Final fall, I got here throughout a memorable opinion piece by Steven King (paywalled), a man who has written some 10 million phrases in his profession. This specific piece was 4 brief paragraphs, nonetheless. Seven sentences. It addressed mass shootings in america and it was uncharacteristically brief as a result of King concluded that the issue, although devastating, was unsolvable. “There’s nothing extra to say,” he concluded.
I considered that essay this morning. I’ve been writing an MLK Day put up on this weblog for seven years working. I’m not one of the best individual to jot down on that matter, demographically, but it surely’s actually one thing I’ve studied. The theme of my posts is that hashish is a civil rights subject. Annually, I’ve demonstrated with details (upon details upon details) that the Battle on Medicine continues in insidious methods; and I’ve regarded for indicators of enchancment. Little has modified, nonetheless. When it has, it’s usually been for the more serious.
So I’ll maintain this weblog put up to 4 paragraphs immediately. Suffice it to say that in keeping with The Man, marijuana associated arrests topped 227,000 in 2022, which is a rise from 2021. Three issues to notice: 1) that quantity is nearly actually underreported, as a result of many regulation enforcement businesses don’t report information to the FBI; 2) 92% of those arrests had been for easy possession, which is simply terrible; and three) worst of all, an outsized variety of these arrests had been actually of minorities and folks of colour– similar to each different 12 months I’ve dug into this.
Extra states proceed to legalize hashish and plenty of folks make a residing within the hashish business. A lot of them not solely possess hashish, however “visitors” at a big scale underneath state authority. But, we’re going backwards on civil rights and hashish total. How can this be? I really feel out of issues to say.
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Details upon details:
