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| Photo Credit: AP. |
(AP) - By pardoning Americans with federal convictions for marijuana possession, President Joe Biden said he aimed to partially redress decades of anti-drug laws that disproportionately harmed Black and Latino communities.
While
Biden’s executive action will benefit thousands of people by making it easier
for them to find housing, get a job or apply to college, it does nothing to
help the hundreds of thousands of mostly Black and Hispanic Americans still
burdened by state convictions for marijuana-related offenses, not to mention
the millions more with other drug offenses on their records.
Advocates
for overhauling the nation’s drug laws are hopeful that Biden’s pardons lead
state lawmakers to pardon and expunge minor drug offenses from people’s
records. After all, they say, dozens of states have already decriminalized
cannabis and legalized it for a multibillion-dollar recreational and medicinal
use industry that is predominantly white-owned.
“We know that this is really the tip of the
iceberg when it comes to people who are suffering the effects of (past)
marijuana prohibition,” said Maritza Perez, director of federal affairs at the
Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit organization pushing for decriminalization
and safe drug use policies.
The
decades-long “war on drugs,” a sweeping federal legislative agenda that Biden
championed as a U.S. senator and that was mirrored by state lawmakers, brought
about mass-criminalization and an explosion of the prison population. An
estimated tens of millions of people have had a marijuana-related arrest on
their record since 1965, the vast majority of them stemming from enforcement by
local police and state prosecutors.
But as many
law enforcement officials like to point out, the majority of people who serve
long sentences for marijuana-related offenses were convicted of more serious
charges than possession, such as a weapons count or the intent to sell or
traffic the drug on a larger scale. Such factors are typically how a case moves
into federal territory versus state prosecution.
Still,
reform advocates counter that many of them aren’t violent drug kingpins.
A 2021
Associated Press review of federal and state incarceration data showed that
between 1975 and 2019, the U.S. prison population jumped from 240,593 to 1.43
million people. Of them, about 1 in 5 were incarcerated with a drug offense
listed as their most serious crime.
The passage
of stiffer penalties for crack cocaine, marijuana and other drugs in the 1990s
helped to triple the Black and Hispanic incarceration rates by the year 2000.
The white incarceration rate only doubled.
And despite
state legalization or decriminalization of possession up to certain amounts,
local law enforcement agencies continue to make more arrests for drug
possession, including marijuana, than any other criminal offense, according to
FBI crime data.
The
president’s pardon of more than 6,500 Americans with federal marijuana
possession convictions, as well as thousands more with convictions in the
majority-Black city of Washington, captures only a sliver of those with records
nationwide. That’s likely why he has called on state governors to take similar
steps for people with state marijuana possession convictions.
“While white and Black and brown people use
marijuana at similar rates, Black and brown people have been arrested,
prosecuted and convicted at disproportionate rates,” Biden said Thursday. “Just
as no one should be in a federal prison solely due to the possession of
marijuana, no one should be in a local jail or state prison for that reason,
either.”
With the
president’s unambiguous acknowledgement of racial inequity in marijuana
enforcement, drug law reform advocates and those with convictions now see an
opening to push for far more remedies to the harms of the war on drugs.
Weldon
Angelos, whose 2003 federal case for selling $300 worth of marijuana to a
confidential informant in Utah got him sentenced to 55 years in prison, said he
knows many people who will benefit from the president’s pardon. But there are also
many more who will not, he said.
“I feel like this is a first step of (Biden)
doing something bigger,” said Angelos who, after serving 13 years in prison,
received presidential clemency and a pardon during the Obama and Trump
administrations. He is now a drug law reform activist.
Felony
cannabis cases like his also deserve consideration, Weldon said. Biden’s pardon
does not cover convictions for possessing marijuana with an intent to
distribute, which could further widen the scope of people receiving relief by tens
of thousands.
Enacting a
law that clears a person’s federal drug record, similar to what has been
offered in nearly two dozen states where marijuana has been decriminalized or
legalized recreationally, would make the conviction invisible to companies and
landlords doing criminal background checks, he said. Even with the federal
pardon, Weldon’s record is still visible, he said.
“There’s a
lot more that needs to be done here, if we really want to unwind the effects,
and the racist effects, of the war on cannabis,” Weldon said.
Some
advocates believe the country should consider clearing more than just marijuana
records. In the 1990s, Marlon Chamberlain was a college student in Iowa when he
learned that his then-girlfriend was pregnant with his eldest son. He began
using cannabis to cope with the anxiety of becoming a young father and, soon after,
started selling the drug.
“My thought
was that I would try to make enough money and have the means to take care of my
son,” said Chamberlain, a 46-year-old Chicago native. “But I got addicted to
the lifestyle and I graduated from selling weed to selling cocaine.”
Chamberlain
said he had a slew of state charges for marijuana possession between the ages
of 19 and 25. But it was a federal case for crack cocaine, in which authorities
used his prior marijuana arrests to enhance the seriousness of their case, that
upended his life. Chamberlain was sentenced to 20 years in prison before the
punishment was reduced to 14 years under the Fair Sentencing Act that narrowed
the sentencing disparity between crack and powder forms of cocaine. He was
freed after 10 years.
Even though
he will not benefit from Biden’s marijuana pardon, Chamberlain sees it as an
opportunity to advocate for the elimination of what he calls the “permanent
punishments,” such as the difficulties in finding a job or housing that come with
having a past drug offense.
“What Biden
is initiating is a process of righting the wrongs” of the drug war, he said.
Colorado and
Washington were the first states to legalize the recreational use of cannabis
in 2012, although medical use had already been legal in several states.
According to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, 37
states, the District of Columbia and four U.S. territories now permit the
medical use of cannabis. Nineteen states, D.C. and two territories have legalized
its recreational use.
And during
next month’s midterm elections, voters in Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, North
Dakota and South Dakota will decide whether to permit recreational adult use of
cannabis. That is reason enough for every state to look into mass-pardons and
expungements, civil rights leaders say.
“How fair is
it that you will legalize marijuana now, tax it to use those state taxes to
fund government, but forget all the people who are sitting in jails or were
incarcerated when it was illegal?” NAACP President Derrick Johnson told the AP.
“All those individuals who have been charged with marijuana crimes need to be
pardoned, particularly those in states that have legalized marijuana.”
Richard
Wallace, executive director of Equity and Transformation, a social and economic
justice advocacy group in Chicago, said state pardons must also come with some
form of restitution to those who suffered economically under the racially
discriminatory drug war.
“We need to
be thinking about building out durable reparations campaigns centered around
cannabis legalization,” he said. “I think oftentimes we end up just fighting
for the pardons and the expungements, and we leave out the economic component.”
Aaron
Morrison is a New York City-based member of AP’s Race and Ethnicity team.
Follow him on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/aaronlmorrison