A secondary issue here is that a joints worth of pot was cause for a felony conviction. How is that punishment in any way fitting the crime.
How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
31–40 of 109 posts
Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do you really want someone with a shitload of existing drug connections, being the poster face for the industry you're trying to vanillify ? This seems like a poor choice of words at best.
Word choice is fine. Vanilla means plain, unremarkable, blends in well. To become an unremarkable part of the economy. Taking an altogether different meaning not fitting the context says more about your interpretive frame of reference.
I think it was pointed out because vanilla is also associated with "white". In this case, one reading of the comment is "an industry you're trying to make white".
Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
#33"Henderson was more than qualified, so why didn’t he get the gig? ... he has two drug possession felonies on his record" You know, people with illegal bookmaking convictions are kept out of the gambling industry for good reasons. It started off as a dirty industry, and to the extent you keep anyone with a hint of grime out of it, you avoid it regressing to that state. That keeps regulators off your back and eventuall…
A lot of people don't recognize "drug crime" as a crime. Your comparison is actually like comparing apples to oranges. There was no legal drug industry, so how people were going to it legally?
Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
#34"Henderson was more than qualified, so why didn’t he get the gig? ... he has two drug possession felonies on his record" You know, people with illegal bookmaking convictions are kept out of the gambling industry for good reasons. It started off as a dirty industry, and to the extent you keep anyone with a hint of grime out of it, you avoid it regressing to that state. That keeps regulators off your back and eventuall…
Everything you say is entirely logical, but omits the reality that as a black person in america you are vastly more likely to be arrested for drug crimes. Not more likely to DO drug crimes, just more likely to get caught. This means profiling and racist policing directly leads to economic exclusion. If the american dream is upward mobility, that means black people get a smaller shot at the american dream. But all tha…
This is just bad statistics. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-m...
>For example, all of these “equally likely to have used drugs” claims turn out to be that blacks and whites are equally likely to have “used drugs in the past year”, but blacks are far more likely to have used drugs in the past week – that is, more whites are only occasional users. That gives blacks many more opportunities to be caught by the cops. Likewise, whites are more likely to use low-penalty drugs like hallucinogens, and blacks are more likely to use high-penalty drugs like crack cocaine. Further, blacks are more likely to live in the cities, where there is a heavy police shadow, and whites in the suburbs or country, where there is a lower one.
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>Finally, all of this is based on self-reported data about drug use. Remember from a couple paragraphs ago how studies showed that black people were twice as likely to fail to self-report their drug use? And you notice here that black people are twice as likely to be arrested for drug use as their self-reports suggest? That’s certainly an interesting coincidence.
Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
#35Once I met a guy who worked for some Edward Jones-type company, investing the money of moms and pops, making money from watching various markets for opportunities to make profits. He was so in love with how effectively the whole world made sense in terms of dollars, contracts, and trades. He liked the meta-economics of the prevailing world economic order. He would think in terms of "is it worth it to me to buy your d…
> What did he think about weed then? That it was an unproductive (one of his favorite words) and likely immoral industry of drugs, not fit to be placed in his glorious world of markets and trade deals. > What does he think about it now? You know already. What do all these full-time market-men think about it: markets are awesome and efficient and now it's just another market service for them to try to arbitrage and to…
Yes, it's good business ethics, but it's not good human ethics to completely base your moral judgments of something on whether or not it's legal and profitable.
Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
#36I read the entire article. The man was duly convicted of a crime in Oklahoma. He broke the law, regardless of what anyone thinks. Fast forward to when selling dope in certain places is now legal and this guys want a piece of the action, but... he cannot legally do so because he's a convicted felon. Should we undo his conviction? No. He was tried fairly and found guilty based on the laws of the time and place. His fau…
I totally agree with you about this guy in particular. He is a felon, with a conviction relating to the industry he wants to work in. Don't let fraudsters become accountants, don't let illegal dealers become legal ones.
But the problem is that there are a lot of white people who are guilty of the same offenses, who are currently operating businesses he isn't allowed to operate, but who were never convicted of those crimes due to previous racial profiling.
Whether or not we do something to right the wrongs of our ancestors against blacks, Native Americans, or other groups, and what that something might be, is a hard problem.
