Wednesday, November 30, 2016 by: Lance D Johanson
Tags: cannabis, discrimination, drug war
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(Natural News) The laws against cannabisvary from one region to the next, and differ from the state to the federal level. There is no absolute standard when it comes to the law. All law enforcement officers and judges react to cannabis differently and punish at their own discretion. With cannabis, the law is interpretive and this negatively impacts low income demographics, especially poor African American communities.
Americans growing increasingly disgusted by discriminatory, irrational cannabis laws
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul spoke about the discrimination in 2014, reaching out to the inner cities of Philadelphia, Baltimore and the south side of Chicago, where more poor African American communities are adversely affected by these laws. “I think that the law needs to be fair and that we shouldn’t incarcerate one race more than another and I think the law should be fair in the sense that the penalties should be proportionate to the crime,” Rand said in a 2015 interview.
“You can kill someone in Kentucky and be eligible for parole in 12 years, but we have people in jail for marijuana sales for 55 years, life, 20 years, 25 years. We’ve gone too far in all of this and then when you add up the numbers, even the white kids and black kids use marijuana at about the same rate and in national surveys the arrests and incarceration rate is four times greater for black males than it is for white males,” Paul states.