
How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom - swamp40
http://www.buzzfeed.com/amandachicagolewis/americas-white-only-weed-boom?utm_term=.wdG9yoVWO
======
fiatmoney
"Henderson was more than qualified, so why didn’t he get the gig? ... he has
two drug possession felonies on his record"

You know, people with illegal bookmaking convictions are kept out of the
gambling industry for good reasons. It started off as a dirty industry, and to
the extent you keep anyone with a hint of grime out of it, you avoid it
regressing to that state. That keeps regulators off your back and eventually
helps you turn it into a family-friendly mass market industry.

It's also really difficult for people with fraud convictions to get job as
accountants, no matter how good they are at forensic accounting. Trust is the
commodity being sold.

Do you really _want_ someone with a shitload of existing drug connections,
being the poster face for the industry you're trying to vanillify? The whole
premise of legalization wasn't that your local corner boys get to go
industrial after they gain mass market access, it was that the "drug trade"
becomes roughly parallel with the "tobacco trade", where the worst thing that
happens is penny-ante tax evasion.

~~~
kennywinker
Everything you say is entirely logical, but omits the reality that as a black
person in america you are vastly more likely to be arrested for drug crimes.
Not more likely to DO drug crimes, just more likely to get caught.

This means profiling and racist policing directly leads to economic exclusion.
If the american dream is upward mobility, that means black people get a
smaller shot at the american dream.

But all that aside. This is like saying that people who've had DUIs can't work
at bars. The guy in the article had possession charges. That means he had
nothing to do with selling the stuff, he was just a fan. That's a big
difference from being an accountant convicted of fraud or a bookie trying to
work at a casino.

~~~
ikeboy
This is just bad statistics. [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-
justice-much-m...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-
more-than-you-wanted-to-know/)

>For example, all of these “equally likely to have used drugs” claims turn out
to be that blacks and whites are equally likely to have “used drugs in the
past year”, but blacks are far more likely to have used drugs in the past week
– that is, more whites are only occasional users. That gives blacks many more
opportunities to be caught by the cops. Likewise, whites are more likely to
use low-penalty drugs like hallucinogens, and blacks are more likely to use
high-penalty drugs like crack cocaine. Further, blacks are more likely to live
in the cities, where there is a heavy police shadow, and whites in the suburbs
or country, where there is a lower one.

...

>Finally, all of this is based on self-reported data about drug use. Remember
from a couple paragraphs ago how studies showed that black people were twice
as likely to fail to self-report their drug use? And you notice here that
black people are twice as likely to be arrested for drug use as their self-
reports suggest? That’s certainly an interesting coincidence.

~~~
pflats
> Likewise, whites are more likely to use low-penalty drugs like
> hallucinogens, and blacks are more likely to use high-penalty drugs like
> crack cocaine.

Why is it, then, that crack cocaine is a high-penalty drug, and hallucinogens
are low-penalty drugs?

(I leave this as an exercise to the reader.)

~~~
pakled_engineer
Because of the damage addiction does to communities. When these laws were
passed it was people in those affected communities demanding them. People
forget there were huge community marches in the 80s/90s crack epidemics with
locals demanding police rid their towns of crack dealers.

~~~
chimeracoder
> People forget there were huge community marches in the 80s/90s crack
> epidemics with locals demanding police rid their towns of crack dealers.

People also forget why those dealers were in the business in the first place.

(Hint: the US government played a large role in explicitly financing the drug
trade that resulted in a stead inflow of crack, predominantly to black
communities[0]. Crack cocaine would not have been anywhere nearly as lucrative
a business otherwise[1].)

[0]
[https://oig.justice.gov/special/9712/](https://oig.justice.gov/special/9712/)

[1] Which isn't to say that it's particularly lucrative either way, as has
been demonstrated numerous times by economists - it just happens to be one of
the few options available for many people who are trying to scrape together a
living under those circumstances.

