June 13, 2023

The podcast transcript is available below.

Starting on July 1, 2023, marijuana will officially become legalized in Maryland for adults 21 and up. This also includes a new law that bans police stops and searches based on the alleged smell of marijuana. But is that enough for Maryland to become a model for marijuana and racial justice? In this episode, we'll examine that question and see if marijuana reparations are possible for those communities most harmed by the "War on Drugs" – a war whose ramifications are still felt today.

On this episode of Thinking Freely, you'll hear from:

Produced and hosted by: Nehemiah Bester, communications strategist, ACLU of Maryland

This podcast was recorded on Piscataway land.

TRANSCRIPT

00:00 - 00:19
Michele Hall
How we've gotten here is that there is no trust between communities of color and law enforcement. But what I hope is that we are really forcibly refocusing law enforcement away from relying on marijuana and its connections to black criminality, to police our communities.

00:25 - 00:52
Nehemiah Bester
You listening to Thinking Freely with the ACLU of Maryland. The show that talks about what's happening politically in Maryland, from the courts to the streets and everywhere in between. I'm your host Nehemiah Bester. Marijuana, let's talk about it. In 2022, Maryland voters overwhelmingly decided that it was time for marijuana to be legalized for recreational use. But let's be real.

00:53 - 01:21
Nehemiah Bester
That should have happened years ago. Since 2014, marijuana has been decriminalized in the state for possession of ten grams or less. Specifically, black and brown people who were searched at a rate of 2.41 times higher than whites. And that research only came four years after decriminalization. On top of this, marijuana legalization has opened the door to for profit businesses with local stores and industries using financial gain from the substance.

01:21 - 01:44
Nehemiah Bester
The unfortunate truth of it is, is that there seem to have always been two very different realities of marijuana use with black and brown people use it, it's criminalized. The very intentional racist war on drugs created by President Nixon was used to target black people specifically, but when white people use it, not only are consequences less severe, it's seen more as medicinal and now profitable.

01:46 - 02:14
Nehemiah Bester
This gets into another issue on marijuana reparations for those communities that are owed for their constant persecution and community destruction over a commonly used plant. The ACLU of Maryland acted fast this legislative session to push for legislation that put an end to these outdated laws, including ending stops and searches over the alleged smell of marijuana, which police have long used as a precursor to justify their own violent crimes in communities this wants to serve.

02:15 - 02:36
Nehemiah Bester
To help us make sense of all of this. We have Michelle Hall, who's an Assistant Public Defender at the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, where she represents clients on appeal and engages in legislative advocacy, as well as Lawrence Grandpre the Director of Research for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, who focuses on police accountability and community based economic development.

02:37 - 02:38
Nehemiah Bester
Thanks for joining me, too.

02:39 - 02:40
Michele Hall
Thanks for having us.

02:42 - 03:09
Nehemiah Bester
So, Lawrence, I want to, I want to start with you. You've done tons of research on community-based development, particularly on drug policy and criminal justice. So even before Marylanders overwhelmingly voted to legalize recreational marijuana, right, in Maryland, there have been calls for reparations for those most impacted by the dangerous war on drugs. And, you know, we're talking about black people and the communities they reside in.

03:10 - 03:16
Nehemiah Bester
My question to you is, are marijuana reparations possible in our state?

03:16 - 03:40
Lawrence Grandpre
That's a good question. And the answer is yes. But I think part of the important thing to understand this definition of reparations differs depends on who you talk to. So many people sorry, under a lot of different definitions, reparations. But at the core of my definition of reparations is, I guess I'd probably say two things. First, it is not just a recognition of guilt.

03:41 - 04;02
Lawrence Grandpre
Apology really doesn't matter to me. That's just words. These are things that are very important to other forms of definitions of reparations from the United Nations. One of the most important things for me, I will say the first thing is the promise of non-repetition, as in if we recognize if there has been a historical harm. You have to build structures of accountability to not have attacking again or not keep doing it.

04:03 - 04:33
Lawrence Grandpre
Well, of course, reparations essentially try to do is just funding and don't actually deal with the systemic systems causing the violence. The violence can continue. So, I would say the first thing upon repetition, the second thing is that the people who are aggrieved by the harm have to choose for themselves the mechanism of redress for the harm. And I think that's critically important because many of the calls for reparation essentially are just giving people money, either cash payments or giving already existing institutions money.

