“It’s been clear for more than a decade that Ohioans have wanted to regulate cannabis for adults,” Fox, political director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, told Bolts. “This should be a wake-up call.”

Issue 2 is set to go into effect Dec. 7, with the first round of new business licenses to be announced by September. But the law comes with a crucial asterisk: it changes state statute, not the state constitution, so its approval at the ballot is essentially tantamount to Ohio voters passing a new piece of legislation just like Ohio lawmakers do. This means that those lawmakers can change the law back without voter consent. There is no limit on the extent to which the GOP-controlled state legislature can amend the 41-page initiative voters just supported; they could even outright repeal it. 

Governor Mike DeWine and his fellow Republicans who run the legislature have stopped short of calling for total repeal, but even before Election Day, they had signaled their intent to make the law more restrictive if it passed. Now that it has, they’ve indicated they could make some changes as soon as in the next few weeks, ahead of the Dec. 7 effective date, while others may be a bit longer in the offing. 

Fox is incredulous that these lawmakers would cross the electorate by messing much with a law 57 percent of voters just approved. “It would be political malpractice,” Fox said. “That being said, they don’t always do right by their constituents.”

Ohioans need look no further than another ballot measure that just passed—Issue 1, enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution—to see that their legislature is comfortable upending voter will: House Republicans on Friday issued a news release claiming that Issue 1 doesn’t actually affect the state’s existing abortion ban, and they vowed to continue enforcing abortion criminalization, in defiance of election results. These lawmakers even said that they would “consider removing jurisdiction from the judiciary” over the amendment—an extraordinary prospect. “No amendment can overturn the God-given rights with which we were born,” Republican state Representative Beth Lear said in that release.

These rapid threats come after Ohio Republicans earlier this year tried to torpedo the abortion measure by rushing a separate ballot measure to raise the threshold for passage of constitutional amendments from 50 to 60 percent. Ohioans rejected the measure in August, and Bolts reported at the time that these events were part of a long series of maneuvers by the Ohio GOP to undermine direct democracy. 

Cat Packer, director of drug markets and legal regulation at the Drug Policy Alliance, now worries that cannabis regulation ushered in by Issue 2 could similarly be distorted by politicians. “I think there’s going to be this real disconnect with particularly GOP legislators wanting to overturn the will of the voters and make this, potentially, something that actually does the opposite of what the voters intended in trying to address some of the harms of the drug war, and may be used as a vehicle to double down on some of those harms,” she told Bolts.

GOP leaders of both Ohio legislative chambers have already confirmed they’ll consider reversing aspects of Issue 2 that sought to unwind drug-war policies, which have produced vastly disproportionate enforcement of marijuana laws against Black people in the state. 

Issue 2 contains no provisions to automatically expunge the records of Ohioans who already have criminal convictions over marijuana. Other states have passed such a reform after legalization, but for now Ohio lawmakers seem more likely to loosen the measure’s other equity provisions than to strengthen them.

Senate President Matt Huffman has said that he takes issue with the amount of tax revenue that will be dedicated to promoting cannabis business opportunities for those most personally affected by prohibition. 

As it stands, Issue 2 calls for a 10 percent tax on marijuana sales, with a plurality of the proceeds going toward a program meant to provide financial assistance and license application support to prospective cannabis business owners who demonstrate “both social and economic disadvantage” resulting from the historically racist and classist enforcement of marijuana laws. That includes people and family members of people who “have been arrested for, convicted of, or adjudicated delinquent for a marijuana-related offense,” the law states.

Instead, some Republican leaders have signaled they want the tax money to serve very different purposes. Speaker Jason Stephens told local media that the legislature should allocate tax revenue from cannabis sales to fund jail construction and law enforcement training.

His remarks have alarmed people who worked to pass Issue 2 in Ohio, who say that a main reason they sought the initiative was to reduce incarceration and criminalization stemming from drug charges. FBI data show Ohio has arrested at least 5,700 people in each of the past three years for selling or possessing marijuana, and Black Ohioans have long been targeted at much higher rates than their white peers, despite comparable rates of marijuana usage.

Fox saw this up close when he was arrested multiple times in Ohio for possession of marijuana. These charges, he said, hampered his ability to take out student loans and to find housing and employment. But Fox, who is white, said he got off relatively easy: “I would go to court and have the exact same charge and criminal history, and the same exact judge, on the exact same day, and I saw people who didn’t look like me get much worse sentences.”

Packer of Drug Policy Alliance, who led Los Angeles’s cannabis regulation department from 2017 to 2022, also worries broadly about whether the aspects of Issue 2 that seek to promote social equity will be preserved. As both medical and recreational marijuana become legalized across the country—40 states allow at least medical use— it’s become commonplace for states to undertake restorative efforts like this one, but that wasn’t always true. 

“There has been a seismic shift,” Brian Vicente, an attorney and national leader in marijuana policy, told Bolts. Vicente, who is from Ohio, co-authored the measure that legalized recreational marijuana in Colorado in 2012, kick-starting a national movement. He also advised this year on Issue 2 in Ohio.

“Every law we see now has an attempt to address social equity issues and to try to remedy some of the harms of cannabis prohibition,” he added. “We didn’t see that for years and, in Colorado, it polled horribly and so we kept it out of the conversation in 2012. We cared deeply about the issue, but Colorado voters didn’t care.”

Because Colorado did not address social equity on the front end of its legal marijuana program, it has had to play catch-up for many years and remains behind the curve, current and prospective business owners of color in that state have said consistently. The same pattern has held elsewhere: in its short history, the legal marijuana industry in this country has shown in various states that it would marginalize Black people and other communities of color absent intentional intervention by regulators, even though those communities suffered the brunt of enforcement before legalization. 

Ohio has itself already learned that lesson: Black entrepreneurs have complained for years of being left out of the state’s medical marijuana industry. (Medical marijuana was legalized in Ohio in 2016.) 

Some states have sought not just to mend past harms through equitable business licensing, but also to allow people to wipe clean their criminal records for certain marijuana-related offenses. Ohio earlier this year passed broad legislation to streamline expungement for misdemeanor crimes, including simple marijuana possession, but neither this law nor Issue 2 creates a pathway for automatic record expungement. Automation eliminates the difficult and costly process of petitioning for expungement, and helps the legislation more widely impact the populations it’s intended to reach. Minnesota’s 2022 marijuana legalization law, for example, included an automatic expungement provision that impacted an estimated 50,000 people. 

Tom Haren, spokesman for the campaign to pass the measure, told Bolts his side was bound by rules limiting state ballot measures to single issues, which meant that Issue 2 could not force changes to the law regarding both regulation and record expungement. 

But while Issue 2 doesn’t mandate anything related to criminal records, the law does spend paragraphs detailing the profundity of the harm inflicted by criminalization.

“Individuals who have been arrested or incarcerated due to drug laws suffer long-lasting negative consequences, including impacts to employment, business ownership, housing, health, and long-term financial well-being,” the law states. “Family members, especially children, and communities of those who have been arrested or incarcerated due to drug laws, suffer from emotional, psychological, and financial harms as a result of such arrests or incarcerations.”

This, the law continues, argues for “remedying the harms resulting from the disproportionate enforcement of marijuana-related laws.”

Advocates hold out hope that some future legislation can address these harms, but for now their biggest concern is that lawmakers keep intact as much of Issue 2’s language as possible.

Packer said that when she reviewed those sections of Issue 2, plus those meant to promote equity in licensure, she feared that lawmakers would not let them stand if the ballot measure passed. Now that it has, and now that leading Republicans have signaled they’ll revise the law, she added, “I imagine those may be some of the first provisions that are on the chopping block.”

Because Ohio is 24th among U.S. states to legalize marijuana, Packer added, it cannot plead ignorance as to what will happen should lawmakers scrap equity-minded provisions of Issue 2. “Ohio should know better and it is in a position to do better,” she said.

The post After Ohioans Legalize Weed, GOP Leaders Already Want to Roll Back Key Reforms appeared first on Bolts.

The police union’s messaging, which has dominated San Antonio’s municipal elections this spring, wasn’t crafted to go after any particular mayoral or city council candidate, but rather to spread fear about Proposition A, a police reform charter amendment that local activists petitioned to get on the May 6 ballot. 

The so-called Justice Charter is broad in scope because it was drafted by a coalition of San Antonio groups representing causes ranging from organized labor to reproductive justice, which wanted to build on reforms local organizers have been pushing for years. It would add a “Justice Policy” to the city charter that calls for ending citations and arrests for low-level marijuana possession, an idea city council members have long paid lip service to but failed to fully implement, as well as decriminalizing abortion, which the council already directed the city’s police to do last August after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision triggered Texas’s criminal abortion ban. 

Prop A also calls for banning police chokeholds and no-knock warrants, both of which the San Antonio Police Department already has internal policies against. It would also direct police to prioritize citations over arrest and jail for people accused of certain low-level crimes, like theft below $750; this would codify and expand a cite-and-release policy that city and county law enforcement began implementing several years ago in the name of criminal justice reform. 

Police union rhetoric has already convinced many people in power in San Antonio to oppose it. The city’s chambers of commerce established their own PAC last month to raise money from business interests to campaign against the ballot measure and amplify the police union’s talking points. Most of the candidates running for city council this year oppose the Justice Charter, and Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who is expected to sail to re-election later this year, urged people to vote no in early April despite having previously voiced support for much of what’s in it.

Their opposition raises major questions about Prop A’s future even if it were to pass, as some local officials also signaled they would not implement whole swaths of the measure. Prop A could also be challenged by Republican officials who dominate state government and love to pick fights in Texas’ more liberal cities, and anti-abortion activists who already sued to try to stop the measure from appearing on the May ballot are likely to keep agitating should it win.

Still, Ananda Tomas, founder and director of ACT 4 SA, the police reform group that led the effort to get the Justice Charter on the ballot, says that the intense opposition from the police union and the backtracking from the mayor highlight why local activists are pushing reforms through citizen-led ballot initiatives in the first place. 

“I think not just here in Texas or San Antonio, but nationally, you’re seeing a lot more ballot initiatives as the people’s way of fighting back,” Tomas said. “When we have city or state leadership or even federal leadership that’s not moving with the people, then we’re going to take matters into our own hands, and that was the exact thinking behind this.”

Tomas’ group was born out of the massive protests and increased activism around police accountability that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. In 2021, Tomas and Act 4 SA gathered enough signatures to put a different measure on the ballot that sought to repeal police collective bargaining rights in San Antonio, which they had pitched as a means to begin addressing disciplinary procedures baked into the city’s police union contract that long shielded bad cops, sometimes even allowed awful ones back on the street, and yet had remained a third rail in local politics; officers the city’s police chief had tried to fire, but couldn’t, included a cop who berated and hurled racial slurs at a Black man while arresting him, an officer who was drinking on duty when he got into a gunfight and killed his girlfriend’s ex, and another who gave someone living on the street a sandwich with feces in it. 

