How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom

Once 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 debt?" if ever you said anything within a mile's distance of implying that you might want money for some economic purpose.

Well, at that time, there was no weed boom. It was illegal for the most part, in the U.S.

And his worldview, which always tried to relate everything -- from national or world news, right on down to the conversations of everyone around him after the workday was done -- everything he related to in terms of how our existing systems of money, contract obligations, and legal decisions was so logical and coherent and wonderful.

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 buy ownership of so that they themselves can maximize profit on the margins.

What was the difference before and after? Well, in this one respect, there is no difference: he still goes on effusing self-serving pro-US-capitalist rhetoric everywhere he goes. The one difference is that now he doesn't think weed is bad, it's just another thing for him to try to leverage financial/economic advantage out of, behind his Edward Jones-style desk, while there is a whole 'nother entire class of people mentioned in this article who probably don't dig his own worldview as much as he does.

It'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, black people are much more likely to have been arrested for it.

The lesson goes much further than the weed-boom, of course. So many people look at the current legal landscape and say "opportunities are equal for equal candidates", with seemingly no ability to observe for the compounded effects of all the preceding inequality.

@

edit: My comments seem to have been flagged so hard that I can't post replies. I guess this place isn't much more sophisticated than BuzzFeed when it comes to race issues.

As for that piece you keep posting, ikeboy, I don't think it's nearly as relevant or convincing as you think it is.

From the choice headline quote from the research SSX cites:

> is small to nonexistent once legally relevant variables (e.g. prior record) are controlled

The entire controversy here arises due to the racially-biased source of the prior record.

I have a very low opinion of SSX's weasel-word-weaving to pander to his narrow audience, to be honest.

> Summary: Blacks appear to be arrested for drug use at a rate four times that of whites. Adjusting for known confounds reduces their rate to twice that of whites. However, other theorized confounders could mean that the real relative risk is anywhere between two and parity. Never trust the media to give you any number more complicated than today’s date.

Blacks "appear to be", huh? With a couple of sketchy assumptions, suddenly we're "between two and parity", which then gets reproduced by you in this debate as "misleading and basically parity".

Anyway,

> There seems to be a strong racial bias in capital punishment and a moderate racial bias in sentence length and decision to jail.

The book mentioned in the article "The New Jim Crow" is an extraordinary good read for people more interested in gaining context on the situation between race and crime mentioned in the article. It is also good to gain more insight into how politics can be racially coded without ever mentioning race - great given the current political climate.

"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 eventually helps you turn it into a family-friendly mass market industry.

It's also really difficult for people with fraud convictions to get job as accountants, no matter how good they are at forensic accounting. Trust is the commodity being sold.

Do you really want someone with a shitload of existing drug connections, being the poster face for the industry you're trying to vanillify? The whole premise of legalization wasn't that your local corner boys get to go industrial after they gain mass market access, it was that the "drug trade" becomes roughly parallel with the "tobacco trade", where the worst thing that happens is penny-ante tax evasion.

I 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 fault. His color has nothing to do with it, and quite frankly, I'm sick to death of everything in this country now revolving around race, homosexuals, feminists.

The man made a choice, he now lives with the repercussions of that choice, whether anyone agrees or disagrees. I realize my outlook is likely unpopular, but like I tell my children -- there are consequences for your actions, and it may take years to see them. This story will be read by my kids tonight to reinforce my good advice.

Besides, the morality of the people involved in a business like legal dope would put me off. Just because they don't have convictions means nothing. The type of people attracted to the dope business are off putting.