The marijuana legalization movement in America has made some amazing strides these past few years. More and more states are abandoning their crusade against an herb that makes people behave like snacky philosophy freshman. But unfortunately for those who wanted their legal weed to come with a mellow high, it turns out that marijuana legislation has some crappy side effects, such as...

6 Legal Pot Will Really Only Benefit White People

The decriminalization of marijuana has not only been hailed as a victory for personal freedom, but also as a blow to inequality. For too long, certain groups in this country have been unfairly targeted by both prejudice and the police via the illegality of weed. But now, everyone will be able to enjoy and profit from the benefits of legal weed, right?

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Haha, nope.

Take Colorado, the birthplace of the legal stoner. As progressive as the state is, it is of course illegal for kids to possess marijuana. That makes sense. It also makes sense that because of that, juveniles tend to feature the most prominently in marijuana arrests. But everything stops making sense when you discover that it isn't white juveniles who make up most of the arrests, but young people of color, despite there not being much of a racial divide amongst those who smoke pot and those who don't.

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Pictured: exactly one drug crime.

Police say it's not their fault, but rather the fault of all those racist civilians they have to protect and serve. According to law enforcement, they receive substantially more reports of suspicious behavior when the behavior in question is being perpetrated by a nonwhite person, and the police are obliged to investigate. In Colorado, that means that black people in particular can still be 2.5 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana-related offenses. Yes, there are still marijuana-related offenses. Call your congressperson.

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Just don't expect them to be lucid, either.

But why settle for keeping the status quo when you can add another tile to the long domino streak that is institutionalized racism? Colorado, and others states following suit, have made it part of decriminalization legislature that people who've previously been arrested for possessing marijuana cannot get a license to operate a grow operation or run a dispensary. Guess which groups tend to have the highest conviction rate? Not the Chads of the world, to be sure. At the time that article we linked was written, out of Colorado's 424 dispensaries, one was owned by a black person. Within a year, pot has become the whitest industry since country music. To put it simply: Thanks to decades of racial profiling and disproportionate targeting, a whole lot of minorities were caught possessing marijuana when it was illegal, and now these same people are not allowed to sell the stuff even though it's legal -- incidentally leaving almost exclusively whites in a position to profit from the most booming startup industry this country has seen since the last tech bubble. Way to shake up the system with your revolution.