Proposition B, the 2021 ballot measure, failed by two percentage points. But last year, when the police union negotiated a new contract with the city, it quickly agreed to tweak its arbitration process in order to give the police chief more power over firing decisions—a departure from previous contract talks, when disciplinary rules were essentially off limits and yet still negotiations could drag on in years of acrimony and litigation with city officials. 

“There was this whole narrative shift and power that the city was able to get in the negotiations by saying, ‘Hey, this is how close you guys came to losing your contract because people are so upset with how unaccountable it is,’” Tomas said. She thinks that the close vote over Prop B ratcheted up pressure to change the next contract. 

The history of the San Antonio Police Officers’ Association is a case study in how police unions amass and wield power in local elections. It dove headfirst into local politics in the 1980s when it started publicly endorsing and opposing candidates, created a political action committee to bankroll their supporters, and established a formidable phone banking operation ahead of elections. People running for city council who wouldn’t commit to better pay and equipment for cops were smeared as anti-police and pro-crime, and by 1988 San Antonio police had paved the way for other police unions by negotiating one of the best wage and benefits packages in the nation.

San Antonio’s police union became notorious for its brash approach to local politics. One former San Antonio mayor wrote in a memoir about turning down police union money ahead of an election in the 1990s and receiving a gift basket with a dead rat in return. Politicians started calling the police union president at the time “The 44 Caliber Mouthpiece.” In 2013, after San Antonio’s then-city manager Sheryl Sculley established a task force to study reforming officers’ generous benefits because she thought they were threatening financial disaster for the city, one high-profile business leader on the benefits task force reported being tailed in his car by police officers. Sculley felt so aggrieved after battling the city’s public safety unions that she wound up writing a book chronicling the experience, which she titled “Greedy Bastards.”  

With its fiery campaign against Prop A this year, the police union is again fighting back against what little reform it has been forced to accept in recent years. It has opposed the local cite-and-release program since Bexar County’s reform-minded district attorney spearheaded it after taking office four years ago, and which the Justice Charter aims to strengthen. The DA and his supporters say the program has saved the county $5.6 million in jail booking costs, helped alleviate overcrowding at the dangerous county lockup, and diverted thousands of people with petty, non-violent charges towards services.

Danny Diaz, president of San Antonio Police Officers’ Association, said in an interview with Bolts that cite-and-release policies have fueled an uptick in crime that was reported in San Antonio as well as cities across the country during the pandemic, even in places without such changes. But the city’s longtime police chief, William McManus, who does not support Prop A, has rejected that notion, and the DA’s office reports a recidivism, or re-offense, rate for defendants in the cite-and-release program of 9.6 percent compared 38 percent for people booked into the county jail. 

Diaz insisted that the police union’s terrifying vision of what could happen if Prop A passes is “realistic”—that decriminalizing marijuana and abortion, in addition to codifying and expanding cite-and-release, would really allow dangerous criminals to escape consequences, force business across San Antonio to close, and plunge the city into chaos. But he also struggled when asked for evidence. How, as he argued, would local businesses and the community at large be worse off if more people accused of low-level theft got a citation and summons to appear in court instead of being hauled to jail? “I’ll put it as simply as I can,” Diaz said. “As children, we were all taught not to lie, cheat or steal. This proposition is basically telling people you can steal.”

Diaz, a former SWAT officer, also insisted that decriminalizing marijuana was a slippery slope but again sputtered general talking points about lawlessness when pressed. “If they’re not convicting or going to court or going to jail or giving fines for maijuana, they’re gonna turn around and do the same thing for theft on cite-and-release,” he said. 

The police union’s ads and public statements over Prop A are also divorced from the reality of what’s actually in the ballot measure, claiming for instance that it seeks to decriminalize offenses like graffiti. But a cite-and-release program, which is meant to avoid people’s stay in jail, does not “decriminalize” since people would still be subject to criminal penalties.

Currently, it seems unlikely that any sweeping policy changes would immediately follow passage of the Justice Charter; San Antonio’s city attorney has already claimed that much of what’s in it is unenforceable. But part of what’s motivating the police union’s attacks on Prop A is the concern that a win would put pressure on future city councils to go further.

Diaz said he’s worried about more “activists” making it onto the council in the future and pushing to implement elements of the Justice Charter, especially if they see this year’s vote as a clear referendum by residents. He pointed to two progressive council members, elected in 2021, who voted against the union’s last contract for not going far enough on reforms to police discipline and oversight, and are now supporting the ballot measure. 

The single element of the ballot measure that city officials have said they would implement has also riled the police union. It would create a new position at city hall, a Justice Director, someone without ties to law enforcement appointed by city council to review public safety policy, hold regular stakeholder meetings with communities that are heavily policed or have complaints about officers, and help mediate conflict between police and the public. The police union has, unsurprisingly, ridiculed the idea of appointing someone without policing experience to monitor them. But Prop A supporters have called it their best attempt to bolster independent oversight of the San Antonio Police Department, which is currently paper thin, even compared to dysfunctional oversight bodies in Texas’ other large cities. 

Progressive organizers in other Texas cities have turned to local ballot measures to force reforms that local elected officials are refusing to consider or failing to fully implement. While most of those campaigns centered on marijuana, San Antonio’s is the most expansive and the first attempt by a Texas city to decriminalize abortion since the end of Roe.

But these initiatives are also a kind of end-run around an anemic and poorly organized Texas Democratic Party. One recently-formed statewide group, Ground Game Texas, has thrown itself into helping local organizers, including the coalition of San Antonio activists pushing Prop A, raise enough signatures to put reform measures on their local ballots.

Mike Siegel, who helped start Ground Game after twice running for a central Texas congressional seat on a progressive platform, said that the point of their work isn’t just to mobilize voters and build coalitions across the state, but also to force debates whenever people in power dig in their heels. “We’re starting fights,” Siegel said. “I think that’s the most important thing we’re doing, and I think that really is in some ways the core of Ground Game, kind of a catalyst, an allied group that partners with local organizations that have deep roots in the community.” 

“Now we are head-to-head as a coalition with the anti-abortion lobby and the pro-cop lobby, which are two extremely formidable forces,” Siegel said. 

Lingering questions over implementation, as well as fearmongering and misinformation by the police union, have clouded what’s actually at stake in San Antonio’s upcoming Justice Charter vote. But Yaneth Flores, policy director at the abortion rights group Avow Texas, insists that the threats pregnant people face in light of the state’s total abortion ban underscore the importance of taking a stand at the local level and codifying protections. 

“I think that’s the right path for us, to say that as a city we are not buying into the fascist policies of the state,” Flores said. “I’m not exaggerating when I say that, because we are being robbed of having autonomy to make our own health care decisions.”

In addition to presenting it as a local bulwark against increasingly extreme anti-abortion laws at the state level, Prop A supporters hope that it sparks a deeper debate about what kind of criminal legal system San Antonio voters want. “At the end of the day, a really significant part of this ballot initiative has to do with a fundamental question of whether or not we as a community think that sending people to jail and having them sit there away from their families, away from their job away from their lives, is the best way to solve crime in our communities,” said Alejandra Lopez, president of the San Antonio Alliance, the local teachers union that backs the ballot measure.

Lopez said that part of the reason she has been personally working to pass the Justice Charter is because, as a teacher, she’s seen first hand how a criminal charge for pot or a stupid mistake like graffiti can derail a young person’s life and disrupt their family. She added that she’s disturbed by the inflammatory, streets-on-fire message by opponents. “The lies that are coming out of the opposition on this, we should all be troubled,” Lopez said. “We should be troubled deeply to our core about those tactics.”

The post Police Union Spreads Fear Over San Antonio Ballot Measure Decriminalizing Weed and Abortion appeared first on Bolts.

State Question 820 lost overwhelmingly, 62 to 38 percent. It trails in all Oklahoma counties, and the state’s rural areas rejected it by especially large margins.

In the five years since voters approved a measure to legalize medical marijuana, Oklahoma has seen an explosion in cannabis farms and dispensaries. Some business owners are making a fortune. 

But possession and sale outside of those strictures remains a criminal offense. An estimated 60,000 Oklahomans are weighed down by a past marijuana conviction and the number keeps climbing, with 5,000 people arrested over marijuana possession in 2020 alone, according to state data. 

“At a time when the state has legal marijuana millionaires, it seems both unjust and imprudent for there to be so many people who can’t get a job and can’t put food on the table for low-level marijuana convictions,” Damion Shade, executive director of OK Justice Reform, told Bolts. 

Had it passed, SQ 820 would have enabled these people to seek an expungement of their criminal records. Providing retroactive relief has become a staple of legalization efforts around the nation, since the effects of a conviction extend far beyond the sentence, affecting people’s ability to secure employment, housing, or college grants. And Black Oklahomans disproportionately suffer these repercussions; an ACLU study found that between 2010 and 2018, Black people were four times more likely to be arrested over marijuana than white people.

Organizers intended to qualify SQ 820 for the state’s November 2022 ballot. But challenges delayed approval and kicked it off to 2023. Then, Republican governor Kevin Stitt scheduled the referendum for March 7—a special election where SQ 820 would stand on its own—even though Oklahomans were already set to go to the polls on both Feb. 14 and April 4 for local and school board races. 

This left the state with a confusing schedule of three separate election days—each with their periods of mail-in ballots and early voting—within eight weeks.

“People can’t rearrange child care and jobs every month to go vote,” says Andy Moore, CEO of Let’s Fix This, an organization that promotes civic engagement in Oklahoma. “Doing it like this was clearly a way to suppress turnout.” 

While Oklahoma routinely sees some of the worst voter turnout in the nation (it was the lowest of any state in the 2020 presidential election), participation on Tuesday paled even in comparison to that low bar. Roughly 560,000 people voted in Tuesday’s election, 25 percent of registered voters and less than 20 percent of the total voting-eligible population in the state. 

When Oklahomans voted on medical marijuana in June of 2018, alongside the state’s primaries, nearly 900,000 people voted; turnout on Tuesday was 37 percent lower. 

“If we really want to get an assessment of what the voters want, we need to help them to the polls,” Moore told Bolts. “We can do things to make elections more accessible to more people so that we can have higher turnout.”

The governor who scheduled the election opposes legalizing marijuana and called on voters to defeat SQ 820, as did other prominent Republicans who said it would endanger the state. “I believe this is the best thing to keep our kids safe and for our state as a whole,” Stitt said on Twitter on Tuesday after the result was known.

Some Oklahoma Republicans are pushing changes to the ballot initiative process that could guarantee an odd placement on the calendar, lending credence to complaints that state officials are intentionally seeking to dampen turnout in those elections. 