~~~
pakled_engineer
A steady influx of cocaine, which became too expensive when said shady
agencies stopped what they were doing and local dealers decided to boil the
expensive coke into crack so it became more affordable to addicts. Now there
was a $5 per point addictive drug flooding poor areas with zero law
enforcement to control it.

I remember big protests with black community leaders accusing the police of
racism for not arresting crack dealers as their neighborhoods had become so
dangerous police totally avoided them. They demanded new laws. Their newly
elected reps ran on a platform of new tougher laws. The heavy hand of
government then solved this by creating mandatory minimum sentencing and other
laws that were blanket applied regardless of individual situation and created
mass incarceration.

~~~
chimeracoder
Yes.

Now, let's think why white neighborhoods were not struggling with the same
problems of violent crime due to the drug trade. We know that the answer is
not

(a) white people weren't doing drugs

(b) white people were doing drugs that were less addictive

because in reality, white people had (and still have) roughly the same total
rates of drug use as everyone else. And in this case, white people were
largely using the _same_ drug (cocaine, in powered form) as black people
(cocaine, in freebase form).

I'm not saying that black people at the time weren't concerned with violent
crime and calling for solutions to it. In fact, I'm usually the person who
points this out whenever discussions about 80s and 90s drug law sentencing
come up on HN. What I am saying instead is that it's silly to ignore the
reason that black communities were concerned with problems that white
communities never had to face in the first place.

~~~
ikeboy
Whites were doing less drugs per drug user, as my comment above said.

~~~
chimeracoder
No, drug usage rates among whites are not and were not substantially lower
than drug usage rates for other races. (In some years, they were actually
_higher_ , though not substantially so). In fact, in the 1980s, white people
were also 45% more likely to _sell_ drugs as well[0].

The difference in the effects of drug trade on black communities and on white
communities in the 1980s are emphatically not due to fundamental differences
of the drugs themselves, or due to differences in the prevalence of drug trade
and drug usage.

[0]
[http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/339610?seq=1#page_scan_t...](http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/339610?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)

~~~
ikeboy
>Hindelang, Hirshi, and Weiss (1981) compare police records on arrests to
self-reports for a sample of individuals and find these to be similar, with
the exception of self-reports for young black men, which appear to understate
the amount of crime committed.

If the fraction of drug users are equal, but blacks lie about whether they're
drug users more often, then your statistics will show that whites use more.

The reported difference between blacks and whites is less than the known
difference in honesty between them with regard to drug questions.

You also don't seem to have responded to my point at all, which is that blacks
have a higher rate of reported usage within the last week. This is before
taking the self-reported nature into account. See the source originally cited,
[http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rdusda.pdf](http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rdusda.pdf)

>Among black drug users, 54% reported using drugs at least monthly and 32%
reported using them weekly. Such frequent drug use was less common among white
drug users. Among white users, 39% reported using drugs monthly and 20%
reported using them weekly.

I'll let you do the math to determine how this affects usage rates.

~~~
chimeracoder
> You don't seem to have responded to my point at all, which is that blacks
> have a higher rate of reported usage within the last week.

That's completely counter to the results of both the MTF and NSDUH. Since
1975, with the exception of Native Americans, whites consistently have
slightly higher usage rates of drugs than any other racial demographic,
although the overall drug usage rates are roughly comparable. For example:

> For a number of years, 12th-grade African-American students reported
> lifetime, annual, 30-day, and daily prevalence rates for nearly all drugs
> that were lower—sometimes dramatically so—than those for White or Hispanic
> 12th graders. That is less true [in 2014], with rates of drug use among
> African Americans more similar to the other groups[0]

The reason for the discrepancy is that you're citing statistics from the BJS
about drug _users_. That's quite different from usage rates of drugs within
the general population.

Finally, you are quite literally begging the question[1] by citing the 1981
analysis (which is itself a rather contested one). Even if we take that data
at face value, it concludes that black men understate the crimes they commit,
and does so by comparing this to arrest records. The whole point is that
arrest records provide a skewed perspective of drug usage for black men (and
women), because they are far more likely to be arrested for the behaviors they
do.

[0] [http://monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/monographs/mtf-
vol1_2014...](http://monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/monographs/mtf-
vol1_2014.pdf)

[1] Yes, begging the question, not raising the question.