04:34 - 05:01
Lawrence Grandpre
And when you think about the war on drugs, part of the research we've done about the war on drugs talks about the hollowing out of community capacity as one of the critical impacts of the war on drugs. So, you think about all the people who that's why we started community groups, nonprofit businesses. They were literally in jail. So, what you create when you just see funding as reparations is either cash payments, which are not politically popular, very difficult to logistically do.

05:01 - 05:31
Lawrence Grandpre
And when presented, largely end up, people buying sustenance goods or luxury goods, that then that money flows out of the community very quickly, doesn't build institutional capacity to protect the community. There's more political power long term. Or if you just see is funding, we it would do is it creates basically the existing institutional apparatus. This if you call the nonprofit industrial complex, the white savior industrial complex, is basically just a blank check for them to continue to provide services to the community, which many people deem to services themselves as problematic...

05:31 - 06:11
Lawrence Grandpre
...racist, reflective of black pathology, community and capacity. So the call for reparations, the war on drugs, I think maybe because people didn't use the word reparations, but it goes back, you know, decades to at least the seventies when people talked about, you know, the beginning of the heroin epidemic and seeing the joblessness that many Black soldiers coming home from Vietnam came home to and saying this is the beginning of methadone. Saying you can't just give us methadone and ignore what you're doing to the community, can't just give us methadone and ignore what you're doing to the Black Panthers, can't just give us methadone and ignore the larger systemic reality that drive people to addiction.

06:11 - 06:46
Lawrence Grandpre
And now you have visions of reparations that often use things like methadone expansion itself, reparations. While many of the Black elders in the space talks like Mutula Shakur, a political prisoner in New York, was recently released after 40 years of incarceration. He was doing addiction care in his community, specifically questioning methadone and using things like acupuncture. But also, more importantly, political conscientization through the Black Panthers taking over the weekend detox clinic that was their vision of liberatory methodology instead of the public health community supporting that

06:46 - 07:05
Lawrence Grandpre
through reparations frame. The public health community teamed up with the New York Rockefeller Republicans to shut down the clinic that would choose to cooperate in New York. The Panthers and the Young Lords took over this clinics, and public health people assisted the Rockefeller Republicans to take it down, because those folks were against methadone. Methadone was what these people had built their careers off of.

07:06 - 07:26
Lawrence Grandpre
So, the reality is that we can't allow a nonprofit system which is largely hostile to the concept that Black people have the ability to solve their own problems. Giving them money cannot be the limit of how we define reparations. So, it has to be bottom-up community control. We've been centering all that here in Baltimore and Maryland.

07:26 - 07:47
Nehemiah Bester
I want to shift gears a little bit. So, Michelle here's a clip from the ACLU of Maryland Public Policy Director Yanet Amanuel during our 2023 Grassroots Legislative Priorities Presentation a few months ago. She talks about what policy changes are needed to make a difference for racial justice in marijuana legalization.

07:48 - 08:10
Yanet Amanuel
The other bill that we'll be working on this session is also a marijuana related issue, and that is to eliminate criminal penalties for possession with intent to distribute and possessing over the civil use amount, which is 2.5 ounces. Under the current law, possession with intent to distribute and possession of more than a civil use amount, which is 2.5 ounces, can still result in a misdemeanor conviction.

08:10 - 08:32
Yanet Amanuel
Such convictions carry a penalty of for possession is six months in jail and $1,000 fine and intent to distribute is punishable by three years imprisonment and a $5,000 fine. Without limiting these penalties, Black people will be vulnerable to existing arrest patterns where they will continue to be disproportionately targeted by police and criminal penalties despite marijuana legalization.

08:32 - 09:03
Yanet Amanuel
Last year sensing trends in Maryland circuit courts for marijuana offenses over the last decade was released and it revealed that nearly 50% of people charged with felony or misdemeanor offenses that charge was their first entanglement with the criminal legal system, meaning that they didn't have any prior records. And the overwhelming majority of these folks are Black. Additionally, we've seen through every step of both the decriminalization in Maryland and legalization nationwide that racial disparities in arrests and enforcement will persist through every outlet possible.

