Today is 4/20, a day that commemorates cannabis. No matter your opinion of the unofficial holiday, it presents an opportunity for us to meaningfully reflect on the history of drug enforcement in the US and the legacy of the War on Drugs.
There are many conversations surrounding weed – what it should be called, whether it should be legalized – but lost within that conversation is the most essential and oft-overlooked part: the people.
The War on Drugs will be remembered as an American tragedy. It was a war that began with the explicit notion that Black people were the “enemy.” That descriptor was used by John Ehrlichmann, the domestic policy chief for President Richard Nixon. In a 1994 interview, Ehrlichmann tells reporter Dan Baum that “we knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.” Ehrilichmann goes on later to admit that “did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
That is the true tragedy of the War on Drugs. It was a political strategy designed to disenfranchise Black people under the pretense of protecting the public.
And the policies of the drug war worked just as intended: draconian drug enforcement laws became a leading driver of mass criminalization based on a campaign deliberately rooted in racism and fear-mongering. This has been a bipartisan project weaponized against the American people, which has shaped the prejudiced attitudes, lies and skewed perspectives that still carry on to this day. And the racial bias baked into this rhetoric is reflected in the numbers.
The racial disparities between Black Wisconsinites and white Wisconsinites are stark when it comes to who is arrested and who suffers most under these discriminatory laws. For example, in 2022, Black people were 5.29 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession in Wisconsin despite comparable national marijuana usage rates.
The racist history of the drug laws still persists and causes discrimination against Black people, even when their usage is commensurate with everyone else. That represents a reality that Black people have been trying to communicate since their forced arrival here. We are like everyone else. But more importantly, we are human. Our humanity is stripped from us time and time again, when we were the source of America’s primary capital, and then were seen as unruly commodities during the Jim Crow era, and now still deal with policies that make us out to be enemies of the state and take our personhood away from us.
Even in today’s landscape, where legalization is incredibly popular, the discourse focuses on why weed remains outlawed here but doesn’t emphasize enough how its prohibition comes at a real human cost. Again, the question that is usually asked is why, which is valid, but it seems that we should take more time to acknowledge who. Who is suffering? Who is in pain? Who are the people that are being affected the most and what can we do to change it?
So even as you make 4/20 jokes today, I implore you to take some time to also engage with information about the legalization of marijuana in Wisconsin. To think about the history of why marijuana is illegal and how it connects to our nation and the White House. Look into the politics of the situation and see how you can get involved. And think of the people, too.
Think of the people that are still incarcerated because of marijuana-related offenses.
The families that are inextricably torn apart. The friends that they lose valuable time with, time they can never get back. Maybe someday when we think of 4/20, it won’t just be to condemn Wisconsin’s regressive marijuana laws, but to imagine a future where we right the wrongs of cannabis prohibition by not only making it legal, but by repairing the damage done by the War on Drugs.