~~~
ikeboy
You're using 12th grade numbers. That's more than enough to account for any
difference.

>The reason for the discrepancy is that you're citing statistics from the BJS
about drug users. That's quite different from usage rates of drugs within the
general population.

If the same percent of whites use drugs as blacks, then looking at how many
drugs are used by each user (or how often each user uses them) matters. If
each black user uses more than each white user, the total usage can be more.

>Finally, you are quite literally begging the question[1] by citing the 1981
analysis (which is itself a rather contested one). Even if we take that data
at face value, it concludes that black men understate the crimes they commit,
and does so by comparing this to arrest records. The whole point is that
arrest records provide a skewed perspective of drug usage for black men (and
women), because they are far more likely to be arrested for the behaviors they
do.

I took that quote out of your jstor source. If you don't like it, use the one
from SSC that I linked to:

>Comparisons of several different surveys of drug use find that “nonreporting
of drug use is twice as common among blacks and Hispanics as among whites”
(Mensch and Kandel).
([https://www.jstor.org/stable/2749113](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2749113))

This can't be explained by bias in arrest records. Note that they're looking
at how many people who admitted using drugs in 1980 denied ever using drugs in
1984.

------
traviswingo
> But it can’t be someone who got caught. Which for the most part means it
> can’t be someone who is black.

It's thinking like this that pisses me off. Henderson wasn't hired because of
a record. Yes, racism still unfortunately exists, but in order to move towards
an equal future we need to stop bringing it up and searching for problems
where there are none. Fucking Buzzfeed and Huffington post are constantly
using they're over-sensitive audience to start drama.

~~~
knughit
Ignoring up problems won't fix them.

~~~
lsaferite
But how does demonizing the legal weed industry by accusing it of being
racists accomplish anything useful?

They are clearly NOT being racist and just following the legal requirements
for their industry. The fact that the ones being excluded are mainly black is
not some conscious decision to exclude blacks but the result of the current
laws and enforcement saddling them with felony drug convictions. The author's
time would be better spent addressing the real problem of the disproportionate
number of black males with drug felonies for simple possession.

~~~
evilDagmar
Accomplish anything useful? Buzzfeed is about _generating ad revenue through
clicks_, not about being useful or educational.

------
lycidas
The book mentioned in the article "The New Jim Crow" is an extraordinary good
read for people more interested in gaining context on the situation between
race and crime mentioned in the article. It is also good to gain more insight
into how politics can be racially coded without ever mentioning race - great
given the current political climate.

------
notlisted
I don't believe for one second that the people running the dispensaries never
'partook'. It takes a fan of the merchandise to run these things and
communicate with the clientele. They just weren't caught. Why not? I suspect
it still works like this:

Some 10-odd years ago, I had a (white) colleague who really enjoyed smoking
mary-j. He lived on the 48th floor of a deluxe high-rise in Manhattan. He,
like his wealthy neighbors, didn't have to get their fix off the street.
Instead, they called 1-800-greenhouse and ordered two "theatre tickets".
Within 30 mins, a bike messenger (African-American) came over to deliver 2
ounces of stuff to his front door. He never left the house. Last I heard, he
got a job with the government…

He still has the right to vote too.

------
pakled_engineer
Here activists called legalization the new prohibition because of all the
regulations like no dispensaries within a X distance from each other, a
school, church ect so drove them out or cemented monopolies for the existing
dispensaries which can raise prices. Then they created high barriers to entry
with massive licensing fees and other regulations. This of course spawned
online purchasing and delivery business models that's worked well for now,
until more regulations on delivery.

One problem with the distributor in this story is he is constantly getting
high off his own supply while in care and control of a vehicle which makes
nobody want to work with him. That's heatbag behavior asking for problems. His
comment on firearms about pulling out a gun during an argument is also
something only heatbags do, the guys with side arms on the farm he went to are
only armed to deter getting jacked for their product not win arguments.

You can't have a record and operate a dispensary here either, which was
designed to keep bikers and other org crime out but they get around this by
partnering with somebody that has a clean record.

Also wondering why the guy in Colorado can't apply for a pardon if it was only
for teenage possession. Friend in Seattle did that to erase his record and
open a weed business.

