Latest update April 28th, 2024 1:33 AM
Jan 26, 2019 News
The efforts of Governments and law enforcement to police the use, possession and trafficking of marijuana creates a system of disadvantage for certain races and classes, according to findings listed in the Report of the CARICOM Regional Commission on Marijuana 2018.
The report states that the law is inconsistently applied, particularly when viewed against the backdrop of other substances proven to be harmful, such as alcohol, which are not similarly prohibited, criminalised and demonised.
Persons, the report detailed, spend long periods in prison for the possession of small amounts of marijuana, even persons who use for medical reasons. Additionally, persons arrested and convicted end up with harsher penalties than those who commit violent victim-based crimes.
The report posits that the propensity to incarcerate has led to a wasteful and costly system where many potentially productive lives and families have been destroyed without benefit to society.
It is in this regard that the report notes the legal and social dimensions on the issue of marijuana, which it states, are wide, varied and compelling. A discernible disadvantage is that persons are arrested and convicted at disproportionate rates from a certain race and class. This “does not correspond to the many who actually use it,” according to the report.
Findings indicate a diminution of social, economic and cultural rights, and civil and political rights such as equality, constituting the wide-reaching impact of law enforcement efforts.
“Yet, law and policy remain blinded to these unequal paradigms and prejudices, revealing a structural and systematic defect of equity in the criminal justice system.”
Every level of the criminal justice system, the report states, has displayed biases and inequality, particularly to poor, marginalised and Rastafarian people.
“Stereotypes and prejudices remain even in our courts. Because of how Caribbean societies are stratified, such inequity often translates into underlying race biases.”
The commission, in its report, took the position that legal policy toward marijuana should be informed, not by punitive approaches but by public health rationales, within a human rights, social justice and developmental perspective. It notes that there are deep rationales for law reform of harmful, ineffective and unjust prohibitionist legal regime that currently informs cannabis, supported by strong public opinion, as well as credible scientific and empirical data and analysis.
Data suggests that drug usage is often, for poorer communities, a coping mechanism to deal with lack of opportunities. The drug doesn’t cause violence but it causes criminal activity in the context of a society where the drug is illegal and frowned upon, through turf wars and gang violence. Some of the violence occurs as a result of heavy-handed policing in eradication efforts, where millions of black market profits are lost each year, the report stated.
The commission accepts evidence that the original classification of the drug as a dangerous drug with no value was made without the benefit of scientific research or data. This classification, spearheaded by the US, and automatically followed domestically. The history of the criminalisation of the drug in the US was also allegedly constructed to destabilise communities of colour.
CNN reported, in 2016, a quote from John Ehrlichman, the domestic policy chief of former US president Richard Nixon. Ehrlichman was quoted in an interview as saying “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin.
And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
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