The horrors of genocide, racism, and slavery hundreds of years ago or decades ago are one thing, but this is one guy's lifetime - racism played a part in getting him convicted while the crimes committed by his white competitors were ignored. Does that help the argument make more sense?
Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
#37I read the entire article. The man was duly convicted of a crime in Oklahoma. He broke the law, regardless of what anyone thinks. Fast forward to when selling dope in certain places is now legal and this guys want a piece of the action, but... he cannot legally do so because he's a convicted felon. Should we undo his conviction? No. He was tried fairly and found guilty based on the laws of the time and place. His fau…
This is tacking on an extra penalty for breaking the law after the fact which is generally considered unconstitutional. Further, by living in city's poor black people end up with much harsher punishments for the same crimes. Which set's up cycles of negative consequences we are all stuck with. Picture this, you apply for a job but now all background checks are required by law to include speeding tickets which prevent…
A felony conviction is a far cry from a mere moving violation. A felony conviction means you cannot be trusted. Full stop. Selling dope is a choice. The man made a choice and paid for his actions. Should he now be allowed to profit from the same (now legal) action that got him barred in the first place? No. The legal dope industry, as shady as it is, has established laws that says "felons not welcome", and that's OK. Nothing stops this guys from pursuing some other line of work and making something of himself. The problem here is that the legal dope industry is easy money. Too many people want "easy". They don't want to go and actually work.
Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
#38It's shocking to me how the comment section is replete with "a felony is a felony!" and "it's not a race issue- it's a criminal record issue!" messages. A few of them even go further and proudly proclaim they only read the first "paragragh". Too bad, they missed a critical point: > Even though research shows people of all races are about equally likely to have broken the law by growing, smoking, or selling marijuana,…
The problem is that that stat is heavily misleading. See section C of http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-m...
Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
#39Once I met a guy who worked for some Edward Jones-type company, investing the money of moms and pops, making money from watching various markets for opportunities to make profits. He was so in love with how effectively the whole world made sense in terms of dollars, contracts, and trades. He liked the meta-economics of the prevailing world economic order. He would think in terms of "is it worth it to me to buy your d…
> What did he think about weed then? That it was an unproductive (one of his favorite words) and likely immoral industry of drugs, not fit to be placed in his glorious world of markets and trade deals. > What does he think about it now? You know already. What do all these full-time market-men think about it: markets are awesome and efficient and now it's just another market service for them to try to arbitrage and to…
If my rhetoric is too grandiose, or my illogic too hazy, then I have to concede that you can parse details out of it which seem to be incorrect.
So, sure, that's exactly how we want our businesses to be, you are right, I concede for the sake of a limited argument under all the rest of the assumptions you have when you make that statement. I have unstated assumptions as well, everywhere.
Overall I was trying to make a hard point. I think that people are a just a little too content with the status quo. I believe only radical changes can fix the brokenness of our systems, and only on a long time line. (Our systems are broken at so many, many different levels, we could start by talking about problematic broken hardware/software systems if we wanted, and probably arrive at the conclusion that the present paradigm needs a radical change in the long run, saying nothing of money, law, or politics.)
I wanted to complain about how we expect our businesses to behave, because I think it's dysfunctional. But in the pragmatic sense, I'm not making any useful complaint. You are being more pragmatic.
The first thing I've come to realize the importance of by now, is that talk is just talk, and radical changes aren't going to happen on any time line, not without a lot of consensus.
I sincerely hope that some aspect of the human nature itself does not prevent us from coming to healthier consensuses than what we currently have. All I see is a system that maximizes paper profits while not counting environment damage or exhaustible resource availablity. Accounting is everything, and I fear for all humanity if we don't come to some better system of accounting value.
Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point here is that there are more consequences when you're Black in the US. Statistically speaking people of color, and in particular Black Americans, are arrested and convicted of marijuana related crimes at a much higher rate than any other group [1]. That translates into Black Americans being kept out of the newly legal business because of racist policing policies. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/…
I appreciate your remarks. But -- what I'm saying is that no one should feel sorry for this guy. It pains me to see the vast numbers of Americans who but a few years ago were for tough legislation and tough policies and who now desire to see criminals released from prison because the sentence may be too harsh. Really? If you do the crime, you do the time. We should not undo sentencing. It was all done legally at the…
> The morality in America has slipped precipitously since our heyday as a nation in the 1950s.
oh man