Tuesday 29 May 2018

Sustaining Injustice

Canada should legalize cannabis pretty soon now, supposedly this summer. I've been a long time supporter of legalizing cannabis, so I'm very happy they are doing this. I plan on going to my government-run cannabis-selling shop, making a purchase, and using cannabis
for the first time in my life.


But being a very negative person, I tend to see what is going wrong more than what is going right. And on this front, despite following the right overall plan, my federal and provincial governments are doing a hell of a lot wrong.

The War on Drugs was an American policy started under Nixon in order to attack American democracy. Prohibition and restriction of intoxicants has been around far longer than Nixon, but highlighting drug abuse as a particular societal ill and treating that illness with long prison sentences was a way to try to arrest hippies and black Americans for felonies. In many states a felony conviction strips you of your right to vote, so by making a common and nearly harmless drug a serious offense, Nixon could suppress the votes of people who didn't tend to like Nixon.

It worked. America has a massive prison population that is extremely disproportionately black. The New Jim Crow, which talks about mass incarceration as the post-civil-rights-movement tool of choice to maintain racism, opens with a story of Jarvious Cotton who cannot vote, whose father and grandfather and great grandfather could not vote. At some point his ancestors couldn't vote because they were slaves. One of his ancestors was killed by racists when he attempted to vote. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he has a felony conviction for cannabis possession. One way or another, America will keep political power away from its black citizens.

America exported this policy all over the world. I feel very safe saying that Canada's laws against cannabis are largely what they are because Nixon wanted to suppress the black vote. In Canada this isn't about disenfranchisement. Canadians with criminal convictions don't lose their right to vote. But whether Canada started it's own war on drugs as an explicitly racist campaign or not, its effect is racist. It's non-white Canadians who bear the brunt of the enforcement of drug policy. After all, there's more to being convicted of a crime than
losing the right to vote
. And people with criminal convictions are marginalized by Canada
in other ways
.

So are we legalizing cannabis as a way of righting this wrong? Well, no. We are legalizing cannabis because wealthy white people who have had effectively legal access to cannabis for more than a decade just want to recognize their lived reality in law. They'd rather be able to google the closest place to buy it than to have to find a seller through a word-of-mouth network.

Canadian legalization of cannabis is not about trying to right a historical wrong. They aren't going to open up the prison doors and let everyone who sold or possessed the drug go free. It might be easier to apply for a pardon for possession, but it will still be a pardon. The rare child of a wealthy family who got caught in a sting that was intended for people of colour will have no problem convincing a board to expunge their conviction. Many of the people most abused by the law won't be able to afford
the application fee
.

And for people who applaud this purely as a person freedom issue, it's not going to work out that way. Many small dealers will be made worse off by the change in legislation. They will be competing with a government monopoly selling cannabis
cheap
specifically to run them out of business.

The black market will still persist. The black market is doing fine in Colorado where cannabis has been legal for a while now. That's partly because it's not really legal - it's legal under state law but not under federal law. It's partly because it's safer for organized crime to grow cannabis in Colorado and smuggle it to neighbouring states where it is illegal than to grow it in those states. Some people just like their old dealers and didn't want to go to the new, legal dispensaries. But most people would rather buy milk at the grocery store even if they knew a guy who could hook them up with discounted milk on Friday night. The dispensaries are doing just fine.

In Canada if you like your dealer will you be able to keep your dealer? No, they will face fines and charges. Imagine finding out that your the illegal product sold by your small, illegal business was being legalized, only to find out that it will still be illegal for you to sell it. I'll be very interested to see whether the bulk of those fines and charges are handed out to black and indigenous Canadians.

I try not to see malice where there is more likely incompetence, but it sure feels like the government must have put together a committee to figure out how to maintain cannabis-related institutional racism while making the drug legal.

The right way to legalize cannabis would have been to retroactively strike the criminal laws against it the first week they were in power. That would have resulted in a chaotic and difficult transition. As much as we should avoid such transitions in public policy, we should also avoid the incarcerating tens of thousands of people for the colour of their skin. For me, the latter principle takes precedence over the former. Unfortunately Canada's governments at both the federal and provincial level disagree.