~~~
evilDagmar
| Also wondering why the guy in Colorado can't apply for a pardon if it was
only for teenage possession

Because that would dilute the click-baity narrative that Buzzfeed is trying to
drive home. We wouldn't want their efforts in conflating cause and effect to
go to waste now, would we?

------
matwood
A secondary issue here is that a joints worth of pot was cause for a felony
conviction. How is that punishment in any way fitting the crime.

~~~
lsaferite
And this is the real issue the author should be addressing instead of trying
to accuse the legal weed industry of being racist.

------
RodericDay
It's shocking to me how the comment section is replete with "a felony is a
felony!" and "it's not a race issue- it's a criminal record issue!" messages.
A few of them even go further and proudly proclaim they only read the first
"paragragh". Too bad, they missed a critical point:

> Even though research shows people of all races are about equally likely to
> have broken the law by growing, smoking, or selling marijuana, black people
> are much more likely to have been arrested for it.

The lesson goes much further than the weed-boom, of course. So many people
look at the current legal landscape and say "opportunities are equal for equal
candidates", with seemingly no ability to observe for the compounded effects
of all the preceding inequality.

@

edit: My comments seem to have been flagged so hard that I can't post replies.
I guess this place isn't much more sophisticated than BuzzFeed when it comes
to race issues.

As for that piece you keep posting, ikeboy, I don't think it's nearly as
relevant or convincing as you think it is.

From the choice headline quote from the research SSX cites:

> is small to nonexistent once legally relevant variables (e.g. prior record)
> are controlled

The entire controversy here arises due to the racially-biased source of the
prior record.

I have a very low opinion of SSX's weasel-word-weaving to pander to his narrow
audience, to be honest.

> Summary: Blacks appear to be arrested for drug use at a rate four times that
> of whites. Adjusting for known confounds reduces their rate to twice that of
> whites. However, other theorized confounders could mean that the real
> relative risk is anywhere between two and parity. Never trust the media to
> give you any number more complicated than today’s date.

Blacks "appear to be", huh? With a couple of sketchy assumptions, suddenly
we're "between two and parity", which then gets reproduced by you in this
debate as "misleading and basically parity".

Anyway,

> There seems to be a strong racial bias in capital punishment and a moderate
> racial bias in sentence length and decision to jail.

~~~
jgh
The comments section here isnt much better than that

Edit:

To follow up your edit, I find the attitudes toward race and gender on HN
particularly troubling. Whenever there is an article that discusses legitimate
race/gender issues it tends to be downvoted/flagged and drop like a rock off
the front page. The comments are often calling into question the credibility
of the person making the complaint about racism, and even blaming them / their
race.

The reason that I find the attitudes here so troubling is because there are a
number of influential people here. Many are entrepreneurs and future
entrepreneurs. If these attitudes are a reflection of the racial attitudes in
the tech industry then woe unto us. We are doomed. We fancy ourselves
sophisticated, rational, and benevolent leaders of the future world economy
but we are too arrogant to look inward at our own flaws.

------
hnmcs
Once I met a guy who worked for some Edward Jones-type company, investing the
money of moms and pops, making money from watching various markets for
opportunities to make profits.

