MLK & Marijuana: How the Civil Rights Leader’s Work Informs the Push for Legal Pot

Martin Luther King Jr. might have turned 96 years old this month if he had
not been felled by an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968. It is, of course,
impossible to know what the United States would look like today if he had
lived — or what he would think about the political dilemmas of our own time.

Yet there are certain obvious parallels between his time and ours. The
country continues to be bitterly divided along political lines. And many
activists and scholars argue that the racist power structure that King
fought has re-congealed—this time in the guise of the “war on drugs” and
mass incarceration. His legacy, therefore, holds lessons for those now
fighting for cannabis legalization.
*Cycles of Repression and Revolution *

Foremost among those scholars is Michelle Alexander, author of the 2010
bestseller *The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness*. Alexander takes a long view of the struggle for racial
justice in the United States and paints a grim picture. She illustrates how
many of the gains that King won in his life are being reversed after his
death — this time in a new “race-neutral” guise that only serves to mask
continued institutionalized racism.

Alexander notes that in 1972, there were under 350,000 people in prisons
and jails nationwide. Today there are 2 million. In fact, the US has
the most people behind bars of any nation on Earth, in both *per capita *and
absolute terms. This is certainly an irony for the country that touts
itself as the “land of the free.”

Among those 2 million people in prison are 40,000 who remain incarcerated
in state or federal prisons on cannabis-related convictions— about half of
them for marijuana offenses alone. When those waiting to see a judge in
local jails are added in, the figure may approach 100,000 on any given day.
And the racial disparity could not be more obvious. A 2013 American Civil
Liberties Union report, Marijuana in Black and White: Billions of Dollars
Wasted on Racially Biased Arrests, crunched the national data. It found
that black people are more than three times as likely as whites to be
arrested for cannabis — despite consuming the plant at essentially similar
rates.

And this is not the first time the country has seen significant and
hard-won racial progress being in large part (at least) reversed, with the
same power structure re-establishing itself in new guise. Slavery was
abolished in the aftermath of the Civil War. But, as Alexander quotes
historian and early civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, from his 1935
book *Black Reconstruction in America**,* “The slave went free, stood a
brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery.”

In the South under occupation by Union troops after the Civil War, black
people for the first time voted, served on juries and held elected office —
until the backlash came. In 1877, the federal troops were withdrawn. In
subsequent years, without federal interference, Ku Klux Klan terror
enforced legal apartheid in the southern states — the system known as Jim
Crow. Blacks were often reduced to a state of near-slavery through
share-cropping and were barred from the vote by systematic
disenfranchisement.

It wasn’t until nearly a century after the Civil War that this system would
be challenged. In his book *Why We Can’t Wait*, an account of the 1963 Birmingham
Campaign to desegregate Alabama’s biggest city, King wrote of “America’s
third revolution — the Negro Revolution.”

By King’s reckoning, the country’s first revolution had been the one we
actually call “the Revolution” — the War of Independence, although it left
the slave-owning aristocracy of the South thoroughly in place. The second
was arguably far more revolutionary — the Civil War, in which the slave
system was broken. King’s Civil Rights Movement was avowedly nonviolent,
but it was still a revolution — the overturning of a power structure by
physical as well as moral opposition.

Despite the violent backlash, both from the police and Ku Klux Klan
terrorists, the campaign ultimately swayed the nation, resulting in the
passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other landmark legislation that
finally ended legal apartheid in America.

But the year of King’s assassination saw the country’s national political
establishment embracing the backlash — exactly as in 1877. In the 1968
presidential campaign, Republican candidate Richard Nixon first adopted the
rhetoric of a “war on drugs” (although he would actually coin that phrase
three years later, when the Controlled Substances Act was passed). And, in
just barely coded terms, Nixon was promoting the rhetoric of racism.

In her book, Alexander quotes Nixon’s special counsel John Ehrlichman
explicitly summing up the campaign strategy in his 1982 memoir, *Witness To
Power: The Nixon Years**:* “We’ll go after the racists.” Ehrlichman
unabashedly wrote how throughout the 1968 race, “subliminal appeal to the
anti-black voter was always present in Nixon’s statements and speeches.”

Alexander did not mention, however, another quote attributed to Ehrlichman
in which he just as explicitly made the connection between this subliminal
racism and the anti-drug drumbeat. Journalist Dan Baum in the April 2016
edition of Harper’s recalls a quote he says he got from a 1994 interview
with Ehrlichman: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House
after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people… by getting
the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin,
and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We
could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and
vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were
lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

And the backlash was just beginning.
*Birth of the New Jim Crow *

The new order would be consolidated over the next decade. In 1973, the same
year the federal Drug Enforcement Administration was created, New York
state’s Rockefeller Laws imposed the nation’s first mandatory minimum
sentences for drug offenses. In 1977, New York decriminalized cannabis,
overturning the harsh Rockefeller Laws where personal quantities of
marijuana were concerned — but the draconian provisions for cocaine and
heroin remained intact.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the “drug war” rhetoric was
revived with a vengeance, and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 imposed
mandatory minimum sentences nationwide. Ten years later, an ACLU report would
find that the law “devastated African American and low-income communities.”

