American drug law enforcement is a race issue. This is not just my leftist opinion; there is significant data that supports the fact that POC are disproportionately searched, arrested, and prosecuted on drug charges in this country. A lot of liberals thought that legalizing weed would change that, but new research suggests that even where weed is legal, Black and Latinx Americans are still being unjustly arrested on weed charges.
The study, which was released yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, analyzed the data of 838,600 people between 2008 and 2017. Researchers were trying to discern how cannabis legalization has impacted cannabis use across race and ethnicity. What they found was, essentially, that legalizing weed hasn’t changed weed use much at all: White and Black American still use drugs at similar rates, and yet Black Americans still bear the brunt of drug prosecution.
