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Since the May 25 killing of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis police force, the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement\u2014itself galvanized six years ago by the slaying of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, MO\u2014has come to animate what can now only be called a national uprising. No part of the country has been untouched. Large solidarity demonstrations have also been held overseas.<\/p>\n
As in any such situation, unpredictable forces have been unleashed\u2014as witnessed by the broken glass and looted storefronts in cities coast to coast.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Cannabis dispensaries across California have been hit by looters. The\u00a0East Bay Express<\/a>\u00a0reports that \u201cmost of the dispensaries in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Oakland seem to have been hit.\u201d Two outlets of the upscale national chain MedMen were\u00a0among several dispensaries<\/a>\u00a0struck in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n The\u00a0Cannabis Now\u00a0retail store<\/a>\u00a0in Los Angeles was also among those hit. Cannabis Now founder and CEO Eugenio Garcia said in a\u00a0statement<\/a>\u00a0that the looters struck last weekend\u2014hours after a large and peaceful protest was held at the same intersection as the shop, where La Cienega Blvd. meets 3rd St., near West Hollywood. \u201cI was threatened and assaulted and our building was ransacked for hours,\u201d Garcia relates. \u201cAlmost everything was stolen and destroyed. As an entrepreneur this is heartbreaking.\u201d<\/p>\n Adding to the sting, the ransacking came days after the shop had re-opened after having been closed since early March due to COVID-19<\/a>. \u201cIt was wonderful to have so many neighbors stop by and tell us how happy they were to see us open,\u201d Garcia says. \u201cOur store is currently closed again, but we will do our best to rebuild and offer a safe place for the community to come together.\u201d<\/p>\n Oakland\u2019s flagship cannabis dispensary,\u00a0Harborside<\/a>, which made headlines when it\u00a0went public<\/a>\u00a0last year, has been \u201crobbed repeatedly\u201d over the past weeks of unrest, according to the company\u2019s chairman emeritus, Steve DeAngelo. \u201cWe were one of dozens of California cannabis dispensaries that have been targeted,\u201d DeAngelo tells Cannabis Now. He says the break-ins were the work not of protesters but \u201cprofessional thieves who saw an opportunity.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Eugenio Garcia, in his statement<\/a> on the sacking of the Cannabis Now store, had this message for the protesters:<\/p>\n \u201cWe stand with you. For a decade it has been our mission at Cannabis Now to help build an all-inclusive community surrounding the cannabis plant. Black and Latino communities are specifically targeted and incarcerated due to cannabis prohibition. Racial injustice has prevailed for far longer\u2026 <\/p>\n We encourage you to peacefully protest, to vote and to let your voice be heard. While you are doing that, please lift up and support the small businesses in your community who have been affected.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n What makes for the special situation of cannabis businesses at this historical juncture is that the War on Drugs\u2014including cannabis prohibition\u2014has been a major ticket-holder in the matrix of oppression faced by Black America.\u00a0<\/p>\n Harborside\u2019s Steve DeAngelo, with personal roots as an activist long before he became an entrepreneur, especially emphasizes the social responsibilities of the cannabis community.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve always believed and continue to believe that cannabis movement needs to make racial justice an integral part of all that we do,\u201d DeAngelo says. \u201cWe have a debt of history we need to honor and need to pay. This industry would not exist without the efforts of generations of African Americans\u2014who were the first people to bring cannabis to North America. It\u2019s passage from Black jazz musicians to white fans was one of the vectors to rest of America. Cannabis is a gift of the African American community to the rest of the country.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n This history has played out in some agonizingly paradoxical ways. DeAngelo cites the case of Michael Thompson, a 68-year-old African American man who has been\u00a0serving a 60-year term<\/a>\u00a0for selling cannabis in Michigan since 1996\u2014in a state where it is\u00a0now legal<\/a>. A\u00a0campaign for his release<\/a>\u00a0has recently been launched, in light of the danger COVID-19 poses to prisoners. Says DeAngelo: \u201cThere are 40,000 people in this country in same category of doing time for something no longer illegal in many states.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n DeAngelo also invokes the case of Corvain Cooper, a Black man from Los Angeles who is serving a life term under the federal \u201cthree strikes\u201d law\u2014convicted<\/a>\u00a0in 2013 in a supposed conspiracy to ship cannabis out of state. His family appealed his life term, arguing that\u00a0changes to California law<\/a>\u00a0meant that his prior convictions (all for nonviolent offenses) were no longer felonies. But the U.S. Supreme Court turned down the case.\u00a0A\u00a0clemency campaign<\/a>\u00a0for him has now been launched. He was recently\u00a0transfered to a prison in Louisiana<\/a>, so his family\u00a0can no longer afford to visit him<\/a>. In a particularly telling irony, the site of the Louisiana clothes boutique he had opened shortly before his arrest is today a cannabis dispensary.<\/p>\n \u201cCan you imagine how they feel?\u201d DeAngelo asks. \u201cAn\u00a0extraordinarily rich industry is being built, and not only can you not participate but you\u2019re still locked up. And with COVID in the prisons, you\u2019re potentially facing a death sentence.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n Last year, DeAngelo launched the\u00a0Last Prisoner Project<\/a>, a non-profit group working for, in his words, \u201cthe release of every cannabis prisoner on the planet, and helping provide the resources for them to rebuild their lives.\u201d First, this means petitioning for \u201ccompassionate release,\u201d DeAngelo says. \u201cThe government has the power at the stroke of a pen to grant clemency, but it\u2019s a political risk. We\u2019re currently having conversations with governors\u2019 offices in legal states.\u201d These clemency petitions are being undertaken\u00a0in partnership with the\u00a0National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers<\/a>. Meanwhile, DeAngelo says the Last Prisoner Project \u201cis making funds available to pay for phone calls and medical care which are prohibitively expansive for many prisoners. We\u2019re also aiding prisoners on release to find employment\u2014especially in the legal cannabis industry.