To the Editor:

A new piece of legislation has been brought to the senate floor that would end the extreme criminalization of cannabis for adults through descheduling cannabis from the list of controlled substances. H.R. 3884 is a direct response to Nixon’s War on Drugs, and its systemic deterioration of underrepresented communities. H.R. 3884 will implement a five percent tax on cannabis products, and will store the revenue from the tax in a trust fund to make Small Business Administration loans and services available to cannabis-related legitimate businesses and service providers. To understand the importance of this bill, the socio-economic fallout from The War on Drugs needs to be understood first.

More than just another chip on America’s shoulder, the “War on Drugs’’ obliterated communities of color, decayed generational wealth and made economic mobility arduous, and caused violent cycles of poverty and oppression. The effects of the War on Drugs linger today in the incessant incarceration of African Americans as the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that “one-third of black male Americans will spend time in state or federal prison at some point in their lifetime.”

The War on Drugs was never about the threat of “reefer madness.” Quoting John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s aid on domestic affairs, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but 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.”

This systematic vilification of these communities helped the creation of implicit biases against minorities in the American people. These biases heavily influenced the implementation of “Stop-and-Frisk’’ policies. We can see this in action in New York’s police department’s policy allowing officers to stop “suspicious” individuals and search for illicit substances on their person. In 2019 under New York’s “Stop-and-Frisk’’ policy 13,459 stops were reported, and of those stops 8,867 were innocent, 7,981 were Black, and 3,869 were Latinx. Under H.R. 3884 congress found that a “legacy of racial and ethnic injustices, compounded by the disproportionate collateral consequences of 80 years of cannabis prohibition enforcement, now limits participation in the industry.” H.R. 3884 is taking the necessary steps in the process of making amends to communities of color by providing “reinvestment in certain persons adversely impacted by the War on Drugs, to provide for expungement of certain cannabis offenses, and for other purposes.”

To address the decades of injustice that have plagued communities impacted by the War on Drugs, contact your senators and voice your support for H.R. 3884, the first step to dismantling the oppressive law enforcement system and the culture set up to disrupt communities, suppress civil rights advocates, and enable unchecked violence by authorities.

Julia Scataglini, junior NHS

Birch Hill Road, Newtown December 25, 2020