One measure, introduced by Senator Warren Hamilton, would mandate that initiatives only go to voters in odd-numbered years, rather than on even-numbered years where turnout is far higher. The proposal goes against the burgeoning movement nationwide to move more elections to even-years in order to sync them with higher-turnout national election cycles and champion higher engagement.

Hamilton’s proposal is now technically dead because it did not survive a legislative deadline last week, though Moore warns that measures can always be revived by legislative leaders or poured into other legislative vehicles late into the session. But another measure, Senate Bill 518, is still alive. Introduced by Senator Julie Daniels, it would make it trickier to qualify a ballot initiative, doubling the time window for someone to challenge petitions and making it easier to invalidate signatures. The legislation would mandate that voters use their full legal name when signing a petition, raising the prospect that any misspellings, nicknames, or other deviations from a government ID could nullify their signatures.

Moore warns that this change would add to what he calls an “already totally bogus” verification process. Oklahoma officials drew complaints last year when they decided to outsource signature verification to a private vendor, claiming the authority to do so by invoking a new law, even if many legislators say they did not mean it to authorize outsourcing, The Journal Record reported last year. 

SB 518, which passed a Senate committee in February, is scheduled to be heard on the Senate floor on Wednesday morning. 

Daniels and Hamilton did not respond to requests for comment about their respective bills. 

Republicans nationwide have retaliated against popular initiatives they oppose by championing an avalanche of measures that make it far harder for organizers to gather signatures to get them on the ballot. In Oklahoma, voters approved a number of ballot measures in recent years that circumvented conservative lawmakers, including medical marijuana in 2018 and Medicaid expansion in 2020. 

SQ 820 won’t add to that list, however. Besides making marijuana more accessible in the state, the measure would have raised revenue off of a 15 percent excise tax on the sale of marijuana that would have funded public schools and addiction treatment programs.

The expungement provision would have given tens of thousands of people the option to clear their records, though it would not have made that process automatic. Last year, for convictions that were already eligible for expungement in Oklahoma (marijuana is not among those), the state adopted a “Clean Slate” law that will lift the need for people to file a burdensome petition for relief. 

Shade, of OK Justice Reform, helped champion that “Clean Slate” law, which he says did not modify the criteria as to which offenses are eligible to be expunged—it only made the existing process automatic. With SQ 820’s failure, he says, he hopes to persuade state politicians to pass a bill to at least allow marijuana convictions to be expunged, which at least some Republicans seem to be open to. “It’s my goal to reach out to stakeholders and begin figuring out what type of legislative success we have going after this,” he said.

The post Oklahomans Reject Recreational Weed in Low-Turnout Election appeared first on Bolts.

Minnesota’s Democratic lawmakers, newly in control of the state legislature, plan to legalize the recreational use and sale of cannabis this year. And they insist that in doing so they must account for past harm—namely, harm done by wildly uneven enforcement practices that made their state one of the most dangerous places in the country to be a Black person in possession of marijuana. 

“For me, it’s a racial justice issue. I wouldn’t support this without it,” state Senator Clare Oumou Verbeten, a lead sponsor of the legalization effort and one of just three Black women ever elected to the Minnesota Senate, told Bolts. “There’s the argument that people are already using cannabis, so let’s not criminalize them for it. Well, yes, but the people who have to live in fear are Black people. They’re impacted the most. We’re trying to right these wrongs.”

A recent nationwide report by the ACLU found that Black Minnesotans were more than five times more likely than white Minnesotans to be arrested for marijuana possession between 2010 and 2018, one of the highest racial disparities across all states. That’s but one example of longstanding systemic inequality that has earned Minnesota the nickname “Mississippi of the North.”

“We’re constantly at the top of these lists in terms of quality of life, best places to live,” Oumou Verbeten said. “It’s not true for people who look like me.”

This is why she and many other backers of Minnesota’s legalization effort want the state’s program to be as dedicated to racial and class justice as any in the country. While early adopters like Colorado waited years after legalization to adopt policy confronting the damage done by the war on drugs, Minnesota lawmakers seek to do that work upfront. 

Their legalization bill, House File 100, proposes to help marginalized communities gain footholds in the regulated recreational cannabis industry by giving them preferential access to business licenses. These licenses would be awarded based on a points system weighted in favor of the poor and those who can demonstrate personal or familial harm from cannabis prohibition.

The bill would also automatically expunge records of low-level cannabis convictions, including for petty misdemeanor and misdemeanor charges over the sale or possession of up to 42.5 grams of marijuana. These convictions can acutely inhibit social mobility by blocking people from stable housing and employment, and can, in some cases, plunge people into a prolonged morass of criminalization and poverty. 

Jon Geffen, a law professor and attorney with The Legal Revolution, a Minnesota nonprofit law firm, explained that prior conviction records are currently public in Minnesota. As a result, “you can use that data for anything you want: hiring, renting—hell, even dating if you want it. Whether or not it was weed it comes up as ‘drugs,’ and people rarely hire people with drug convictions. People lose jobs and apartments. Families separate because of these things.”

For some advocates, though, these equity provisions may be too little, too late for those affected by the war on drugs.

Many political leaders now cast equity as core to their legalization efforts, rather than a footnote to be addressed years after state industries ramp up. In New York, people with past marijuana convictions are being given a first crack at business licenses. In Maryland, new Governor Wes Moore, sworn in this week, has insisted the state’s soon-to-launch legal cannabis industry must prize social justice and “economic parity.” Like the regulated cannabis industry itself, this concept of licensing equity is a rather new one; Oakland pioneered it in 2017.

But these equity projects have rarely gone smoothly, or delivered their stated impacts. Some Oakland licensees feel that the city’s program has done them more harm than good. Lawsuits challenging cannabis equity provisions in places like Detroit, Maine and Missouri have slowed or thwarted progress. 

Also, even the most equity-minded cannabis legalization policies do little to repair certain harms. Giving people from overpoliced communities special access to cannabis dispensary or cultivation licenses, for instance, won’t change the fact that those people are less likely to have business ownership experience, professional mentorship, and investor networks—intangible assets that help sustain an operation. 

Angela Dawson, a northern Minnesota hemp farmer and a champion for agricultural opportunities for Black people, said the expungement plan laid out in Minnesota’s pending bill would do very little for people like her younger brother, whose marijuana conviction two decades ago threw him for a prolonged tailspin.

“He lost time in school, never graduated. He met up with some pretty bad people while he was in jail. He didn’t have an opportunity to do anything else,” Dawson told Bolts. “He just got out of prison in November.”

Clearing marijuana charges like his will be relatively easy for the state, policy experts in Minnesota say. But that can’t undo twenty-plus years of compounding challenges and lost time that stemmed from his first drug charge. 

“It shouldn’t cost you your whole entire future,” she said.

Oumou Verbeten acknowledged that this bill alone won’t unwind these longstanding harms. She said she hopes to pair the cannabis legislation with complementary bills to seal eviction records and to ban public employers from asking job applicants about their criminal histories. She is also sponsoring legislation that would restore voting rights to Minnesotans on parole and probation—a population that skews disproportionately Black, Native American, and Latino.

These and other bills are viable in large part because Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party flipped the state Senate in November, claiming full control of the state government for the first time since 2014. 

The state House passed legislation in 2021 to legalize cannabis but the bill fizzled in the state Senate, which was then under control of Republicans. (One GOP leader at the time said there was “zero chance” his party would go along.)  Minnesota politicos believe it’s nearly assured to pass this time around, though its final form may be several months and about a dozen more committee hearings away.

But now that they have a trifecta, Democrats see marijuana legalization as a headlining bill in a legislative session that is also poised to see Minnesota lawmakers codify abortion rights, advance paid family and medical leave, and seek to expand voting access.

A recent poll, conducted by Mason-Dixon, shows a slim majority of overall Minnesotans—and a wide majority of non-white Minnesotans—back cannabis legalization. The country at large favors it, too, and strongly supports expungement of cannabis convictions.  

The specific design of the major equity portions of this year’s legalization bill in Minnesota are getting mixed reviews from criminal justice reform and racial justice advocates.

On expungements, “the framework of it is pretty darn good,” Geffen said. He noted that the bill would make expungements automatic and free, a measure that MinnPost estimates would affect some 50,000 people with criminal records.

The state already accepts petitions for expungement, in a process that is anything but user-friendly. He described it as a winding road with all sorts of obstacles over which even his law students regularly trip. Any mistake along the way can lead a court to toss a petition, with no way for the applicant to recoup the $305 the state requires for every charge one seeks to expunge.

“So the populations that don’t use it are poor populations. It’s a double whammy, where poor people are over-prosecuted, over-charged, and then they don’t get expunged, even when they’re eligible, because they don’t have the money to pay an attorney,” Geffen told Bolts.

Tom Gallagher, a Hennepin County (Minneapolis) criminal defense attorney and libertarian advocate for legalized cannabis, wishes the bill went further by categorically granting gun ownership rights back to people who lost those rights because of felony drug convictions. He doesn’t expect liberal lawmakers to restore gun rights through this bill, but he argues they should, in order to thwart the cycle of criminality that drug prohibition can catalyze. 

“Let’s say you’re 19 years old and you get convicted of possessing two ounces of marijuana. Now, 10 years later, you get caught with a gun in your house, but now you’re an ineligible person in possession of a firearm, and you’re looking at a minimum of 3 years in prison in Minnesota,” Gallagher told Bolts. “It’s purely the status of the person in possession of the gun that makes the crime.”

The bill’s second core equity provision—licensing equity—also faces questions as to its scope and implementation.

The state has had a regulated medical marijuana industry for seven years, and, at present, that entire sector is controlled by one of two corporations,.

The new legislation contains provisions meant to chart a more equitable path for the recreational cannabis industry by requiring that the state substantially favor cannabis business license applications from so-called “social equity” applicants—that is, residents for at least five years in areas “that experienced a disproportionately large amount of cannabis enforcement,” as determined by a state report not yet produced. People could also qualify for “social equity” status in business licensing if they live in areas with poverty rates of 20 percent or more, or where the median family income does not exceed 80 percent of the statewide mark.

Oumou Verbeten said the idea, transparently, is to give a boost to Black and Latino would-be businesspeople, but that it’d be thorny, and possibly illegal, to legislate in explicit favor of one or more racial groups over others.

“If you look at concentrated places of poverty and overlay that with racial demographics, then, yes, a lot of those areas are where we’re going to see communities of color,” Oumou Verbeten said. “We want to make sure people who’ve been harmed get the priority. And those are people of color, and Black Minnesotans especially.”

This goal is easier stated than accomplished, Black leaders in Colorado’s cannabis industry told Bolts. Boosting an application is much easier and cheaper, after all, than providing sustained training and financial support needed to get a cannabis business up and running. 

And that’s leaving aside headwinds that these businesses face in the market; existing federal prohibition cuts off cannabis operators from the tools other industries enjoy, like basic inclusion in banking systems, or loans and guidance from the Small Business Administration.