09:03 - 09:38
Yanet Amanuel
Thus, without eliminating these penalties, we will only have partial legalization and have made no progress in accomplishing the goal of racial justice and stopping this racist enforcement of our marijuana laws. Which is why the members of the MGA said that they were prioritizing legalizing Maryland to begin with. So, in 2023, the ACLU, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, the Office of the Public Defender and our allies will work on a bill, to pass a bill that eliminates these penalties and designates possession of more than the civil use amount and possession with intent to distribute subject to citations and civil fines rather than a criminal conviction.

09:39 - 10:01
Nehemiah Bester
Given that clip, even though criminalization for the recreational use of marijuana is ending, there still seem to be criminal penalties for possession over the civil use amount, civil use limit and possession with intent to distribute. So, my question is, what's the hope for next session to ensure that we eliminate criminal penalties for marijuana?

10:02 - 10:23
Michele Hall
Well, I certainly hope that our sponsors from this past year, Delegate Davis and Senator Carter, as Yanet had mentioned in the clip, will reintroduce their bills that would have eliminated the criminal penalties for possession over a civil use amount and possession with intent to distribute. And, you know, really, for us, this is a matter of fundamental fairness, right?

10:23 - 10:49
Michele Hall
If we have something that is legal, it's legal to go into the store and purchase this product and it should not continue to be subject to criminal penalties for engaging in the cannabis market, even if it may be outside of what is in the legalized scheme. The legislature over the past couple of years has started doing a racial equity impact note, which talks about the race-based impacts of different pieces of legislation and bills.

10:0 - 11:16
Michele Hall
And the note for this bill this passed session made really clear that although national data shows that the lifetime cannabis use of Black people is actually less than their white counterparts, Black people are disproportionately arrested and convicted of cannabis crimes. And that disparity is also true in Maryland. In Maryland we have a 29% Black people are 29% of the state's population, but 59% of the cannabis possession arrests.

11:16 - 11:42
Michele Hall
And so, reducing the penalties related to possession and possession with intent to distribute cannabis really balances I think the state's interest in regulating the cannabis marketplace, making sure that people are engaging in the legal marketplace while not criminalizing people for engaging outside of that marketplace. And ultimately, we have something that it's in the state's interest to bring a cannabis marketplace here, right, Because it's an economic boon.

11:43 - 12:10
Michele Hall
But with that, we can't continue to have the disparate surveillance enforcement and arrests in Black communities for cannabis use. And one thing that, you know, I think some people would say, well, if people are possessing, you know, the personal use amount of illegal amount, then this is not a problem. Ultimately, I think there are incentives for police and law enforcement to characterize things that are part of just personal use of cannabis as possession with intent to distribute.

12:10 - 12:37
Michele Hall
Right. And so, if you and some of the things that are in HB 1071, which I know we'll talk about shortly, are meant to get at that, right? So, it used to be that if an officer saw you in possession of a drug and having cash then therefore, you're engaged in possession with intent to distribute because cash in proximity to a drug necessarily means that you're selling drugs. Not taking into account that large parts of our communities,

12:37 - 13:03
Michele Hall
right, are not necessarily using banks are going to cash checking storefronts and getting cash in that type of way. And if you want to go and purchase cannabis with cash, that should not all of a sudden have you exposed to being charged with possession with intent to distribute. And so, there are incentives in order to, again, be able to surveil and force and arrest individuals in Black communities to characterize things

13:03 - 13:25
Michele Hall
that in white communities, I think would very easily be seen as part of legal cannabis use. And all of a sudden that as is seen as possession with intent to distribute. And so, without coming back and being sure to eliminate criminal penalties for cannabis, I think that's a risk that is still going to exist. And so hopefully we'll be able to next session still work on that piece.

13:26 - 13:53
Nehemiah Bester
I want to I want to switch really quickly to you, Lawrence. So given that what Michele was just describing, you know, especially about the community aspect of that. On the topic of local campaigns and grassroots organizations and funding, what are the key components of accountable community control plans for the marijuana repair funds? Like how and how can people get involved and be a part of making this happen?