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe cannabis industry has a responsibility to strive for racial justice, both in operational and advocacy points of view,\u201d DeAngelo sums up. \u201cBoth the COVID and policing crises make clear how urgent this is. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s any more urgent now than it was a week ago, but that urgency is becoming clearer now.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think it\u2019s any more urgent now than it was a week ago, but that urgency is becoming clearer now.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2013 Steve DeAngelo<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n Maritza Perez, director of national affairs\u00a0at the Drug Policy Alliance<\/a>, said this in a June 1\u00a0statement<\/a>\u00a0in response to Trump mobilizing the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Customs & Border Protection (CBP) to\u00a0target protesters<\/a>: \u201cFor far too long, the drug war has been used as a tactic to target, harass, assault, criminalize, and incarcerate communities of color, resulting in a social, economic, and cultural stranglehold around our necks\u2026 People of color have a right to be angry and a right to be heard. We cannot meet pleas for liberation with more state-sponsored violence. Until we defund agencies like the DEA<\/a> and CBP, and remove federal incentives for local police departments, Black and Brown people will forever be gasping for air.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The War on Drugs has been identified, most prominently by writer Michelle Alexander, as a \u201cnew Jim Crow<\/a>\u201d that is again incarcerating, disenfranchising\u2014and killing\u2014Black people in the United States. It can be argued that, whatever new propaganda guise is now employed, the actual\u00a0social function<\/em>\u00a0of the War on Drugs has been the same as that of legal segregation and Klan terror of an earlier era. And as indicated by the case of Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year-old Black man\u00a0killed while jogging<\/a>\u00a0near his Georgia home in February, the outright vigilante terror of the Klan era also lives on. \u00a0<\/p>\n We now see the narco-stigma being employed against George Floyd, with the\u00a0assertion that he had been using meth<\/a>\u2014as if that makes any difference to the moral equation whatsoever. Often in the past,\u00a0cannabis has been the substance at issue<\/a>\u00a0in the\u00a0posthumous stigmatization<\/a>\u00a0of victims of police terror.<\/p>\n And many of the police killings of unarmed Black youth that we\u2019ve seen in recent years across the country have been linked, one way or another, to cannabis. Most notorious was the case of 18-year-old Ramarley Graham, who was shot dead in his own home in the Bronx in 2012. He was killed by an NYPD officer who had followed him into the apartment after supposedly witnessing him engaged in a street deal. He was shot while attempting to flush his stash of cannabis down the toilet. The officer who killed him\u00a0never faced charges<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n As recently as this March, an\u00a0egregious incident of police abuse<\/a>\u00a0in Brooklyn went viral on the internet and re-ignited public anger over racist marijuana enforcement in New York City.<\/p>\n If we\u2019re honest with ourselves, we must recognize peaceful protesters and opportunistic theives as opposites ends of a spectrum\u2014some of the looting (at least) has presumably been carried out by the simply angry and desperate. We should also keep in mind that\u00a0from Minneapolis<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0Las Vegas<\/a>, there have been signs that some of the violence has been provocation by far-right white nationalists bent on provoking a civil war.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a paradoxical testament to the gains of cannabis \u201cnormalization\u201d that dispensaries are seen as just another capitalist enterprise\u2014and therefore fair game for social rage, when it erupts. Where cannabis enterprises are seen as\u00a0complicit with gentrification<\/a>, the rage may even be targeted at such businesses. And this rage may be compounded by the bitter irony of white entrepreneurs disproportionately getting rich off legal cannabis, while Black users remain disproportionately criminalized. Official policies of \u201ccannabis equity<\/a>\u201d in California (at least) represent an effort to address this contradiction\u2014but the contradiction still persists.<\/p>\n The soul of the country\u2019s cannabis community is being tested by this crisis. Cannabis massively reached white America\u2014the critical step of its \u201cnormalization\u201d in a white-dominated society\u2014as a part of the cultural ferment of the 1960s, which also included the anti-war and civil rights movements. It is painfully clear that it is\u00a0still necessary to fight<\/a>\u00a0for the things the civil rights movement fought for two generations ago. The degree to which the cannabis community will be a part of this fight will reveal the degree to which the values of that era have truly been nurtured\u2014or whether the weed is today just another capitalist commodity in a system that consumes and exploits Black lives.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, how do you feel about the cannabis industry\u2019s response to the Black Lives Matter movement?<\/p>\n The post The Cannabis Industry and the Black Lives Matter Uprising<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Since the May 25 killing of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis police force, the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement\u2014itself galvanized six years ago by the slaying of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, MO\u2014has come to animate what can now only be called a nationalContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":43033,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4774,50,10273,13218,13342,141,1843,320,10223,1593],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43032"}],"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\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43032"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43034,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43032\/revisions\/43034"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/CashRegister-Retail-After-Looting.jpg\")
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War on Drugs Helped Bring Us to This Point\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0<\/h4>\n
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The Soul of the Cannabis Community<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: The Cannabis Industry and the Black Lives Matter Uprising<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"