In his Sept 7 OpEd in the LA Times, Steven Gutwillig points out how the cultural mainstreaming of marijuana ignores the "racism of marijuana prohibition."  The Community Rights Campaign applauds Mr. Gutwillig for bringing to light the racist treatment of Black youth by drug laws and enforcement:

"Enforcement of marijuana laws disproportionately affects young African Americans -- even though their usage rates are lower than whites."

The criminalization of black people extends well beyond drug laws and their enforcement.  Black people and Black youth experience the sting of the Criminal Legal System at higher levels per their population that any other group in the US. Why?  Hip hop artist Wise Intelligent wrote in his 1996 song "Freestyle," "You [Black people] picked the cotton, the coffee and cut the sugar but in 1995 an Ex-Slave is a useless n----r."  First, big agro-business appropriated Black owned farm land, and then capital was pulled from the industries that employed large pools of skilled Black labor. Displaced from land and jobs, Black communities--along with Latino and poor communities--are now targeted by thousands of new laws designed to criminalize and imprison them. The Community Rights Campaign focuses on what we call the "pre-prisoning" of Black youth and other youth of color in California's public schools, our communities and in the country.

Mr. Gutwillig's timing is important. Since the early 1980's, California's prison population has risen from 24,000 to 173,000 and the prison budget has gone from $300 million to $11 billion. But just last month, a group of federal judges ordered the California state government to come up with a plan to release 44,000 prisoners from the state's overcrowded prisons. Many of these are the very people that Mr. Gutwillig writes about in his article: black people targeted by the racist enforcement of drug laws, imprisoned for drug possession as well as technical parole violations that include failing drug tests, and missing appointments with parole officers.

Please e-mail us if you are interested in trying to get the Governor and Legislature to comply with the Federal Courts and bring our loved ones home.

Read Los Angeles Times op-ed : Stephen Gutwillig - The racism of marijuana prohibition

Enforcement of marijuana laws disproportionately affects young African Americans -- even though their usage rates are lower than whites'.