13:53 - 14:23
Lawrence Grandpre
That's a really good question. So, I've been studying this issue since 2014, and I started studying it because it was clear to me that new money is a political opportunity to fund grassroots organizations. And so, part of the reason I was able to do that is because, like our organization is not a nonprofit. So many foundations did not want to give money for people to advocate on cannabis bills because it's still federally illegal.

14:24 - 14:56
Lawrence Grandpre
So, after the bill passes, they'll give some people money to do the social justice implementation of the bill, but actually crafting the bill, writing the policies very few foundations have an appetite for that. So, all over the country, the Cannabis Reinvestment Provisions passed without the typical cadre of social justice grassroots organizations that foundation funded being present. And many of those examples vary in their success, but many of them share certain characteristics that we felt delayed them and prevented them from being considered reparations that we tried to correct here in Maryland.

14:56 - 15:18
Lawrence Grandpre
So, one of which is that it was very much centrally controlled. This is part of the new technocratic, top-down vision of social justice that we need to have the money centralized in state capitals where academics and nonprofit people can choose where the money goes because there's a general distrust of local decision makers and people on the ground because they're not seen as enlightened and not seen as intelligent.

15:19 - 15:47
Lawrence Grandpre
In our experience, looking at examples like Illinois was really just the exact opposite, where they had a very highly resourced fund. So, they put 30% of the tax revenue there but the fund was largely fast for political appointees and certain hand-selected representatives of essentially a nonprofit industrial complex. And this produced results where people who were already resourced nonprofits got a majority of the money in some Black churches right.

15:47 - 16:06
Lawrence Grandpre
And that's not even necessarily bad. That's not reparations to the war on drugs. reparations for the war on drugs means that the type of people who may have gone to jail for cannabis possession or attempt to distribute are going to be preferred in the decision-making process when these grants go out. But we got the opposite. You to have three years of financial statements.

16:06 - 16:30
Lawrence Grandpre
You need to have evaluations for your programs, claiming your using evidence based on best practices. All of these seemingly race neutral conceptual criteria on who gets money that they weaponized, and its grassroots organizations on the ground. So, what we're doing here in Maryland is that we're having the pile of money, just 35% being divvied up in proportion to by locality and have the money be given to localities not centralized in the state governments.

16:31 - 16:57
Lawrence Grandpre
And this is basically theorized that given the demographics of how people get elected in different state legislatures, you have more juice, with your local elected official than with your state elected officials. Most people can't get to the state capital. most people have never been to Annapolis. The city council races are decided by a few thousand votes or a few hundred votes rather than a few thousand votes, the amount of money that goes into these races are different, and people just know these people.

16:57 - 17:15
Lawrence Grandpre
Even if you don't like them, they know. They know what they are. They know what they can get to them. They know people that know these people. And it's just there are 15 of them in the council rather than just like the one or two or three people in your district. So, you just have the ability to magnify your social capital locally, to influence local politics differently than state politics.

17:16 - 17:42
Lawrence Grandpre
So that's going to be a proportional divvying up of the funds. And the funds will be given to locality. These localities must pass an ordinance by the county council or city council that dictates how the funds will be used to enumerate the harms the war on drugs within certain guardrails. So, it can't go with policing, it can't go to replace already allocated in the budget and can't kind of play budget shell games used to fill gaps in your existing budget.

17:43 - 18:05
Lawrence Grandpre
And importantly, it doesn't just go to the executive because the other criticism we saw is that many times the executive is seen as the safe place to put money. We have these things in Maryland called local management boards, and they actually take a large chunk of state, federal and foundation money given to localities. And these often times led by political appointees in the executive.

18:05 - 18:27
Lawrence Grandpre
So, the idea that we're doing here in Baltimore City that we want to replicate statewide, if we're doing a reparations commission and reparations commission will have one representative from every city council, district and reparations commission will be tasked with studying the longitudinal impact of the war on drugs in Baltimore City and producing recommendations for what should be funded to repair that harm.

18:28 - 19:00
Lawrence Grandpre
So, within the framework of the policy, what folks need to do with they need to talk to whoever it is at the local level in city governance or county governance they have a connection to and tell them that they need to pass the ordinance to get this money once it starts flowing in July of 2024. And we need to be part of that process because whoever holds that money needs to be very clear with the decision-making criteria need to be. We've done things in Baltimore that say things like you should not have to have a 501c3 status already, that's very prohibitive.

