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| Subject: A road back to the war on drugs? N.J. cannabis law funds controversial poLICE methods Mon Nov 29, 2021 1:44 am | |
| Cannabis activists hold a rally centering around drug and criminal justice reform June 17, 2021 in Trenton.
It was all going to hell on a balmy June afternoon.
Shouting from behind a podium into an animated crowd at Trenton’s Statehouse Annex, the Rev. Charles Boyer condemned the war on drugs to eternal damnation.
“To hell with the drug war!” he shouted. Earlier, he had demanded, “Let our people go!” and his audience echoed back with the same fire.
New Jersey Policy Perspective had just released a report detailing how the state had spent an estimated $1.2 billion per year from 2010-2019 to support the drug war here, where Black residents are 12 times more likely and Hispanics twice as likely to be incarcerated than white residents.
Many gathered in Trenton that day were people of color, activists, those who had been incarcerated or a mix of all three. The war on drugs, officially launched during the Nixon administration but perpetuated on a federal, state and local level over the ensuing decades, instead had been a personal hell for those gathered.
On that day, they wanted to damn it back.
Billions in revenue was generated from the drug war to the detriment of communities of color. At the statehouse, they wanted their voices heard in a legalized cannabis industry that could generate billions in the opposite direction.
After Boyer’s impassioned speech, people clasped hands to form a circle of healing. Another area was set aside for those who wanted to share their personal struggles in the form of an oral history — visceral evidence of collateral damage in the government’s decade-long, $11.6 billion failed campaign.
.https://www.nj.com/marijuana/2021/11/a-road-back-to-the-war-on-drugs-nj-cannabis-law-funds-controversial-police-methods.html
_________________ Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis, OZschwitz Contraband “The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner "Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann |
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