“In trying to bend ourselves into equity and things that make right, basically the entire industry is failing top to bottom,” Denver entrepreneur Wanda James told Bolts. For years she was the only Black cannabis business owner in Colorado, among hundreds of businesses; now, she says, she’s one of a few.

“The really sad thing is we are setting up Black and brown entrepreneurs for a massive failure. And at that point of massive failure, they don’t even have bankruptcy protection,” because cannabis remains illegal federally, James added.

She said Colorado and other states can do much better in providing support to licensees and those harmed in the war on drugs, but she said she’s skeptical policymakers can ever truly legislate out the impediments to equity that she and others trace to federal prohibition.

Jeff Brinkman, a Minnesota hemp entrepreneur, is also concerned that the state will not adopt enough legal protections on how licenses can be transferred from one business to another. “I just feel that as the bill is developed and revamped, if they aren’t keeping their eye in the loopholes and on how to build this industry for small business, that’s when we’ll get the takeover” by wealthy interests. 

When “social equity” licensees fail to launch, policymakers are given cover to say, “See, we tried and it failed,” Hashim Coates, executive director of Black Brown and Red Badged, an organization representing Black and Latino business owners in the cannabis industry, told Bolts.

“Just creating an opportunity without the intention of success is not creating an opportunity,” he added. 

The post With Marijuana Bill, Minnesota Democrats Seek to Repair Harms of War on Drugs appeared first on Bolts.

Voters in Maryland and Missouri supported proposals to allow for the regulated sale of marijuana for non-medical purposes, joining 19 other U.S. states that have already done so. However, similar proposals in Arkansas, North Dakota and South Dakota all were shot down by comfortable margins.

Also, ten years to the week since Colorado and Oregon became the first two states to legalize recreational pot, Colorado voters are poised to approve a measure that removes criminal penalties for use, possession and home-grow of psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) and some other psychoactive substances. Oregon went first on this front, passing a ballot measure decriminalizing those substances in 2020. 

“The more public dialogue there is on drug policy issues, the more sensible the policy outcomes are,” said Mason Tvert, a policy expert and industry advocate who co-directed Colorado’s landmark 2012 campaign to legalize non-medical cannabis use. 

“As we saw in North Dakota, South Dakota and Arkansas, there’s still a lot of work to be done. Most people alive right now have lived the vast majority of their lives in a world where cannabis was entirely illegal, and where they were hearing anti-cannabis propaganda. It’s not surprising that there are still voters with concerns. … But the writing’s on the wall.”

Underscoring Tvert’s point is the fact that even President Joe Biden, who has been a dedicated soldier in America’s war on drugs, is coming around. Last month he ordered a federal review of marijuana’s classification as a “Schedule 1” substance, defined as having “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse,” and he pardoned thousands of people convicted federally and in the District of Columbia for marijuana possession.

The marijuana map is diversifying rapidly in the U.S., as the issue is no longer a project only of progressive advocates for drug policy reform. Missouri, which approved its cannabis measure by six percentage points as of Wednesday morning, went for Donald Trump by at least 15 points in the 2020 presidential election. Maryland, which went for Biden by 33 points and approved its cannabis measure by about 30 points on Tuesday, was the bluest state in the country that had yet to legalize recreational marijuana.

The Missouri and Maryland measures were the only two of Tuesday’s five state-level marijuana initiatives to allow for record expungement by people previously convicted of marijuana-related activities that have now been legalized by voters. These states will now automatically expunge records for certain people, and make others fill out petitions. Missouri’s approach to prior convictions has been especially controversial, as some reformers fear it won’t be as effective in practice as on paper. The chair of the Legislative Black Caucus, plus some prominent cannabis advocates, came out against the ballot measure.

It’s relatively new that marijuana ballot measures would take this issue on at all. A decade ago, the reformist initiatives were focused squarely on the question of whether or not to legalize, and left questions of social equity, record expungement, banking and more for later on. 

“What’s happening now is there’s a far more detailed discussion taking place,” Tvert said. “There’s this growing sense that it’s inevitable that it will be legal, and so what should the details be?”

The two Dakotas took opposite paths to the same result this year. North Dakotans overwhelmingly rejected legal marijuana just four years ago, voting down a measure that, unlike this year’s, would have allowed for some record expungement. The previous North Dakota measure lost by 19 percentage points, while this year’s was losing by just 10 as of Wednesday morning. 

Fifty-four percent of South Dakota voters supported legal marijuana just two years ago, but after a lawsuit championed by Republican Governor Kristi Noem, who won reelection Tuesday, the state supreme court invalidated that measure. Given a chance to vote again on the issue, South Dakotans rejected it by a six-point margin.

The Arkansas measure looked little like the other four on the ballot this year, prohibiting home-grow of marijuana plants and placing a hard cap on cultivation and dispensary permits. More exclusive markets can perpetuate race and class disparity in who has access to the substance, and who is policed over it.

Market exclusivity was of chief concern to many who opposed Colorado’s ballot measure on psychedelics. Among these opponents were some of the organizers who pushed successfully for a 2019 Denver reform to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms. They argued this year’s statewide measure, which allows for sale of approved psychedelics only by licensed providers, will benefit a small group of profit-seeking interests. “It’s opening the floodgates for corporations to come to Colorado to open their bougie life and healing centers,” one advocate who worked on the 2019 effort told The Denver Post. 

The post Wins and Losses for State Referendums to Legalize Weed and Psychedelics appeared first on Bolts.

On July 8, 2021, activists in Central Texas showed up at the office of Hays County District Attorney Wes Mau to deliver a cake with blue icing that spelled out the words “Failed Promise.” 

They were commemorating the anniversary of a commitment Mau and other local law enforcement officials had made a year earlier, in the summer of 2020, to give people charged with certain low-level crimes, such as  marijuana possession and driving with a suspended license, a way to avoid prosecution altogether by completing a court program or community service. Activists with the local group Mano Amiga (“helping hand” in Spanish) had pushed for a so-called cite-and-divert policy for more than a year as part of a larger campaign to roll back the kind of punitive, zero-tolerance policing and prosecution that have defined this county for decades, despite its close proximity to Austin, the state’s liberal capital city. 

At first, Mano Amiga activists like Jordan Buckley, who co-founded the group, cheered officials for finally agreeing to reforms. But then Mau dragged his feet so long that a whole year passed without a cite-and-divert program—hence the “happy birthday” party hat that Buckley ironically wore as he stood outside the Hays County government building last summer accusing the Republican DA of failing to live up to his word. 

“There have been scores of people who have been needlessly arrested for petty offenses and kept these petty offenses on their criminal record because our district attorney’s word is empty,” Buckley said before he and other activists walked the cake up to the DA’s office to offer him a slice (Mau never came out). “In Austin, for example, no one gets a criminal record for possession of marijuana,” Buckley said, “and yet it’s one of the leading arrest charges in Hays County because our district attorney is such a hardliner on cannabis.” 

Organizing by Mano Amiga since last summer has helped turn this November’s elections into a referendum on both marijuana decriminalization and pretrial diversion in Hays County. Activists with Mano Amiga gathered enough signatures to put a measure on the ballot this year that would end citations and arrests for possession of up to four ounces of marijuana in the city of San Marcos, the county seat and home to one of the state’s largest public universities. 

This politically competitive county is also voting for a new DA. Mau is retiring, and the race to replace him could pave the way for the kind of pretrial diversion program that local activists have demanded, and officials have promised, for years. While GOP nominee David Puryear echoes the anti-reform, tough-on-crime rhetoric of state and national Republicans, Democratic nominee Kelly Higgins vows a “sea change” in the county. He has promised to decline prosecution of cannabis possession and at last implement a cite-and-divert program for other low-level charges. 

Higgins would also add to the growing roster of reform-minded officials in Hays County, the fastest growing county in the nation—a reflection of the larger population boom in the I-35 corridor between San Antonio and Austin. Some of those officials attended and spoke at a “Reeferendum Fest” Mano Amiga activists threw earlier this month to drum up attention to the ballot measure in San Marcos—including County Judge Ruben Becerra, a Democrat first elected to lead the county in 2018 on a platform of criminal justice reforms and who is seeking re-election this year. 

When Higgins addressed the “Reeferendum” crowd,” he directly referred to the cite-and-divert policy. “I’m telling you it will happen,” he told activists. “I’m promising you it will happen.” 

San Marcos activists founded Mano Amiga in 2017 soon after Texas adopted a “show me your papers” law, Senate Bill 4, allowing local cops to investigate the immigration status of anyone they detain. At first the group focused on assisting immigrants caught in detention and at risk of deportation due to arrest for minor charges, but eventually their scope grew. 

“SB4 intensified what is commonly referred to as the ‘jail to deportation pipeline’ and made immigrant rights groups like ours, which primarily focused on deportation defense campaigns, realize we needed to push for systemic change that benefits citizens and non-citizens alike, keeping all our neighbors safe from the legal system and deportation,” Mano Amiga communications director Sam Benavides told me.

One of the group’s first broader policy demands was an ordinance requiring local police to issue citations for minor charges rather than the typical custom of hauling people off to jail over petty things like pot possession; while Texas law has allowed cities and counties to implement so-called cite-and-release policies since at least 2007, small-time marijuana possession remained the leading charge for arrest in Hays County for years. Activists called the policy a racial justice issue: Black people, who comprise about 5 percent of San Marcos’ population, accounted for nearly one third of low-level marijuana arrests in the city, and were almost always arrested over citation-eligible offenses. 

About a year after local activists started pushing for it, San Marcos became the first city in Texas to adopt an ordinance directing police to issue citations over making arrests for most low-level crimes with certain exceptions, like when someone is suspected of assault or family violence; larger cities nearby like San Antonio only managed to pass “resolutions” that simply suggested cops favor citations. The ordinance narrowly passed the city council over intense opposition from both the San Marcos Police Officers’ Association and the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, a statewide police union.

The local and state police unions haven’t taken a public position on this year’s referendum to decriminalize marijuana possession in San Marcos. But they have endorsed Puryear, the GOP nominee to replace Mau, the outgoing DA who has taken a notably hard stance on marijuana possession, even as state law made it increasingly difficult and costly to prosecute. 

Puryear, a former prosecutor and appeals court judge who didn’t respond to multiple interview requests for this story, has run in part on demonizing neighboring Travis County—which elected a reform-minded prosecutor who vowed to not prosecute drug possession in 2020. Travis is also home to the city of Austin, which voted to decriminalize small-time marijuana possession earlier this year. 

“Crime victims should know that we will doggedly pursue justice for them and criminals should know this isn’t Travis County,” Puryear wrote in one social media post soon after filing to run for DA. His campaign website states, “Dangerous ‘soft on crime’ policies have led to an exponential rise in robberies, sexual assaults, and murder in Austin and the surrounding counties.” (Data shows that violent offenses have increased statewide in Texas, as well as in counties around the nation irrespective of the politics of their lead prosecutors.) 