19:00 - 19:22
Lawrence Grandpre
You should not need to have, you know, what are the audited statements and the executive capacity to open the fiscal sponsorship. We need to have money allocated to incubate applicants. Taking public money is very difficult. There's lots of strings attached to. So, if you want grassroots people to receive the money, they have to be given incubation and technical support to learn how to take this money.

19:22 - 19:44
Lawrence Grandpre
And if you're not doing those things, you're not doing a model that we think reflects reparations. So whatever people want to see in the bill, you have an opportunity to push locally in Maryland to have your locality implement a process that reflects what you think needs to happen. And that would not necessarily be the case with the money stuck in Annapolis.

19:44 - 20:11
Nehemiah Bester
I want to quickly go to you, Michele. Similarly on that same topic, but earlier, you briefly mentioned HB1071, you know, and that just passed just in time in the legislative session. Why was it so critical that Maryland passed this bill to end police stops and searches over the alleged smell of marijuana? If legalization was already on its way?

20:14 - 20:43
Michele Hall
Yeah. So, under the Fourth Amendment right, that is what regulates in that body of case law, regulates when police can conduct a stop or a search. And under Maryland cases, there had been a path created in the cases that have come out since 2014 when marijuana was first decriminalized, that basically said the odor of marijuana alone could be enough for a stop.

20:43 - 21:11
Michele Hall
So, a stop of a person and a search of a vehicle, as long as there were any marijuana related crimes and because odor, because there were still marijuana related crimes on the books. And at the time that the most recent case came out last June, marijuana was still contraband. Its odor alone could be indicative of contraband or perhaps a crime.

21:12 - 21:35
Michele Hall
Now, as we talked about earlier, right, we still have marijuana related crimes on the books, possessing more than the civil use amount possession with intent to distribute. And so even when marijuana was legalized, there was still a path for courts to be able to say, well, odor of marijuana can be indicative of a crime because we still have possession with intent to distribute and we still have possession over the civil use amount is a crime.

21:36 -22:00
Michele Hall
So, legalization alone did not fix this. And quite frankly, the way that so many of our clients come into contact with the system is because of the odor or the alleged odor of marijuana. You know, unlike other things, body cams, for better or worse, have changed a lot of things about policing. And one thing is that we have a check of being able to say, did this series of events happen the way that you said that it happened?

22:01 - 22:18
Michele Hall
There is no way, though, to verify or not if police smelled the odor of marijuana. And so, we regularly have police saying, oh, during the course of a traffic stop, I came up to the window and I smelled the odor of marijuana. And I use that as the basis to search a car. Maybe they find nothing. Maybe we find a handgun, maybe they find something else.

22:19 - 22:43
Michele Hall
I mean, all that evidence is automatically admissible, maybe. And a lot of times they have not found any marijuana, or they've maybe found a small, small roach, which I think there's a question of whether or not that is emitting any type of odor of marijuana, right. So, without this bill, we would have created a situation where people can go engage in this legal marketplace that we put a lot of time and energy into setting up.

22:43 - 23:07
Michele Hall
And they can go to the dispensary, they can buy weed, they can leave the store, they can have cannabis in their car, and then they can be stopped for rolling a stop sign. They can be stopped for failing to put on a turn signal and the police can come up and maybe they do smell marijuana or maybe they don't, but they just saw them leave the dispensary, so they know they have marijuana in the car and say, well, now I want to search your car because of the odor of marijuana.

23:07 - 23:39
Michele Hall
And there would be nothing that anyone would be able to do to challenge that, because that would likely continue to be seen as a legal stop or search. And so, this bill was important to put a stop to that and put a stop to that, at the same time, you know, that marijuana was going to be legalized. So, you know, I think the first thing is there's an open question of whether or not the courts were going to ultimately conclude and, you know, this was a lot of the pushback we got from the opposition is that the courts will ultimately decide this issue.

23:39 - 24:06
Michele Hall
And, you know, it would be they're going to say that it's not reasonable to do that anymore. Maybe they would, but maybe they wouldn't because of, again, that path that I explained that the case law took. But the other thing is that on July 1st, people are going to be able to legally possess marijuana. It takes a very long time for a case to wind its way through the courts in re D.D. which was the most recent case that was litigated on the odor of marijuana and was my case from the trial courts through all of the appeals.

