Can America's Weed Industry Provide Reparations for the War on Drugs?
This month, Oakland's City Council unanimously approved a program giving people with former marijuana convictions a leg-up when it comes to entering Oakland's growing legal cannabis industry—a move the City Council sees as a step towards reparations for the drug wars that, in part, led to a boom in America's prison population since the 1970s and targeted people of color.
While many states and districts actively ban people with past criminal convictions from participating as owners or employees in the country's increasingly legal billion-dollar marijuana industry, Oakland's new priority licenses program, called Oakland's Equity Program, reserves half of its marijuana business licenses for the recently incarcerated and people living in neighborhood directly impacted by the drug war.
For the last 18 months, Oakland's City Council has been in conversation with Oakland's Cannabis Regulatory Commission about what regulation and licensing should look like on...
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