Puryear has also publicly criticized Higgins, his opponent, for promising to not prosecute abortion under the state’s new criminal ban, a stance that other Democratic prosecutors and DA candidates in Texas and across the country have taken following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling this summer overturning abortion rights. “To pick and choose which laws you will obey and enforce as DA, based on your personal feelings, sets an example of lawlessness and opens the door to chaos,” Puryear wrote in another social media post. 

Puryear’s rhetoric against declination also clashes with another campaign promise from Higgins: The Democratic nominee has said he would decline to prosecute all cases of simple possession of cannabis, including THC oils and edibles that can still be charged as felonies in the state, and often still are in Hays County, despite any individual town’s efforts to decriminalize. Higgins, a longtime defense attorney in Central Texas, argues that the hardline stance on marijuana is a sign of deeper dysfunction at the DA’s office. 

“The general impression that you’ll find if you talk to everyone in the courthouse is that the DA’s office is sluggish and vicious—they will charge anything if they can possibly construe as a crime,” Higgins told me. 

“The goals there are not to pursue justice, which is the oath, but to train up your prosecutors to get them more trials, and to be more unreasonable in plea offers to drive cases to trial,” he said. “That includes cases that in no other county would get tried to a jury, like vape pen cases.”

But as much as Higgins’s approach to cannabis is clear (don’t prosecute it), his plans for a cite-and-divert policy in Hays County are more vague. Activists at Mano Amiga have advocated for pretrial diversion not just for misdemeanors but also possession of small amounts of other drugs that still carry felony charges. They want a policy that provides alternatives to plea deals, criminal convictions, and prison time for low-level crimes like substance use, and programs that steer people toward services and treatment instead of punishment. 

“If there is any district attorney out there who actually wants to bring about real community change, and they don’t want it to be a dog and pony show, then they would create a cite-and-divert program to address felony drug offenses,” Mano Amiga policy director Eric Martinez told me. 

When I asked what would be covered by his vision of a pre-charge diversion program, Higgins told me, “The general rubric of party drugs, Friday night, what’s in your blue jeans,” before quickly pivoting to concerns about fentanyl and drug trafficking. “The rise of fentanyl is inhibiting my ability to be very, you know, liberal about a cite-and-divert program,” he said. “I’m not worried about things like THC and things where fentanyl doesn’t appear.” 

Higgins admitted that his thinking on the issue had evolved while campaigning, crediting local activists with helping expand his idea of reform. “Talking with groups like Mano Amiga, and I mean specifically talking with Sam Benavides at Mano Amiga, I got a little educated about what cite-and-divert means, and it is pretty attractive to me,” Higgins said. 

He sounded more resolute when speaking at the group’s “Reeferendum Fest” the following day, including the same word—promise—that activists had put on a cake to mock the last DA for failing to deliver. 

Local activists have long pushed reform on another issue: They criticize the often yearslong pretrial detention of people in the county jail, and demand fair representation for people accused of crimes who can’t afford to hire their own defense attorney. 

The long ordeal of Cyrus Gray underscores the stakes. In 2018, Gray was one of two people arrested and charged with capital murder in the 2015 death of another Texas State University student. Because he couldn’t afford his own lawyer and Hays County didn’t have a public defender’s office to help indigent people accused of crimes, a judge appointed a private attorney to represent Gray, who has maintained his innocence since his arrest. 

Gray has been detained pretrial inside the Hays County jail ever since. He has had two court-appointed lawyers during his more than four years in pretrial detention—the first of which, according to Gray, hardly represented him. 

“He came to see me three times within two years, and every time came to see me he tried to convince me to take a plea deal for 45 years (in prison),” Gray told me in a phone call from the Hays County jail earlier this month. “I would express to him, ‘I didn’t do anything, why would I willingly take 45 years of my life in prison knowing I didn’t do anything?’ And then immediately he’d find an excuse to leave—so these conversations would be like 10 minutes long.” 

Gray’s prosecution, which has generated local controversy, ended in a mistrial last month when jurors remained deadlocked after three days of deliberations. One juror who favored acquittal has publicly criticized police and prosecutors for bringing a flawed case (as of this writing, Mau’s office has said it plans to retry Gray at the end of this month). 

“Witnesses were badgered and harassed on the stand in ways that felt far beyond even a confrontational cross-examination,” the juror, Melinda Rothouse, recently wrote in an essay published in the Texas Observer. “The accused man’s friends had been coerced, threatened, intimidated and treated as suspects themselves by investigators to the point that implicating the defendant seemed to offer their only way out from under the thumb of the system.” 

Others like Gray are also spending years in the Hays County jail without a trial, the Austin Chronicle reported last month. Gray says they also go months or even years without seeing their appointed defenders. The Chronicle also described dangerous and degrading conditions, including unchecked violence and poor medical care—problems that plague local jails across the state. 

In recent years, activists with Mano Amiga have rallied around Gray’s case to argue for the need for a local public defender’s office to improve representation and overall conditions in the legal system. After years of activists organizing around the issue, Hays County commissioners voted unanimously this past spring to allocate $5 million in federal stimulus funds to build a new public defender’s office, which has yet to launch. 

Along with monitoring the implementation of the nascent public defender’s office and rallying for marijuana decriminalization, activists with Mano Amiga are already planning for how future elections could reform local law enforcement. 

Last month, Mano Amiga activists began the process of gathering the signatures needed to put an item on the local ballot next year to overturn the contract that the San Marcos city council recently approved with the city’s police union. Activists, along with the life partner of a woman killed in a car crash with an off-duty deputy, had pushed for disciplinary and transparency reforms to the contract, none of which were included. The campaign to repeal the police union contract follows a similar effort by San Antonio activists to put an ordinance before voters to curtail police union power, a measure which narrowly lost last year. 

As Hays County has grown, it has also shifted blue. Biden carried the county in 2020 after six consecutive wins for GOP presidential candidates, though elections there remain competitive. 

To Benavides, the organizing behind this year’s ballot measures is larger than the individual issues at hand because of how activism has started to reorient power in Hays County. “For me it’s so much bigger than any policy itself, it’s about showing people the power that they have as a collective,” she told me.

Gathering signatures and organizing for reforms has also underscored the need for change. “Every time we knock on doors we hear from people saying how they’ve been abused or mistreated by law enforcement,” Benavides told me. She says Mano Amiga has started branching out to help organize and push for reforms in surrounding counties. 

“I feel like there isn’t enough emphasis on the organizing going on in rural communities,” she added. “There’s so much going on in San Antonio, so much going on in Austin, and our goal is to bridge that gap and help build a corridor of resistance.”

The post How Years of Organizing Put Drug Reform and Diversion on the Ballot in Central Texas appeared first on Bolts.

Five states are voting on legalizing recreational marijuana, and most are staunchly Republican. The issue has long drawn support across the political spectrum, and these elections will again test the sense of a growing national consensus against marijuana prohibition. 

Even President Biden, who was a dedicated soldier in America’s war on drugs while a senator, is coming around. Last week he ordered a federal review of marijuana’s classification as a “Schedule 1” substance, defined as having h “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse,” and he pardoned an estimated 6,500 people with federal convictions for marijuana possession, plus thousands more convicted in the District of Columbia.

The national debate over the war on drugs is also shifting past marijuana. Colorado, which helped launch the wave of weed legalization a decade ago, is now considering a measure that would legalize psychedelics, emulating a reform adopted by Oregon in 2020. 

Bolts looks at the six state referendums, plus some intriguing local measures, that may affect drug policy this fall. 

Most measures would establish new state-regulated systems for the sale of marijuana or, in the case of Colorado, psychedelics, likely bringing in considerable new revenue into public coffers. 

But there is wide variance as to how they would handle people who have already been convicted over behaviors that could soon become legal. A review by Bolts shows that only two of the five marijuana referendums would set up expungement of past criminal records, which considerably saddle a person’s access to jobs and housing.

Arkansas | Issue 4: On legalizing marijuana

Arkansas could become just the second state in the South, after Virginia, to legalize marijuana for recreational use and sales. Issue 4 qualified for the ballot after a petition drive organized by the group Responsible Growth Arkansas, just six years after another citizen-initiated measure legalized medical marijuana. A September poll found wide support for the measure.

But Issue 4 is also raising concerns about inequitable design. The Arkansas Advocate found that Arkansas would have the strictest rules among the 19 states that have legalized recreational marijuana: It would be the only one to both prohibit home-grow operations and keep a hard cap on cultivation and dispensary permits, which experts predict would limit supply and competition, leading to higher prices at retail stores. A more exclusive market could also perpetuate race and class disparity in who has access to the substance, and who is policed over it.

Moreover, unlike in some of the other states with marijuana measures this year, Issue 4 does not provide for wiping clean the criminal records of people already convicted over marijuana.

Republican lawmakers are angry that organizations are using the initiative route to champion issues that they oppose, including the 2016 medical marijuana vote. They have placed another measure on the ballot that would make it harder for ballot measures to pass in the future.

Missouri | Amendment 3: On legalizing marijuana

Just north of Arkansas, Missouri has also legalized marijuana for medical use, and may now do the same for recreational use. 

Amendment 3, which also qualified for the ballot through a petition drive organized by the group Legal Missouri, would end existing state prohibitions on the possession of marijuana, set up a regulated sales system by distributing licenses via a lottery system, and allow home growth. Polling shows a closely divided electorate. 

Missouri borders eight states, only one of which (Illinois) has legalized recreational marijuana. Based on the experience of other states, that would presage an influx of out-of-state customers looking to buy legal marijuana in Missouri. But this could also cause new legal problems as these customers would be breaking the law the second they crossed back into their home states, where marijuana possession may be punishable by jail time. This has been a long-documented problem for people traveling into Kansas with weed from Colorado.

The Missouri amendment creates a path for people with marijuana convictions to expunge their records. But many marijuana advocates believe the ballot measure does not go far enough and are raising alarms. They stress that some people would be excluded from automatic expungement due to carve-outs or because they’re still serving time; they also note that the initiative would keep in place some criminal penalties, including for smoking marijuana in public. The chair of Missouri’s Legislative Black Caucus opposes Amendment 3 on these grounds. Organizations that support criminal justice reforms such as ACLU of Missouri and the Missouri Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, are supporting it.

Maryland | Question 4: On legalizing marijuana

Going off of the results of the last presidential election, Maryland is the bluest state in the country that has yet to legalize marijuana. Question 4 would end that distinction and legalize the possession and retail sale of marijuana.

Maryland lawmakers placed it on the ballot as a constitutional amendment that does not need the governor’s signature. (Republican Governor Larry Hogan has vetoed bills related to marijuana in the past.) Lawmakers also passed implementing legislation earlier this year (House Bill 837) that would be triggered by the passage of Question 4; Hogan allowed the bill to become law without his signature. 