24:06 - 24:32
Michele Hall
That case began in November of 2019, and we didn't get an opinion from the Supreme Court of Maryland until June 2022. So, you know, if we were to leave this to the courts, we could be talking about two and a half or three years until we get a final conclusion of whether or not conducting stops and searches based on the odor of marijuana alone was something that would still be permitted in the era of legalization.

24:32 - 24:58
Michele Hall
And in the meantime, people would continue to be stopped and searched. And that's that is the conduct that we want to prohibit. And mainly that's because there is a risk. Any time we're engaging with law enforcement, there's a risk. There's a risk, particularly for people of color. And we don't have to go into depth about the many, many encounters that have happened right in the course of a traffic stop that has escalated unnecessarily and someone has end up seriously injured or killed.

24:59 - 25:24
Michele Hall
And, you know, I think the most prescient thing that happened during the course of this legislative session was on the day that we had our final hearing on HB 1071 was the day that the Demonte Ward Blake excessive force lawsuit was settled with Prince George's County and Demonte Ward Blake was a Black man who, in the course of a traffic stop, was paralyzed by law enforcement.

25:24 - 25:52
Michele Hall
And the reason, one of the reasons that that traffic stop escalated was because of the alleged odor of marijuana. And so, on the same day that we had that hearing, Prince George's County settled that excessive force lawsuit with Demonte Ward Blake's family for $7.5 million. And so, we have a county admitting to liability, right, for harming this Black man for it in a traffic stop that escalated over the odor of marijuana.

25:52 - 26:11
Michele Hall
And we're talking about should the police, until someone else steps in and says something, still be able to stop people and search them based on the odor of marijuana? I mean, imagine the conflict. There's already conflict that happens right now with people saying you can’t search me. It doesn't make any sense that we have something that I can smoke.

26:11 - 26:28
Michele Hall
Right. We have medical marijuana. We have at least right now, there's, you know, civil penalties. In July there aren't going to be for under the personal use amount. You're telling me that I can have this, then you can use that to search my car? And people all the time are saying that isn't right because it doesn't make any sense.

26:28 - 27:00
Michele Hall
Now, imagine the number of incidents and escalations that would happen if we left that paradigm in place for legalization. You know, we don't want, no one should suffer what Demonte Ward Blake and his family had to suffer. And so a large part of this is making sure if we are going to, you know, take this step and the voters took the step to say, yes, we want legal marijuana, then that means that everyone needs to be able to engage in that marketplace and have that product without being at risk of being brutalized by the police and without and not even stepping that far

27:00 - 27:23
Michele Hall
right? Without being at risk of your right to privacy being intruded upon.

27:41 - 28:02
Nehemiah Bester
Right. And that's an excellent point that you made, because I was thinking about that and wondering, you know, because like when those stops occur, like it's almost like you are literally but also metaphorically opening the door for higher risk. And so, I want to end with this final question to the both of you.

28:02 - 28:16
Nehemiah Bester
Lawrence, I can start with you. When it when it comes to marijuana legalization, we know isn't just about legal justice, right, it's about racial justice like we just talked about. What would a racial justice center marijuana model look like?

28:17 - 28:46
Lawrence Grandpre
So, answering this question over the years what I’ve have typically said that it's a three-legged stool. I think one of which is resentencing and expungement and the criminal justice side. So obviously, very few people are actually in jail for pure cannabis possession or really just pure possession of a drug, especially in Maryland. We charge in units and if one, so you get charged with possession of drugs, also might be charged resisting arrest, carrying a firearm, carrying paraphernalia.

28:46 - 29:19
Lawrence Grandpre
Assaulting an officer, and if one thing in that unit is non expungable, the entire unit is non expungable. So, we've had multiple fights over the so-called unit rule and expungement in Maryland. And in fact, that's an incredible frustration with some of the criminal justice advocates with the cannabis people, because the cannabis advocates not understanding Maryland, working off models in other states will offer pretty banal, pretty weak expungement bills around cannabis, and then they'll pass to great fanfare, not realizing that for the mass majority of people, that's completely useless.

