If we want law enforcement reforms that would show a tangible, real effect in America, this would be a really good place to start, and wouldn’t even be terribly controversial-2/3 of Americans think it should be legalized (including a majority of Republicans).
The young, Democratic mayor of Kansas City, MO is having that conversation in his city right now. He believes it would go a long way in dealing with racial injustice, but I think it would have even bigger implications than that.
Mayor Quinton Lucas, a Democrat, has announced a plan to completely remove all offenses related to marijuana possession from the city code, which he says are often pretexts for stopping people and lead to over-policing of Black and brown communities and negative police interactions.
When Illinois legalized, they expunged the records of roughly 3/4 of a MILLION people, and released 10k+ low-level pot offenders from prison (violent offenders were not eligible for expungement or parole). This meant that a lot of people who had that stigma following them via background checks are going to have a lot less of a problem “picking themselves up by the bootstraps” than they did before. It means the Land of Lincoln is going to waste a lot less money processing and incarcerating people for low-level offenses.
Well over half the country has legalized it in some form or fashion, and has shown that the US is committing a pretty major injustice against those it has arrested and criminalized for low-level, non-violent pot offenses.
In many places in America, a person can lose their freedom for possessing a ziplock bag, not even full, of a natural plant. Take TN, for example. Possessing ANY amount is punishable by up to a year and prison and a $2,500 fine. That mark follows a person, limiting what type of job they will be able to get and in general, just screws with peoples’ lives in ways it shouldn’t.
Not only that, but a few years back, a survey of law enforcement agencies showed that harder stuff was creating a much bigger problem for them than was weed, which was literally at the bottom of the list of all drugs.
The DEA asked a nationally representative sample of over 1,000 law enforcement agencies what they saw as their biggest drug threats. Marijuana came in at the bottom of the list, named by only 6 percent of survey respondents. The share of law enforcement agencies naming pot has been declining steadily since the mid-2000s, even as states have moved to legalize medical and recreational marijuana during that time period.
Whoever decides to follow through and do this is going to score a giant political win.