The legislation would automatically expunge the records of people who have been convicted of offenses that would be newly legal under the law. It would allow people who are presently incarcerated for marijuana possession to petition for immediate release. 

If Question 4 passes, lawmakers would still have a lot of blanks to fill in the next session, as HB 837 did not flesh out the regulatory details of marijuana sales. Progressive advocates and lawmakers have already signaled that building an equitable retail system is a prime concern and that they want dispensary licenses and tax revenue to be distributed in a way that helps the Black communities that have been disproportionately affected by the prohibition of marijuana. A report released by the Baltimore prosecutor’s office in 2019 found that Black residents of Baltimore were six times likelier than white residents to be cited for marijuana possession. 

North Dakota | Measure 2: On legalizing marijuana

North Dakotans overwhelmingly rejected a measure to legalize marijuana just four years ago. But proponents of legalization are hoping for a different outcome by highlighting a broad alliance: Measure 2 qualified after a petition drive organized by a coalition called New Approach ND, whose chair is a member of the Libertarian Party and whose treasurer is a police officer-turned-defense attorney. The measure’s sponsoring committee features lawmakers from both parties. 

The Republican-run state House already passed a legalization bill in 2021, though the bill later died in the Senate. Measure 2 picks up where that bill left off: It would legalize the possession and sale of marijuana, and also allow home growth of up to three plants.

The measure would leave a lot of regulatory rulemaking for the legislature to take care of, but it does stipulate that only 18 retail licenses would be granted to start. That may limit the circulation of marijuana in a very vast, if sparsely populated, state. 

Measure 2 would not allow for expungement of criminal records, unlike the 2018 measure that provided for automatic expungement. 

South Dakota | Measure 27: On legalizing marijuana

South Dakotans already said what they think about marijuana in 2020: 54 percent of voters approved a ballot measure to legalize its recreational use. But after a lawsuit championed by Republican Governor Kristi Noem, that measure was invalidated by the South Dakota Supreme Court the following year for breaching the state’s requirement that initiatives only pertain to one subject.

Advocates returned this year with a drive to qualify a new proposal for the ballot. Measure 27 takes a simpler approach than the 2020 initiative. It would not change the state constitution, for one. It would allow for the purchase and possession of marijuana, plus home-grows of up to three plants for personal use, but it would leave questions of taxation and regulatory structure to the state legislature.

And it would not set up a process for people to expunge their past convictions.

The marijuana debate has seeped into the governor’s race, as Democratic nominee Jamie Smith has denounced Noem’s efforts to overturn the 2020 initiative. Another South Dakota election that touches on drug policy is the ballot measure to expand Medicaid access to tens of thousands of people; enhanced health insurance can improve paths to treatment over substance use issues that are otherwise funneled into jail, which played a role in other recent referendums over Medicaid. 

Colorado | Proposition 122: On legalizing psychedelics

With Proposition 122, a voter-initiated measure once known as Initiative 58, Colorado may add to a new trend: Building off of a 2019 ballot measure in Denver, and a 2020 ballot measure in Oregon, the measure would remove criminal penalties for use, possession and home-grow of psilocybin (commonly known as “magic mushrooms”) and some other psychoactive substances. 

It would also set up a legally regulated system for state-regulated providers to sell psychedelics for a range of treatment and therapeutic purposes. 

Denver, the state’s capital city, did a version of this, and a government review panel that included law enforcement found no resulting threats to public safety. Some of the organizers of the Denver reform are now opposing  Initiative 58 because they fear the measure would specifically benefit a small handful of profit-seeking interests. “It’s opening the floodgates for corporations to come to Colorado to open their bougie life and healing centers,”  one advocate who worked on Denver’s decriminalization effort told The Denver Post. 

Local elections matter to drug policy, too

Under the hood of state statutes and prohibitions, localities retain vast powers to decide how aggressively to pursue the war on drugs. That, too, is at stake this year all around the country.

Colorado, for instance, is a home-rule state, meaning that towns and counties still have the authority to ban the sale of marijuana. Colorado Springs, the state’s second-largest city and the anchor of a historically arch-conservative region, has long resisted legal weed; residents cannot purchase it within the city, which misses out on all the local sales tax that other municipalities get to collect. Colorado Springs voters this year will decide Questions 300 and 301, which would enable recreational marijuana sales and tax them.

In Texas, where marijuana is illegal but where some liberal-leaning cities have asked the police to not enforce the statute, some towns like Killeen will weigh in on decriminalizing marijuana. 

And the war on drugs is also on the ballot in many elections for the law enforcement offices that have the power to make arrests or press charges over drugs—or refuse to do so. In many places, the debate still revolves around marijuana. The Democratic incumbent in Indiana’s Marion County (Indianapolis), for instance, has stopped prosecuting low-level possession but his Republican challenger is taking issue with that. “I do not want Indianapolis to become a San Francisco, to become a New York City, to become a Los Angeles,” she said at a recent forum.

Other candidates are promising to at the very least avoid jail time over drug offenses. And some reformers want to go further and keep the criminal legal system out altogether. Rahsaan Hall, running for prosecutor in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, says he won’t prosecute drug possession. “Those are not law enforcement issues,” Caitlin Sepeda, a nurse who narrowly lost the primary for sheriff in another Massachusett county in September, told Bolts last month. “Those are nursing issues. Those are social service issues.”

The post Six States Are Voting on Legalizing Weed or Psychedelics appeared first on Bolts.

Criminal justice reform advocates called for sweeping changes in this challenging year. But state officials and legislatures largely ducked the COVID-19 pandemic that is raging inside prisons and jails, and the protests against police brutality and racial justice that followed Breonna Taylor and George Floyd’s murders. With some exceptions, they forgoed the sort of reforms that would have significantly emptied prisons amid the public health crisis or confronted police brutality and racial injustice in law enforcement.

Still, on other issues there was headway, and states—whose laws and policies control a lot about incarceration and criminal legal systems—set new milestones: They decriminalized drug possession, expanded and automated expungement availability, repealed life without parole for minors and the death penalty, and ended prison gerrymandering, among other measures.

Throughout the year, The Appeal: Political Report tracked bills, initiatives, and reforms relevant to mass incarceration. Just as in 2019, here’s a review of major changes states adopted in 2020.

Jump to the sections on: the death penalty, drug policy, early release and parole, youth justice, policing, fines and fees, pretrial detention, trials and sentencing, voting rights, expungement and re-entry, prison gerrymandering—and then there’s more.

The death penalty

In March, as the Trump administration was preparing to restart federal executions, Colorado abolished the death penalty, fulfilling a longtime goal for state advocates. Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, also commuted the sentences of the three people who were on Colorado’s death row. 

“The country is one state closer to having a majority of states ban the practice,” David Sabados, executive director of Coloradoans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, told the Political Report at the time. Colorado is the 22nd state to repeal the death penalty.

Bills to outright abolish the death penalty did not move forward elsewhere. Virginia did end the secrecy that protected the manufacturers of execution drugs. Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts, a Republican, vetoed a bill that would have required that witnesses be allowed to see the entirety of an execution. (Ohio is still considering a bill this month that would restrict the use of the death penalty against some people with mental illness.)

Opponents of the death penalty gained new allies in November with victories by prosecutorial candidates who have pledged to never seek it and advocate for its legislative repeal. 

Drug policy

Oregon broke new ground this year when voters adopted a ballot initiative that decriminalizes drug possession. Measure 110 will treat low-level drug possession as a civil offense, punishable by a fine rather than jail or prison time, and it will fund public health programs. 

Advocates say the measure could transform debates around the county by offering a new model for drug policy, even as more work is needed in Oregon to reduce enforcement and inequalities.

Other states focused on marijuana reform. In October, Vermont’s legislature created a legal system of marijuana sales. Then, in November, voters in Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota legalized recreational marijuana. There are now 15 states, plus Washington, D.C., where recreational use of marijuana is legal. 

Also, Virginia adopted a law decriminalizing marijuana possession, but legalization stalled. Political leaders there, as in New York and other states, have signaled they may push further in 2021. Separately, ballot initiatives legalized psilocybin mushrooms for therapeutic purposes in Oregon; mostly decriminalized psilocybin in D.C.; and legalized medical marijuana in Mississippi.

Finally, in Missouri and Oklahoma, voters opted to expand Medicaid, furthering a trend of voters in red states circumventing Republican lawmakers who have blocked expansion via initiatives. These two measures will grant public insurance to an estimated 500,000 people. 

Among many benefits, expanding Medicaid can combat the overdose crisis and assist efforts to reduce the criminalization of substance use by enabling access to treatment programs. This link also resonated in 2018 initiative campaigns in Idaho and Nebraska.

Early release and parole

With the outbreak of COVID-19, prisons and jails that are overcrowded and confined promptly became virulent hotbeds for the virus, making up many of the country’s largest sources of infections. This sparked widespread demands for public officials to take meaningful decarceral measures to protect people in prisons and jails, and the surrounding communities.

Officials responded at a glacial pace, especially when it comes to emptying prisons. The Justice Department made release from federal prisons harder; Pennsylvania and Alabama left medically vulnerable prisoners without recourse when they canceled hearings; Ohio, New York, Delaware, and Vermont officials resisted calls for release or stalled release plans. “States are not even taking the simplest and least controversial steps, like refusing admissions for technical violations of probation and parole rules,” the Prison Policy Initiative wrote in an analysis. 

In the fall, New Jersey was an exception to the general indifference: It adopted a law in October that granted many people incarcerated in the state with early release. As a result, more than 2,000 people were released on Nov. 4, in what the New York Times described as “one of the largest-ever single-day reductions of any state’s prison population,” with more releases to come. 

Other states considered legislation to expand releases, often apart from the immediate context of COVID-19. Beyond the pandemic, those hoping to cut the size of prisons have been pushing for ways to modify the lengthy sentences people are serving around the country. On this front, a significant change may still be on the horizon this year: The D.C. council passed a “Second Look” bill this week that would enable people serving lengthy sentences for a crime they committed before they were 25 to petition for resentencing after 15 years in prison. The fate of the bill remains unclear given the mayor’s opposition, though.

Elsewhere, at least three states expanded parole eligibility. 

California expanded eligibility for the state’s elderly parole process, and made people eligible at age 50 instead of 60. Louisiana, one of the harshest states for life in prison sentences, made some dent in that: Some people convicted for crimes they committed as children will now be eligible for parole after 25 years of incarceration if they fulfill a list of conditions. Then, there’s Virginia: The state eliminated parole in 1995, and did not broadly reinstate it in 2020, but still took incremental steps to revive it. It ended sentences of life without parole for children (see below); it made most people sentenced between 1995 and 2000 eligible for parole; and it did the same for some people who are terminally ill.