29:20 - 29:43
Lawrence Grandpre
Right? So, the idea is to not just have pro forma cannabis possession, expungement and resentencing. Cause almost no one goes to jail for just possessing cannabis, but actually deal with larger questions of if I have to carry a weapon to protect myself and my family contracts and unenforceable by the courts in the street gang. And if you don't pay back the person giving drugs, you can literally die.

29:44 - 30:11
Lawrence Grandpre
So, it raises complicated questions that social justice advocates don't like to have. To be like the perfect victim of the nonviolent drug possession offender. But we in Maryland have had conversations about having new sentencing hearings for people who not only have complex units of charges, including cannabis possession and intent to distribute, but also when you have cannabis production on your jacket, you may have in the future been charged with another unrelated crime but the previous possession of cannabis.

30:11 - 30:35
Lawrence Grandpre
may have been an escalator to give you a higher sentence for that future crime you committed, which isn't fair if we've now deemed cannabis to no longer be illegal. So, these resentencing hearings are very important, but they're very difficult and logistically time consuming. So having conversations now which have not been on the table, because we had a Republican governor about potential clemency and gubernatorial pardons is also on the table.

30:35 - 31:12
Lawrence Grandpre
The second leg of the stool is the business side. On the business side, it's very complicated. We don't have time to get into it. But the idea obviously is that for folks who want to engage in the cannabis economy. Folks who have a so-called legacy economy, who have been in the street game for years, maybe folks who have been growers who have particular strains or essentially intellectual property that they've branded over years, are they going to be able brought into the economy through a collaborative mechanism or been completely criminalized or be exploited in terms of, you know, people buying their brand name, people buying that intellectual property, using them as spokespeople, but essentially giving them pennies while

31:12 - 31:33
Lawrence Grandpre
these big, multi state operators make millions. There's no simple, easy way to do that, given that the Supreme Court is probably going to come down even harder on race specific policy in a few weeks now when they release that decision. But we're looking at a variety of mechanisms to ensure minority participation. And in the last leg in my mind is the community reinvestment reparations.

31:33 - 31:56
Lawrence Grandpre
Cause the point is that not everybody wants to sell cannabis legally, not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. So, for the variety of people, and not everybody who was impacted by cannabis prohibition went to jail. This impacts entire communities when someone who goes to jail for cannabis possession or intent to distribute, they were a mother, a brother, a sister, a cousin, the father paying bills, buying diapers, paying rent.

31:57 - 32:19
Lawrence Grandpre
So, the entire community was destabilized by the hyper targeted, hyper incarceration produced by the war on drugs. So, you have to invest holistically in the entire community. We have a lot of liberal individualism in terms of how people conceptualize reparations. If you went to jail, you should get a check. That's not, for example, an African way of conceptualizing a community as a central political unit.

32:19 - 32:42
Lawrence Grandpre
And so, the idea of reparations for me is it has to function at a community holistic level and be able to employ people who maybe don't want to sell drugs, maybe they want to run a youth based nonprofit, maybe they went to a business entirely unrelated to cannabis. You need unrestricted funds to be able to fund those dreams that community has, and we typically get told we don't have any money, but now we do it because it's cannabis legalization tax revenue.

32:42 - 33:10
Lawrence Grandpre
So, the idea is to be able to invest holistically and not have to kind of red tape and bureaucracy that typically hamstrings these funds when they come from the federal level, related to others. It’s definitely not a perfect vehicle because state money can be very difficult to utilize, but it opens up possibilities that would otherwise be off the table because of the ways in which money is typically funneled very narrowly into programing and very narrowly into grants and very narrowly into very specific places.

33:10 - 33:20
Lawrence Grandpre
You have a whole more holistic criteria for why you need the aperture of what’s able to be funded and help people access this.

33:20 - 33:26
Nehemiah Bester
Same question to you, Michelle. What would a racial justice centered marijuana model look like in your opinion?

33:27 - 34:01
Michele Hall
So, I think throughout this incremental legalization journey here in Maryland, one of the things we've continually talked about is how this is meant to start to ameliorate the war on drugs, the disparate enforcement in communities of color, and meant to refocus the police away from enforcing low level marijuana laws to focusing more on more violent crime and serious crime that is impacting our communities.

