AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH ABOUT JUNETEENTH AND THE WAR ON DRUGS

On June 19, 1865, Union Army General Gordon Granger announced General Order No. 3, which proclaimed that all enslaved African Americans were free. 

It began with …

The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer.

To commemorate this proclamation, we celebrate Juneteenth, which actually became a federal holiday last year, after Congress passed The Juneteenth National Independence Day Act. A bill that passed the Senate with unanimous consent. 

While we certainly welcome the opportunity to celebrate Juneteenth as a national holiday, we should also use this time to recognize that despite General Gordona Granger’s 1865 proclamation that all African Americans are free, history accurately disputes the validity of this claim.

You needn’t look any further than Jim Crow and the War on Drugs for proof of this truism.

Of course, while the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 overruled Jim Crow laws, the War on Drugs has allowed the continuation of Jim Crow style policies, which have enabled a very real destruction of black communities in the United States.

The War on Drugs is a War on Us

Earlier this month, the California Reparations Task Force released its interim report detailing the harms of slavery and systemic discrimination on African Americans.  In that report, authors highlighted how the war on drugs has contributed to the cycle of mass incarceration of black folks. 

Here are some highlights of that report …

• The American government at all levels criminalized African Americans for social control, and to maintain an economy based on exploited Black labor. Mass incarceration, another tool of racist social control, has also had the consequence of breaking up Black families.

• Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses are Black or Latino.

• The criminalization of African Americans through the ‘War on Drugs’ also contributed to increasing numbers of Black children being removed from families and placed into the foster care system, as Black men in particular were disproportionately arrested for minor crimes, breaking apart families and often leaving children in the care of extended relatives or strangers,

• During the post-civil rights era, both Republican and Democratic politicians ran on ‘tough on crime’ or ‘law and order’ political platforms that popularized especially punitive criminal laws—particularly laws prohibiting drug sales, distribution, possession, and use—to gain support from voters. These political campaigns often relied on the negative stereotypes of African Americans as criminals built by the previous three centuries of American law and order.

• Police crackdowns and incarceration for drug possession did not relieve the social conditions that spawned the crack cocaine epidemic, but rather created harmful consequences for African Americans. State actions exacerbated them by treating drug addiction as a crime, as opposed to a public health issue.

• Rather than treat drug use as a public health issue, the American government chose to treat illegal drug use as a criminal justice issue. Federal and state governments chose to punish drug users rather than offer medical help. The war on drugs, which continues today, is a cause for the high numbers of imprisoned African Americans, as evidence exists to suggest that African Americans use drugs at approximately the same rate or less than white Americans.

• African Americans have experienced marginalization, physical harm, and death, at the hands of the American criminal justice system at both the federal and state level beginning in slavery and continuing today.

And make no mistake: none of this was unintentional.

50 Years of Modern Slavery 

In 2016, journalist Dan Baum reported that John Ehrlichman, former President Richard Nixon’s domestic policy chief, admitted that the war on drugs was designed to persecute black communities in the United States, saying that they knew they couldn’t make it illegal to be “against the black community,” but by criminalizing drugs heavily, they could disrupt the black community.

We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Nixon’s declaration of the War on Drugs has lasted for more than 50 years, but new decriminalization and legalization measures have started to dismantle this racist and unjust war.  Though still, African Americans are arrested for violating cannabis possession laws at nearly four times the rates of white folks, with both groups consuming cannabis at roughly the same rates. 

Moreover, even with new legal markets popping up all over the country, African Americans still have very little representation in these markets. And we know we can’t rely on the government to right these wrongs, so we continue to take matters into our own hands by working with, and supporting black-owned cannabis businesses as well as the communities they serve.

This is certainly the case in Michigan, where we recently launched exclusively in five black-owned dispensaries in Detroit: Remedy, House of Zen, House of Mary Jane, West Coast eds, and Viola.

Only about 3% of cannabis business owners in Michigan are black, so we wanted to ensure that those black-owned dispensaries had the opportunity to get TICAL products on their shelves first. 

Of course, this has always been our strategy, regardless of which state we’re in: get TICAL into the communities that have been most negatively impacted by the war on drugs, and support the black-owned and women-owned dispensaries that are instigating racial justice within the cannabis community.

Slavery and Jim Crow laws were overturned because those who supported racial justice worked tirelessly to overturn them.  But we still have a lot of work to do when it comes to ending the war on drugs and the federal prohibition on cannabis, which continues to facilitate the persecution and enslavement of African Americans.  

Make no mistake: while we joyously celebrate Juneteenth today, we must also recognize that African Americans will never truly be free until the war on drugs has been completely dismantled. And with your support, we will make that happen.