But in some states, promising reforms ended up derailing. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves and Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts, both Republicans, vetoed bills that would have made some people eligible for parole earlier than scheduled. Maryland lawmakers seemed on their way to ending governors’ effective veto power on anyone serving a life sentence getting parole, but the bill stalled in the Senate. In Arizona and Florida, advocates prioritized curtailing “Truth in Sentencing” guidelines that bar release until people have served at least 85 percent of their sentence, but these bills also did not move forward. 

Youth justice

Virginia abolished sentences of life without the possibility of parole sentences for minors, the 23rd state to do so. “It’s a huge victory,” Heather Renwick, legal director of the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, said at the time.

The Virginia law, which applies retroactively, will give hundreds of people who have been incarcerated for at least 20 years a shot at petitioning for release. (Ohio may still adopt a reform to end life without parole for minors before the end of the year, via a bill that remains alive as of publication.)

Also, Virginia and Utah narrowed the circumstances in which a minor will be treated as an adult, a designation that triggers harsher punishment; Utah’s law also restricts prosecutors’ authority to unilaterally decide to charge children in adult court. Still, whereas 2019 saw major reforms around the country that significantly cut down on the prosecution of children as adults, and in some states altogether ended the mandatory adult prosecutions of minors, momentum on that front did not build in 2020. Instead, Missouri adopted a punitive law to expand adult prosecutions and punishments for some minors as young as 14; lawmakers in Missouri who opposed the measure warned that it would primarily harm Black children.

Elsewhere, California adopted a law that will phase out its youth prisons; minors will be detained instead in facilities run by county governments. New Jersey ended fines in the juvenile system.

Policing and law enforcement

In many states, police unions and law enforcement groups successfully lobbied to stop the boldest measures filed in the wake of protests against police brutality in the spring and summer.

In California, for instance, a slate of policing reform bills stalled in the legislature, and then two bills that made it through were vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat. One would have mandated that district attorneys maintain a list of police officers with a history of lying or misconduct, and the other would have set up a pilot program for mental health or medical professionals to answer some 911 calls. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, said this month that he would veto a provision meant to mostly ban facial recognition. 

But Colorado reached a milestone in June: It adopted a law eliminating qualified immunity, which is the legal doctrine that often shields police officers from civil lawsuits, in state courts.

Colorado’s law, which was introduced by Democratic lawmakers and passed with large bipartisan majorities, also empowers the attorney general to prosecute officers, restricts the standards for use of deadly force, and mandates police departments to disclose more data. Connecticut later limited qualified immunity, with loopholes. Bills to end it in Massachusetts and Virginia seemed in promising shape but died in the legislature. 

Another emblematic policing legislation came from New York: In June, the state repealed Section 50-a, a stringent statute that shielded police officers’ disciplinary records. This repeal was a longtime demand of advocates who protested police departments’ ever-expanding use of the statute. Connecticut also expanded transparency over disciplinary records and eased the process to decertify police officers.

Elsewhere, Virginia became the third state to ban no-knock warrants. New York and Connecticut codified special offices to investigate police killings. Minnesota changed police unions’ ability to interfere with an independent arbitrator. Hawaii required police departments to disclose the identity of officers who are discharged or suspended. And some states, including Connecticut, Iowa, Minnesota, and New York, adopted bans against the use of chokeholds and/or neck restraints. But such statutes can be difficult to enforce amid a culture of impunity, as NPR reported.

Fines and fees 

More states confronted the pervasive practice of suspending drivers’ licenses over court debt. In taking away people’s means of transportation, these suspensions cut off their access to work and make it harder for them to pay off this debt—and those who still use their cars can get prosecuted for it.

Hawaii, Oregon, and Virginia all adopted laws this year to end these suspensions. Overall, this makes 10 states that will not hinder access to licenses over non-payment of fines and fees, according to a national tracker created by the Fines and Fees Justice Center; other states have adopted narrower restrictions on such suspensions, without ending them. (Michigan and New York could still adopt similar reforms before the end of 2020, depending on the fate of bills that remain under consideration.)

These reforms will affect a staggering number of people since suspensions are so widespread. In Virginia alone, more than 900,000 residents were deprived of their licenses over unpaid fines and fees as of 2016, according to a Legal Aid Center lawsuit.

But states could be far more ambitious in stopping the predatory imposition of fines and fees in the first place.

COVID-19 brought the issue into stark relief not only because it has sparked an economic crisis for all, but also because the end of in-person visitations in prisons and jails has compounded the importance of phone and online communication that often cost astronomical prices, as reported this year from Illinois to Alaska and Florida. In October, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have capped the cost of phone and video calls from prison, and capped the inflation of commissary items; this came a year after he vetoed a different bill that would have required judges to determine people’s financial ability before imposing financial obligations.

But Newsom signed into law a measure to eliminate many administrative fees that are imposed on people by California’s criminal legal system.

Expungement and re-entry

The economic havoc brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic compounded the urgency for states to help people re-enter their communities and lift the barriers of a criminal record. But in some regions, public services closed their doors or could not meet the demands of people released from prison who needed assistance.

And legislation to help was met with a chorus of gubernatorial vetoes.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican, vetoed a bill that would have shielded marijuana convictions from public records. About 200,000 Marylanders stood to benefit. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves, a Republican, vetoed a bill that would have authorized people to expunge some convictions over nonviolent offenses. And Washington Governor Jay Inslee, a Democrat, vetoed a bill that would have set up a pilot program to automatically expunge some people’s records, citing budgetary constraints. 

Michigan bucked that trend in October, when it adopted a major legislative package that could enable hundreds of thousands of Michiganders to clear their criminal records. The package expands the range of cases that people can get expunged, including marijuana-related convictions. It also makes expungement automatic for many misdemeanors and some felonies, though only after a prolonged wait time. Eligible Michiganders will see their records expunged without having to apply or file a petition; the vast majority of people eligible for an expungement do not apply because of cost, lack of information, or administrative complexity. 

Michigan is the sixth state to adopt a system to automatically clear convictions, and it will be the most expansive, according to the Collateral Consequences Resource Center. This year, Michigan also eliminated its ban on people receiving food assistance benefits (SNAP) if they have multiple drug-related convictions. .

Other states took some incremental steps to removing barriers for people with past convictions.

North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, signed an executive order barring employers from asking job applicants whether they have a criminal record, but this will only apply to public sector jobs; broader bills have stalled in the GOP-run legislature. Hawaii expanded partial protections against employment discrimination for people with a criminal record. Kentucky set up automatic expungement for people whose cases are dismissed or who are acquitted. Finally, California adopted a law that loosens the prohibition of formerly incarcerated firefighters becoming civilian firefighters. But the law comes with major hurdles and carve-outs due to the vocal opposition of police unions, state DAs, and firefighters unions.

Pretrial detention 

Criminal justice reform advocates in New York had one of the bigger victories in 2019 when Democrats overhauled the state’s bail system to greatly reduce pretrial detention. This reform significantly reduced jail populations in New York starting just before the COVID-19 pandemic, helping contain some of the spread.

Still, law enforcement groups pursued a yearlong crusade against the measure. In March of this year, Democrats chose to partly roll back the 2019 law by expanding the range of circumstances under which judges can impose bail. Some progressive lawmakers, who increased their clout in the year’s legislative elections, opposed the rollback.

After the pandemic began, some states such as Massachusetts and California adopted emergency measures to shrink pretrial detention during the outbreak—meeting longtime demands of advocates to shrink jails and end cash bail, but only on an exceptional basis. Texas took the opposite route when Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, issued an executive order to block some counties’ efforts to shrink jails to fight the pandemic.

In November, finally, Californians voted to strike down a 2018 law that had eliminated the cash bail system and replaced it with algorithm-driven risk assessments. The bail bond industry opposed the law, and in an unusual twist, so did many advocates who warned that the new system would perpetuate racial disparities in pretrial detention.

Trial procedures and sentencing

California made it harder for prosecutors to exclude Black people from jury pools. As Kyle Barry explains, racial discrimination in jury selection is routine around the country: Prosecutors are not supposed to strike prospective jurors because of their race, but in practice courts allow them to invoke factors that track closely with race—a sleight of hand that California’s new law aims to curtail. 

Separate legislation, also signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in September, will make it easier to appeal a conviction or sentence on the grounds that it is racially discriminatory. And in November, Californians beat back a ballot initiative (Proposition 20) that would have rolled back some decarceral sentencing reforms adopted over the past decade.

Elsewhere, Virginia transferred some sentencing powers to judges to forestall what defense attorneys describe as a “jury penalty,” and Maryland restricted the use of jailhouse informants, Also in Maryland, Governor Larry Hogan’s heated efforts on behalf of punitive measures that would have toughened sentences did not convince the legislature. Oklahoma saw a setback for criminal justice reform when voters rejected State Question 805, which would have prevented prosecutors from seeking harsh sentencing enhancements against some defendants.

Voting rights and disenfranchisement 

Washington, D.C., made history this summer when it eliminated disenfranchisement for anyone with felony convictions, including when they are in prison. It joined Maine and Vermont, which have never barred people from voting because of a criminal conviction.

Elsewhere, though, millions of U.S. citizens were once again barred from voting in this year’s elections. And in the many states that have expanded voter eligibility in recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic stalled outreach efforts and voter registration drives.

Still, some jurisdictions took big steps in loosening disenfranchisement, even if they did so more incrementally than the nation’s capital. California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 17 in November, which enfranchised people who are on parole. In practice, the reform means that all voting-age citizens who are not incarcerated will be able to vote. California is the 19th state to adopt such a rule. 

Over the summer, amid protests against racial injustice in law enforcement, activists amplified the pressure for Iowa to no longer be the only state in the country to disenfranchise anyone with any felony conviction for life. GOP Governor Kim Reynolds issued an executive order in August that restored the voting rights of most people once they finish a felony sentence. The order affected tens of thousands of people, but also kept Iowa among the nation’s harshest states.

Bills against disenfranchisement did not advance in many other states, including Virginia and Washington State, which have harsh rules by the current standards of Democrat-run states. 

Prison gerrymandering 

The next round of redistricting is almost upon us, and most states are poised to once again employ prison gerrymandering, the practice of drawing political maps by counting incarcerated people at their prison’s location, rather than at their most recent address. This disproportionately skews political power toward white and rural communities.

The issue has gained political visibility in recent years. In 2020, three states adopted laws to end prison gerrymandering: New Jersey, Colorado, and Virginia. When they redraw some or all of their maps in coming years, they will count incarcerated people at their most recent residence. 

“The system is set up to take citizens out of their communities … and increase the political power of [other] communities,” Aaron Greene, associate counsel at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, said after New Jersey’s reform. “Having people counted in the communities where they are from and where they will return, where their families are, is extremely important.”