34:02 - 34:31
Michele Hall
One of the things that Yanet that would constantly say throughout the hearings this session is that, you know, relying on order alone is incentivizing lazy policing and lazy law enforcement, because being able to use the alleged odor of marijuana as like a blank check, and that's how I started talking about it towards the end, right. Is that really this was a blank check to be able to stop people, harass people, search their cars, you know, question them in those types of things.

34:31 - 34:53
Michele Hall
Right. And so, what I really hope that in what we have started to do and there's still more work to be done, but I hope that what we've made clear through passing these bills this session is that we don't want law enforcement to rely on low hanging fruit. I think relying on marijuana is another iteration of broken window’s policing.

34:53 - 35:13
Michele Hall
Right. And saying that if you're getting at these low-level crimes that are related to marijuana or with the investigation starts based on marijuana, and maybe you are finding something more serious, like a gun, who as like Lawrence was saying, right. Sometimes I have a gun because my community is unsafe, and I don't trust law enforcement to protect me and therefore I have a gun.

35:13 - 35:30
Michele Hall
But I am not using it in any type of violent crime or I'm not using it, I'm not going out and robbing people and something like that, but I'm just driving around and possessing a gun, which, you know, in some communities would be seen as your Second Amendment right and communities of color is seen as you need to be caged right.

35:30 - 36:07
Michele Hall
And so, I want us to remove the focus from marijuana and say how if we're going to continue to have this model of law enforcement of policing that we have, how do we use that to actually get at and focus on violent crime and the roots of violent crime that is causing harm in our communities? Because whenever you stop someone based on the odor of marijuana and frisk them and maybe you find nothing or maybe you find something, what you are engendering is a feeling of unfairness and a feeling of like, I'm they're just messing with me just to mess with me.

36:07 - 36:30
Michele Hall
And most of the time it is. And therefore, when something more serious happens, I'm not going to cooperate with you and work with you because you're the same person that was just harassing me off of the odor of marijuana last week or is lying and saying that you smelled marijuana when you know that you didn't. And so how we've gotten here is that there is no trust between communities of color and law enforcement.

36:30 - 36:55
Michele Hall
And it's a shame that we have had to forcibly remove these low hanging fruit tools that law enforcement relies on to say no, you need to do something, something different. And I'm not saying that I think policing is going to save us or anything else. But what I hope is that we are really forcibly refocusing law enforcement away from relying on marijuana and its connections to Black criminality

36:56 - 37:18
Michele Hall
to police our communities and are hopefully moving towards a model where we are actually investigating and engaging at solving the real roots of violence in our communities. And that's the thing that will be helpful. So, I guess the real answer is that I think the racial justice centered marijuana model is like removing marijuana from any type of justice.

37:18 - 37:37
Michele Hall
And I will be very glad when I see a lot less cases where marijuana is playing any type of role. And I think every time I see those cases now, I roll my eyes because I know and I would always say and I still continue to say, right, I started my career as a trial attorney in Prince George's County, and I never saw a marijuana case, at the University of Maryland.

37:37 - 37:58
Michele Hall
But don't tell me that they're not smoking weed there, right. It's because of where law enforcement is choosing to put those resources. And I hope that now that we're saying this is not a priority and in fact, it's not even a crime, that law enforcement does something different, and marijuana is removed from this model of policing in our communities.

37:59 - 38:18
Nehemiah Bester
Right. It doesn't seem like that should be a priority for the state of Maryland at all. So hopefully we're headed in that direction in the next year in the next couple of years. But I want to thank you so much for your perspectives, it's so needed during this time. And I appreciate all the work that you all do. So, thank you.

38:19 - 38:19
Lawrence Grandpre
Thank you.

38:20 - 38:27
Michele Hall
Thank you. And thank you for having us.

38:27 - 38:47
Nehemiah Bester
Thanks for joining us on this episode of Thinking Freely. If you like this conversation, please feel free to leave a like, comment and share to your networks. And lastly, don't forget to subscribe to Thinking Freely wherever you get your podcasts. This show was recorded on Piscataway land. I’m Nehemiah Bester, the host and producer of Thinking Freely, see you next time.

Thinking Freely, ACLU of Maryland's podcast, informs Marylanders about what's happening politically – from the courts to the streets – so they can get involved and realize a more equitable Maryland for all. 

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