Everybody\u2019s favorite ballot initiative, Prop. 64 legalized cannabis for adults 21 and over in California. In Donald Trump-era years, this happened a very long time ago: Weed became legal one weird night in November 2016, the very same evening our 45th president was elected.<\/p>\n
And yet, in many ways, we\u2019re still waiting for legalization to kick in.<\/p>\n
In the years since, in some analyses, very little has gone right. The illegal market is eight times larger than the legal market. The small farmers who built the cannabis industry are shut out or outlaws. And instead of $5 eighths or whatever the brilliant economists looking at advanced models promised us, legal cannabis is outrageously expensive \u2014 so expensive that, in some cities, sales are shrinking. And in many other cities, cannabis retail sales are still illegal \u2014 same as it ever was.<\/p>\n
Okay, so the weed market is jacked up, and people still hate weed. But this wasn\u2019t just about dollars, or getting everyone stoned, or even conquering decades of propaganda and bad press. What about social justice? What about \u201crighting the wrongs of the Drug War,\u201d as the slick legalization campaign\u2019s tagline (sometimes) promised\u00a0(when it wasn\u2019t castigating weed as bad and promising nobody would get any, anyway)<\/a>?<\/p>\n Yes, about that! There are perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in\u00a0California<\/a>\u00a0with cannabis convictions \u2014 people with criminal records for what is now legal conduct \u2014 who are still waiting for that promise to become fulfilled,\u00a0despite a deadline of this summer for prosecutors to make it so<\/a>. So far, by one analysis, only three percent of the Californians who have an estimated 200,000 cannabis convictions on their records have had their records cleared.<\/p>\n What\u2019s taking so long? Well, for one, the people in charge don\u2019t have elections to win. That may be the cynical analysis of\u00a0L.A. District Attorney Jackie Lacey\u2019s announcement Thursday that her office<\/a>\u00a0is asking a judge to throw out 62,000 felony convictions and another 3,700 misdemeanor cases in a single motion. In all, about 53,000 people will have their records cleared,\u00a0as NPR reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n Calling it the single \u201clargest effort in California to wipe out old criminal convictions in a single court motion,\u201d Lacey\u2019s deliverance is powered by\u00a0Code for America<\/a>, a civic-minded computing-power nonprofit, which used algorithms to identify almost 66,000 pot busts from dusty Los Angeles County case files dating as far back as 1961.<\/p>\n \u201cThe dismissal of tens of thousands of old cannabis-related convictions in Los Angeles county will bring much-needed relief to communities of color that disproportionately suffered the unjust consequences of our nation\u2019s drug laws,\u201d Lacey said in a statement released Feb. 13.<\/p>\n Lacey first welcomed Code for America\u2019s criminal-conviction-clearing effort, called Clear my Record, to L.A. a year and a half ago. The computer program both identifies eligible cases, and then automatically fills out the necessary paperwork to file with a judge \u2014 a sort of AI-powered attorney that\u2019s now bearing fruit. But there are two things to keep in mind here.<\/p>\n One is that while Prop. 64 said that legalization would mean cannabis \u201coffenders\u201d could get their records cleared, it also said that all the lifting would be up to the offenders \u2014 for them to hire lawyers to file paperwork and attend hearings. This is not something someone whose life\u2019s been upended by a petty drug bust always has the resources to do, as is evidenced by Code for America\u2019s finding that 97% of pot busts Prop. 64 was supposed to clear are still there, and still hindering job and housing opportunities.<\/p>\n The other is that other cities have recognized, years ago, that reliance on \u201coffenders\u201d to clear their own names is a lame half-step, and that the lifting should be done by the very agencies that made the arrests and keep the records. (Government, in other words, should work for the people.)<\/p>\n That was the approach first unveiled in San Francisco a few years back by George Gascon, the former SF chief of police turned then district attorney, the first \u201ctop cop\u201d to welcome Code for America geeks into his office to void cannabis convictions \u2014\u00a0and who, as fate and fortune has it, is currently challenging Lacey for her job.<\/a><\/p>\n Both Gascon and Lacey as well as the third challenger for the office, Rachel Rossi, a former public defender, all style themselves as reformers rather than tough-nosed \u201clock-em-up\u201d prosecutors. In a profile on the race published earlier this month in the Los Angeles Daily News, Lacey said that voiding cannabis convictions would be a thing she\u2019d soon do \u2014 and lo, her words rang true with her announcement last week.<\/p>\n That\u2019s great, but what took Lacey so long? Jackie Lacey, the first African-American woman to hold the post, has been DA of Los Angeles County since December 2012. And it wasn\u2019t until she encountered a difficult re-election campaign, with a challenger with perhaps better cannabis-reform bona fides than hers, that she filed the motion to reform her office\u2019s marijuana-related criminal records.<\/p>\n As the Guardian reported, elected DAs in California had until this summer to choose whether to clear the records or fight in court to uphold them. It was highly unlikely that anyone would choose the latter path in Los Angeles, but as Code for America\u2019s sobering statistic reveals, there are still plenty more old pot busts waiting for the right moment to go away forever. And that\u2019s not cool.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong>\u00a0do you think all cannabis-related charges should be dismissed in \u201clegal\u201d states?<\/p>\n The post L.A. County Voids 66,000 Marijuana Convictions<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Everybody\u2019s favorite ballot initiative, Prop. 64 legalized cannabis for adults 21 and over in California. In Donald Trump-era years, this happened a very long time ago: Weed became legal one weird night in November 2016, the very same evening our 45th president was elected. And yet, in many ways, we\u2019reContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[148,50,8885,1852,10239,90,488,2111],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41324"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41324"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41325,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41324\/revisions\/41325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nRead More: L.A. County Voids 66,000 Marijuana Convictions<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"