The NAACP Says Stop Jailing Blacks And Let Them Smoke Kush!!!

The NAACP recently announced their “unconditional endorsement” of recreational marijuana use. They claim legalization will stop the system from using current marijuana laws to criminalize black people.

According to a just-released study by the Drug Policy Alliance, blacks are far more likely to be arrested for pot possession than whites — even though statistically, blacks use marijuana at lower rates than whites. The Alliance, a national advocacy group, favors treatment rather than arrest or imprisonment for people suffering from drug dependency.

At a press conference at the California NAACP’s Sacramento headquarters, the group’s president, Alice Huffman, portrayed marijuana laws as a means of criminalizing young black men. She was joined by several other African-America leaders, including Aubry Stone, president of the California Black Chamber of Commerce, and Neil Franklin of the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP).

“It is time for them to stop using my community to fill the prisons,” Huffman said. “Once you get into the system, the next time you get arrested, they bump you up [to more serious charges].”

Defendants are usually given a summons that “looks like a traffic ticket,” the report noted. They’re not given a public defender, and usually end up paying a fine that can add up to hundreds of dollars. But afterwards, these people have officially pleaded guilty to a drug offense. This, in turn, shows up on criminal databases and can come up years later when, for instance, the person applies for a job.
“For young, low-income African-Americans and Latinos – who use marijuana less than young whites, and who already face numerous barriers and hurdles – a criminal record for the ‘drug crime’ of marijuana possession can seriously harm their life chances,” the report said.

The study also found that total marijuana arrests have gone up, even while overall crime and arrest rates have been going down. There were more than 60,000 arrests for marijuana possession in California in 2008, according to the report, compared to 20,000 in 1990. These arrest records come from the U.S. Government’s FBI Uniform Crime Report.

Arrests for “youth of color” rose four times faster than that, from 3,100 in 1990 to 16,300 in 2008. The study found that blacks and Latinos make up 44 percent of California’s population, but 56 percent of marijuana possession arrests. This was despite the fact that whites were slightly more likely than blacks to have had used marijuana in the past month; whites were about 50 percent more likely than Latinos to have used the drug in the preceding month.

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