He was so in love with how effectively the whole world made sense in terms of
dollars, contracts, and trades. He liked the meta-economics of the prevailing
world economic order. He would think in terms of "is it worth it to me to buy
your debt?" if ever you said anything within a mile's distance of implying
that you might want money for some economic purpose.

Well, at that time, there was no weed boom. It was illegal for the most part,
in the U.S.

And his worldview, which always tried to relate everything -- from national or
world news, right on down to the conversations of everyone around him after
the workday was done -- everything he related to in terms of how our existing
systems of money, contract obligations, and legal decisions was so logical and
coherent and wonderful.

What did he think about weed then? That it was an unproductive (one of his
favorite words) and likely immoral industry of drugs, not fit to be placed in
his glorious world of markets and trade deals.

What does he think about it now? You know already. What do all these full-time
market-men think about it: markets are awesome and efficient and now it's just
another market service for them to try to arbitrage and to buy ownership of so
that they themselves can maximize profit on the margins.

What was the difference before and after? Well, in this one respect, there is
no difference: he still goes on effusing self-serving pro-US-capitalist
rhetoric everywhere he goes. The one difference is that now he doesn't think
weed is bad, it's just another thing for him to try to leverage
financial/economic advantage out of, behind his Edward Jones-style desk, while
there is a whole 'nother entire class of people mentioned in this article who
probably don't dig his own worldview as much as he does.

~~~
lmm
> What did he think about weed then? That it was an unproductive (one of his
> favorite words) and likely immoral industry of drugs, not fit to be placed
> in his glorious world of markets and trade deals.

> What does he think about it now? You know already. What do all these full-
> time market-men think about it: markets are awesome and efficient and now
> it's just another market service for them to try to arbitrage and to buy
> ownership of so that they themselves can maximize profit on the margins.

Isn't that exactly how we want our businesses to behave? If a businessman who
didn't want to get involved in something when it was illegal now wants to get
involved now that it's legal, isn't that good business ethics?

~~~
hnmcs
If my rhetoric is too grandiose, or my illogic too hazy, then I have to
concede that you can parse details out of it which seem to be incorrect.

So, sure, that's exactly how we want our businesses to be, you are right, I
concede for the sake of a limited argument under all the rest of the
assumptions you have when you make that statement. I have unstated assumptions
as well, everywhere.

Overall I was trying to make a hard point. I think that people are a just a
little too content with the status quo. I believe only radical changes can fix
the brokenness of our systems, and only on a long time line. (Our systems are
broken at so many, many different levels, we could start by talking about
problematic broken hardware/software systems if we wanted, and probably arrive
at the conclusion that the present paradigm needs a radical change in the long
run, saying nothing of money, law, or politics.)

I wanted to complain about how we expect our businesses to behave, because I
think it's dysfunctional. But in the pragmatic sense, I'm not making any
useful complaint. You are being more pragmatic.

The first thing I've come to realize the importance of by now, is that talk is
just talk, and radical changes aren't going to happen on any time line, not
without a lot of consensus.

I sincerely hope that some aspect of the human nature itself does not prevent
us from coming to healthier consensuses than what we currently have. All I see
is a system that maximizes paper profits while not counting environment damage
or exhaustible resource availablity. Accounting is everything, and I fear for
all humanity if we don't come to some better system of accounting value.

------
treerunner
Black underemployment is not an issue specific to the weed industry, it's a
problem in all industry. Duh.

Also, legal weed is supposed to deal with racial inequalities. Legal weed
means less people being caught and jailed. This is good.

Though, to be perfectly honest, I am not into the idea of states using
Marijuana as a profit vehicle. It's about as cynical and without class as
state run gambling. Hopefully more people will grow their own and once the
rest of the US legalizes, weed will be about as profitable, no more or less,
than a tomato.

------
Grue3
Why would anyone _want_ to be part of something called "Weed Boom" is beyond
me. Also why literal Buzzfeed clickbait is being posted on HN.

------
githubber123
If most DUI convictions were white males and a delivery company didn't hire
you if you had a DUI then that too would be racist? Seems like a reach.