There are now nine states that have taken legislative action against prison gerrymandering. The clock is ticking for other legislatures to act before redistricting.

And there’s more

Regarding conditions of incarceration: New Jersey made incarcerated people eligible to apply for state aid for higher education programs; California provided that transgender people be detained in a prison based on their gender identity, though the law enables correctional officials to override this; and South Carolina banned shackling women who are pregnant, in labor, or recovering from giving birth. This law also mandates that jails and prisons provide menstrual hygiene products, a reminder of the low bar for state reforms meant to change prison conditions. 

Regarding probation: Two states imposed new limits this year on the length of probation terms, which are often interminable, stringent, and can result in incarceration over technical violations. In Minnesota, a notoriously harsh state when it comes to probation terms, the Sentencing Guidelines Commission adopted a presumptive five-year cap, though it comes with carve-outs and will not apply retroactively. And California capped probation terms at one year for misdemeanors and two years for felonies. However, legislative efforts to curtail Pennsylvania’s punitive probation system derailed this year despite some early momentum.

Regarding civil asset forfeiture: New Jersey required that, in some cases, people be convicted before their assets can be seized—a change that falls short of the more comprehensive reform Arkansas adopted last year. Throughout the country, police routinely seize property without trial.

Regarding repression of protests: Tennessee’s GOP-run government toughened penalties for offenses associated with protest activity, part of a wave of recent legislative activity to restrict protests; the new Tenneseee law makes it a felony punishable by up to six years in prison to illegally camp on state property. Florida is considering similar legislation, proposed by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. And a Georgia law that created a new offense of “bias motivated intimidation” against a police officer was denounced by the ACLU of Georgia “as a direct swipe at Georgians participating in the Black Lives Matter protests.”

Regarding prosecutors: Their often-unchecked clout suffered some setbacks. A California law will enable judges to steer people charged with misdemeanors into pretrial diversion (so completing a program would result in the dismissal of charges) without a prosecutor’s assent. Virginia somewhat narrowed prosecutors’ unilateral ability to transfer children to adult court (see above). Kentuckyians rejected an initiative to extend DAs’ terms to eight years. And, in California and Virginia, importantly for future legislation, cracks began to show in the state associations that lobby on behalf of local prosecutors, often to stymie reforms bills.

Regarding pardons: Nevada voters passed Question 3, a measure that will make the state’s pardon process a bit easier. It ends the governor’s de facto veto power over pardons, and requires the Board of Pardons Commissioners to meet more often to address a backlog of requests. 

Finally, regarding immigration: Colorado and New York adopted laws to bar ICE from arresting people who are in or on their way to courthouses, amid a pattern of arrests and detentions. No state adopted new protections for immigrants against local law enforcement cooperating with ICE, even though such sanctuary reforms appeared to have momentum earlier during President Trump’s term. Voters took matters in their own hands by firing some sheriffs who were helping ICE arrest and detain immigrants. 

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On Nov. 3, voters in Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota approved ballot initiatives to legalize cannabis for recreational use.

“Americans across the country have embraced the idea that marijuana legalization is the policy decision that best serves the interests of public health, public safety, and, most importantly, justice,” said Matthew Schweich, deputy director of the Marijuana Policy Project, which advocated for the measures.

The results are a clean sweep for marijuana legalization, and a dramatic acceleration for a movement whose first wins came in Colorado and Washington in 2012. Many other states have since followed suit. 

With Tuesday’s four successes, there are now 15 states, alongside Washington, D.C., that have opted to legalize the recreational possession and sale of marijuana.

In addition, voters in Mississippi and South Dakota approved initiatives that enable the use of marijuana for therapeutic purposes; voters in Oregon legalized psilocybin therapy and decriminalized drugs; and partial returns showed voters in Washington, D.C. opting to largely decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms, though that result is not yet final.

Marijuana legalization will make for a stark change in Arizona because the state has had harsh marijuana laws. Possession of even a small amount of cannabis is a felony punishable by up to two years in prison. Since incarceration can become a barrier to employment, education, housing, and even the right to vote, one marijuana conviction can upend people’s lives—especially people from marginalized communities.

Arizona’s Proposition 207 will now set up a system of marijuana sales in the state.

With legalization, Arizona, alongside Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota, will have an opportunity to reverse the effects of the war on drugs on marginalized communities. 

And advocates say that racial justice should be central to legalization efforts.

“People of color are arrested at far higher rates for marijuana possession than white people,” Jared Moffat, campaigns coordinator at the Marijuana Policy Project, told The Appeal: Political Report in October, “and that’s not due to any difference in usage. That’s just due to a racist policy.”

In South Dakota, for instance, Black people are five times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession.

But when it comes to making amends for racial injustice, this year’s four legalization measures vary. 

Only Arizona’s initiative includes provisions to ensure that communities harmed by drug criminalization benefit financially from legalized cannabis.

It allows people with past cannabis convictions to apply to have their records expunged. Everyone who applies would be presumed qualified unless proved otherwise, according to Stacy Pearson, a spokesperson for Smart and Safe Arizona, the campaign promoting Proposition 207. 

Its cannabis initiative would place a 16 percent tax on marijuana sales, which would fund social services as well as a social equity ownership program to help those with past marijuana convictions get licenses to produce and sell their own cannabis.

But the majority of early priority licenses for recreational cannabis would go to existing medical dispensaries. Only 26 out of 160 licenses would be reserved for social equity applicants and rural counties without a dispensary, according to Pearson.

Advocates have pointed out similar shortcomings in other states. Illinois is considered to have the most robust social equity program, but people who qualify still struggle to secure enough capital to start a business. 

New Jersey’s initiative doesn’t specify regulations beyond tax limits. Now that it has passed, other details will need to be worked out by the state’s Cannabis Regulatory Commission. Advocates plan to push for social equity provisions in that process. 

Provisions that are specifically meant to advance social equity are also absent from the initiatives in Montana and South Dakota.

In recent years, other states have legalized marijuana without provisions to repair the harms of criminalization, but later made reforms to address that issue. Michigan voters approved an initiative to legalize marijuana in 2018, and in October of this year the state adopted a law that enables the expungement of past convictions.

This article is adapted from an October story previewing these four referendums. Daniel Nichanian updated it with the incoming results.

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Ballot initiatives in Arizona, New Jersey, South Dakota, and Montana are seeking to legalize cannabis for recreational use. These states are aiming to raise revenue and reverse the effects of the war on drugs on marginalized communities.

Drug reform advocates say that racial justice should be central to legalization efforts.

“Cannabis criminalization is a cornerstone of the war on drugs,” Jared Moffat, campaigns coordinator at the Marijuana Policy Project, told The Appeal: Political Report. According to the Pew Research Center, 40 percent of all drug arrests in 2018 were marijuana-related, down from 52 percent in 2010. The overwhelming majority were for possession, as opposed to sale or manufacture. 

“People of color are arrested at far higher rates for marijuana possession than white people,” Moffat says, “and that’s not due to any difference in usage. That’s just due to a racist policy.”

If the cannabis legalization measures pass, they would accelerate a shift in drug policy that has quickly evolved since Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize marijuana in 2012. Now 11 states and the District of Columbia allow recreational use of cannabis, and medical marijuana is legal in 33 states. South Dakota and Mississippi voters also have the chance to approve medical marijuana legalization this election cycle. And other drug reforms are on the ballot in Oregon, where voters will decide whether to decriminalize possession of illegal drugs by replacing criminal penalties with fines, and whether to legalize psilocybin therapy.

But when it comes to making amends for racial injustice, this year’s marijuana legalization measures vary. Only Arizona’s initiative includes provisions to ensure that communities harmed by drug criminalization benefit financially from legalized cannabis.

Arizona has particularly harsh marijuana laws; possession of even a small amount of cannabis is a felony punishable by up to two years in prison. Since incarceration can become a barrier to employment, education, housing, and even the right to vote, one marijuana conviction can upend people’s lives—especially people from marginalized communities.

Black people in Arizona are three times as likely as their white counterparts to be arrested for marijuana possession. Despite only making up 5 percent of the state’s population, Black Arizonans comprise 18 percent of those in jail and 14 percent in prison.

Arizona’s Proposition 207 would legalize possession of up to one ounce of cannabis for adults over the age of 21.

It would also allow people with past cannabis convictions to apply to have their records expunged. Everyone who applies would be presumed qualified unless proved otherwise, according to Stacy Pearson, a spokesperson for Smart and Safe Arizona, the campaign promoting Proposition 207. “We’ve given money to community organizations to process expungements on behalf of folks in that system,” Pearson told The Appeal. “The onus is on the prosecuting agency to petition to the court why this person wouldn’t qualify.” 

Arizona’s cannabis initiative would place a 16 percent tax on marijuana sales, which would fund social services as well as a social equity ownership program to help those with past marijuana convictions get licenses to produce and sell their own cannabis.

But the majority of early priority licenses for recreational cannabis would go to existing medical dispensaries. Only 26 out of 160 licenses would be reserved for social equity applicants and rural counties without a dispensary, according to Pearson.

Advocates have pointed out similar shortcomings in other states that have legalized recreational marijuana; Illinois is considered to have the most robust social equity program, but people who qualify still struggle to secure enough capital to start a business. Other states that have legalized marijuana have also put in place social equity provisions, setting precedents to build upon.

In New Jersey, social equity is not factored into the state’s marijuana initiative, though it was a sticking point in the legislative battle that led to the referendum. New Jersey’s initiative doesn’t specify regulations beyond tax limits, so other details would be worked out by the state’s Cannabis Regulatory Commission if it passes. Advocates plan to push for social equity provisions in that process. R.Todd Edwards, the political action chairperson of the New Jersey NAACP, told the New York Times: “If this passes and we are not at the table, it will have been a big hoax.” 

Social equity provisions are also absent from South Dakota’s cannabis initiative, even though the state has the highest arrest rate for marijuana possession in the nation. Black people in South Dakota are five times more likely than white people to be arrested on those grounds. Yet funds from a 15 percent cannabis tax would only go toward public schools and the state’s general fund. Similarly, in Montana, a 20 percent recreational marijuana tax would fund a variety of social services, including substance use programs, veterans’ services, and healthcare.

Some drug policy reform advocates take issue with placing high taxes on cannabis.

“It’s like robbing Peter to pay Paul,” said Deborah Small, executive director of Break the Chains, a California-based organization that aims to change drug policies. “It gives cities and local governments the green light to impose whatever taxes that they want.” Small also said that high cannabis taxes may make cannabis inaccessible to those from low-income households which, in some cases, could drive them back into illicit drug markets.

Small made the case that the best way to make legalization more beneficial for everyone is to develop specific plans for investing in communities that have borne the brunt of marijuana criminalization . “Use the proceeds to actually reinvest in communities that were disinvested in because of drug war enforcement,” she said.

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