Social justice

As Brent Staples, a member of the Times editorial board has written, the history of the federal ban on marijuana possession is rooted in racist prejudices about African-Americans and Mexicans. The burden of the ban’s enforcement, especially since the advent of the war on drugs in the 1970s, has in turn disproportionately fallen on people of color: While whites and blacks use marijuana at roughly equal rates, blacks are 3.7 times as likely to get arrested for possessing it. “The costs of this national obsession, in both money and time, are astonishing,” writes Jesse Wegman, a member of the Times editorial board.

Repaying those costs requires tackling two main challenges.

Criminal justice

In 2018, over 663,000 people were arrested on charges involving marijuana. What happens to them if it’s legalized? As Mr. Wegman writes, marijuana convictions “can have lifelong consequences for employment, education, immigration status and family life,” even when prison time isn’t part of the sentence.

That’s why the Los Angeles Times editorial board came out in favor of retroactively expunging or resentencing marijuana-related convictions. They wrote:

Marijuana is now legal under California law, but hundreds of thousands of Californians have criminal records for possessing or selling the drug when it was still banned. Those records can make it harder for people to get a job, obtain a loan, go to college, rent an apartment or otherwise become productive members of their community — even if their marijuana arrest happened decades ago. … It’s cruel to allow people to continue to suffer the penalties of a conviction for marijuana-related acts that the state no longer considers a crime.

What’s clear is that racial disparities in the criminal justice system won’t disappear on their own: After Colorado legalized marijuana, arrests went down for white kids, but shot up for black and Latino kids.

[Related: The war on drugs, explained]

Economic justice

As legalization moves forward in the states, most of the new market opportunities in the cannabis industry are being captured by white people: According to a survey by Marijuana Business Daily, only 19 percent of cannabis businesses in 2017 had minority founders or owners (African-Americans accounted for just over 4 percent).

Summing up the historical irony, Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow,” said in 2014, “40 years of impoverished black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their families and futures destroyed,” and “now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing?”