed their kids to the reefer madness. what goes around comes around.
White male run America has created wars on everyone else in America than blame the effects on that group. Clinton, "takes a lot of brass to accuse someone of what you do"