The 1986 law also instated the sentencing disparity for crack and powder
cocaine — as crack was flooding black communities and landing people with
the far longer sentences. This was also reflected in public perceptions and
media portrayals. In the early ’80s, powder cocaine was a status symbol for
white yuppies. When crack hit the streets from New York to Los Angeles, it
was immediately stigmatized by association with the criminal (read:
black) underclass.

This period also saw the rapid militarization of police forces, and the War
on Drugs, in Alexander’s words, went “from being a political slogan to an
actual war.” The 1981 Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act started
to erode the firewall that had existed between the armed forces and police
since the end of Reconstruction.

The DEA joined with local police forces to instate Operation Pipeline, a
program of traffic stops and vehicle searches that was protested by the ACLU as
based on systematic “racial profiling.”

This was enabled by a series of bad Supreme Court decisions — *Terry vs
Ohio* in 1968, *Florida vs. Bostick* in 1991, *Ohio vs. Robinette* in 1996
— that dramatically eroded the Fourth Amendment. Alexander writes that
these decisions enabled “consent searches” — in which the motorist (or
pedestrian, or home resident) verbally consents to the search, but actually
does so under police intimidation.

All-white juries were more likely to convict black people, of course — and
prosecutors were still able to strike non-whites from serving as jurors
despite the 1986 Supreme Court decision *Batson v. Kentucky**, *which
barred discrimination on the basis of race in jury selection. As Alexander
writes, “the only thing that has changed is that prosecutors must come up
with a race-neutral excuse for the strikes.”

In a vicious cycle, mass incarceration itself served to entrench the system
of mass incarceration. Convicted felons are excluded from juries in many
states, and only Maine and Vermont allow prison inmates to vote (as most
Western European countries do).

Nor did this system turn around when the Democrats returned to the White
House. The Bill Clinton years saw a 60% drop in federal spending on public
housing, and a 170% boost in prison spending up to $19 billion. Prison
construction would finally begin leveling off in the 2000s, but the actual
prison population broke new records in 2008, “with no end in sight.”

Alexander writes: “Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug
offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of
communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to
the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow
was born.”

And this was utterly out of proportion to any real threat posed by illegal
drugs. In the 1980s, there were some 22,000 drunk driving deaths per year,
among 100,000 alcohol-related deaths. In Alexander’s words: “The number of
deaths related to *all illegal drugs combined* was tiny compared to the
number of deaths caused by drunk driving.”

Among the numberless stories of police terror in the name of drug
enforcement, one recounted by Alexander is that of Alberta Spruill—a
57-year-old Harlem woman who died of a heart attack in May 2003 after
police officers broke down her door and threw a concussion grenade into her
apartment. No drugs or any contraband were found in the apartment. The cops
were acting on a bad tip from snitches snared on a marijuana rap.

*A Fourth Revolution? *

Thanks in large part to growing public consciousness, there certainly
appears to have been some progress in the fight against the War on Drugs
over the past decade. In 2009, following a hard-fought activist campaign,
the Rockefeller Laws were finally overturned in New York. Eleven states
have now legalized cannabis, and nearly all have at least some kind of
provision for medical use of cannabis — significantly lifting the pressure
on one federally controlled substance.

But even amid the progress, there are clear and frustrating signs that a
mere change in the law isn’t enough. From New York City (where cannabis
arrests have been de-emphasized by policy) to Colorado (where cannabis is
now legal), overall arrests for pot are significantly reduced — but the
stark racial disparity persists in those arrests that continue under
various loopholes.

Michelle Alexander concludes with a litany of necessary legal reforms and
then states that, ultimately, they are insufficient: “Mandatory drug
sentencing laws must be rescinded. Marijuana ought to be legalized (and
perhaps other drugs as well)… The list could go on, of course, but the
point has been made. The central question for racial justice advocates is
this: are we serious about ending the system of control, or not?”

She quotes from Martin Luther King’s book of collected speeches, *A
Testament of Hope**: *“White America must recognize that justice for black
people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our
society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to
tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo.”

There are many other quotes from the great civil rights leader that shed
equal light on the current impasse, in which the limitations of mere legal
progress are becoming clear. In his April 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail,
King justified his civil disobedience in these words: “An unjust law is a
code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to
obey but does not make binding on itself.”

This recalls both the relative impunity for white coke-snorters in the ’80s
as black communities were militarized in the name of drug enforcement — and
the white entrepreneurs now disproportionately getting rich off legal
cannabis, while black users remain disproportionately criminalized.

In *Why We Can’t Wait**,* King wrote of how the country needed a “Bill of
Rights for the Disadvantaged” — anticipating the current demands for drug
war reparations, wedding legal cannabis to addressing the harms caused by
prohibition and the related matrix of social injustice.

The notion that cannabis legalization is necessary but not sufficient
recalls King’s 1967 report to the staff of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, the main coordinating body of the civil rights
campaign.

In the “Report to SCLC Staff,” he noted how the 1965 Selma to Montgomery
March culminated in passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year — a
critical victory. Yet, he wrote: “We have moved from the era of civil
rights to the era of human rights, an era where we are called upon to raise
certain basic questions about the whole society. We have been in a reform
movement… But after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new
era, which must be the era of revolution. We must recognize that we can’t
solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic
and political power.”

If cannabis legalization is to truly undo the social harms of prohibition,
its advocates may be in for a similar reckoning in the coming period.

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Push for Legal Pot appeared first on Cannabis Now.