------
tzs
I'd expect states to be strict in this area for now, especially states that
legalized recreational use, because the weed business is _not_ legal under
Federal law. The Federal government is currently taking a hands off approach
to see how this works out. The cleaner the states can keep their weed
business, the more likely the Feds are to leave them alone.

------
cholantesh
Previous discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11305929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11305929)

~~~
elbigbad
To call that link previous "discussion" is generous. There are only a handful
of comments, nothing interesting.

~~~
cholantesh
At the time that I posted, there were only a handful in this thread, too.
Besides, there's no objective indicator of 'interestingness' or a rule that
states that all discussion must be interesting, or have a minimum length in
order to qualify as such.

------
greenisland
I read the entire article. The man was duly convicted of a crime in Oklahoma.
He broke the law, regardless of what anyone thinks. Fast forward to when
selling dope in certain places is now legal and this guys want a piece of the
action, but... he cannot legally do so because he's a convicted felon. Should
we undo his conviction? No. He was tried fairly and found guilty based on the
laws of the time and place. His fault. His color has nothing to do with it,
and quite frankly, I'm sick to death of everything in this country now
revolving around race, homosexuals, feminists.

The man made a choice, he now lives with the repercussions of that choice,
whether anyone agrees or disagrees. I realize my outlook is likely unpopular,
but like I tell my children -- there are consequences for your actions, and it
may take years to see them. This story will be read by my kids tonight to
reinforce my good advice.

Besides, the morality of the people involved in a business like legal dope
would put me off. Just because they don't have convictions means nothing. The
type of people attracted to the dope business are off putting.

~~~
mtalantikite
The point here is that there are more consequences when you're Black in the
US. Statistically speaking people of color, and in particular Black Americans,
are arrested and convicted of marijuana related crimes at a much higher rate
than any other group [1]. That translates into Black Americans being kept out
of the newly legal business because of racist policing policies.

[1]
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-b...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-
blackwhite-marijuana-arrest-gap-in-nine-charts/)

~~~
greenisland
I appreciate your remarks. But -- what I'm saying is that no one should feel
sorry for this guy. It pains me to see the vast numbers of Americans who but a
few years ago were for tough legislation and tough policies and who now desire
to see criminals released from prison because the sentence may be too harsh.
Really? If you do the crime, you do the time. We should not undo sentencing.
It was all done legally at the time and it should stand.

I don't like the dope industry. It attracts children who think that smoking
marijuana is harmless. It's not. The dopeheads can trot out all the industry-
inspired crap they like, but it's not healthy. I'm all for ACTUAL medical
patients who are in severe pain using it, but so many go to these quack
doctors who will give a medical reason for a few dollars. Actual doctors with
hospital admitting privileges should be the law.

Marijuana is not harmless and just a few years ago the majority of Americans
agreed. The morality in America has slipped precipitously since our heyday as
a nation in the 1950s.

~~~
wf
>The morality in America has slipped precipitously since our heyday as a
nation in the 1950s.

Yea, the 1950's were really America's heyday (/s), while the rest of the world
was blown up. I wonder if people in the 1920's were sipping on illegal booze
at Gadsby's party thinking "man, the morality in america sure has taken a dive
since the gilded age". Is your view so skewed by the media portrayal of the
Jones' and white picket fences that you think America was some bastion of
morality then? The morals established then were that woman couldn't own credit
cards unless their husbands deemed it so, gays should be sent to sanitoriums
to prevent the spread of their disease by showing nude pictures to other boys
(Lavender Scare anyone?); it took 10+ years for some states to comply with
Brown v The Board of Education. So how about you get your kids a history book
and let them read that so they don't have to see the world through rose
colored bigoted glasses.

edit. The more I think about this the more upset I am. HUAC, being able to
LEGALLY beat your wife, this isn't even touching on African-American trials of
the time. America was a fucking mess in the 1950's.

