Today, Explained - Yes we cannabis

Episode Date: April 20, 2018

Today Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced a plan to decriminalize marijuana federally. But the debate over legalization rages on at the local level. Sean Rameswaram speaks with a Massachusetts mayor who wants marijuana to fund schools, and a D.C. pot entrepreneur who’s finding a way around the city’s ban on sales. Afterwards, a discussion about marijuana reparations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, this is Andy. Sean Ramos for him. Today Explained. How are you? Good, good. Good hearing from you, buddy. You too. You know, a long time ago, you and I worked in a department store that will go unnamed.

Those were good times. And I sold shoes, and you sold... Yeah, I sold mattresses. Would you mind telling me a bit about that experience for a thing I'm working on? Sure. Great. Okay. And in the meantime, if you're interested in a mattress, you can go to mattressfirm.com and use the code podcast10 to get 10% off before May 2nd. These high school boys and girls are having a hop at the local soda fountain. Innocentlyently they dance.

Innocent of a new and deadly menace lurking behind closed doors. Marijuana, the burning weed with its roots in hell. And the fight rages on in Attleboro, Massachusetts. The state has legalized the burning weed, but a number of townsfolk want nothing to do with it. One teetotaling mayor is stuck in the middle. This is Today Explained. Massachusetts legalized marijuana in 2016, but the bill was kind of quirky. It gave individual cities the right to opt out. And a majority of them did. Almost 200 municipalities have banned selling recreational weed.

But the little Rhode Island border town of Attleboro, Massachusetts, wasn't one of them. How many shops do you see? I don't have an upper limit as to how many, you know, would be a problem. More than five, certainly more than five. Paul Hero is the mayor of Attleboro. He's become one of the biggest backers of legal weed in the state. I'm a new mayor. I've only been in office for about three and a half months. Congratulations.

Well, thank you. But the mayor's got a lot of opposition. A member of the city council is scared Attleboro will become like a new Amsterdam, like people from Rhode Island are going to be pouring in to buy weed. The police chief says the mayor's making a deal with the devil,

and a lot of people around town are pissed. I think marijuana is a very dumb thing. I don't care if the state voted for it or not. Why should we get into it? And the funny thing about Mayor Hero, he agrees. Personally, I've never smoked marijuana. Not even once? No, I've never tried. I'm actually a complete teetotaler. I've never had a sip of alcohol either. I'm actually one of the people who voted against it. Really? Yeah, I'm not a fan of it. Okay, so you're the biggest cheerleader for weed in Attleboro, but you voted against it?

When I voted against it, I was not in my capacity as mayor. I was a state representative, and I was also voting as a private citizen because it was a ballot question. As a politician who's now forced to sort of go through this legalization process, you're the exact person that you're now trying to convince. My position as a private citizen, you know, that's how I cast my vote. It was, you know, not to legalize it. However, I have taken an oath to uphold the city charter, the state constitution and the federal constitution. This is the will of the people, you know, so my thought is let's keep it away from kids, keep it out of public places, like walking down the sidewalk and don't use it when you're behind the wheel of an automobile. You know, our budget in Attleboro is always hurting for money. And so this is hundreds and

hundreds of thousands of dollars to make in revenues every year, something that our school system could benefit from. So we're just capitalizing on this. So how exactly does it raise money? Is it just as much of taxes that you're going to place on marijuana? Yeah, we basically have what's called a host agreement. The city and a marijuana dispensary, the city is allowed to tax them up to 3% of their revenues. And where is this marijuana coming from? Is it being grown in Massachusetts? Is it coming from California, Mexico? Where?

No, actually here in Attleboro, we have a number of facilities where that's all they do here is they just grow for either medicinal purposes or for recreational purpose. And how much money do you think it's going to raise? You know, we've estimated that it will bring in $200,000, maybe even as much as a million and a half dollars, depending on how many facilities we have. So the amount of

money that could, you know, come to Attleboro could really help our school budget, our, you know, our fire budget, you know, it could go a long way. Are your fire budgets and teacher budgets, are they in need? Are you deficient? Well, yeah, I mean, there's actually no city agency that is adequately funded. You know, the school department asked for an extra three and a half million dollars, and that's just to level fund services. Doesn't Massachusetts have like some of the best schools in the country? Well, you know, that's, it's funny you say that. Massachusetts is rated number one in education.

There's a lot of variation. Some school districts are, you know, not doing as well as others. Two years ago, in 2016, 35 teachers were laid off. I see. Attleboro is what's called a gateway city. Our median household income is below the state average. So some other communities that are very well off. And unfortunately, that's just not us.

It's funny you use that word gateway because of course, one of the main arguments made about marijuana is that it's a gateway drug. Oh, yes. By chance, it happens to be called that. Yeah. I think it's an argument even being made by your own police chief who said it's bad social policy. Marijuana is super dangerous. I think he said it's a more extreme things, too. Well, he means well. You know, his concern is public safety. The police chief doesn't set

policy. You know, the will of the people, 57 percent of the voters have said that this is something they want to see in Attleboro. And that's what we're going with. What do you say to people who reside in Attleboro and pretty strongly oppose this? I, you know, I've, I've looked at the peer-reviewed empirical research stuff that's been published in an academic journal and marijuana from my understanding and the research I've read, it's not nearly the dangerous drug that a lot of people are going to try and make it out to be. There's a saying that if you're drinking and driving, you're going to go through a red light. If you're smoking and driving, you're going to stop at a green light. The health consequences of alcohol are far more serious than what we know about the health consequences of marijuana.

And yet there's still so much pushback, right? I mean, why do you think people don't see what you see, like tax benefits and low risk? I'm thinking about two other situations. A lot of people said that doom and gloom will follow and society will completely fall apart if we, you know, legalize gay marriage. And even more recently, there were people saying, oh, if we have a transgender public accommodation, a so-called bathroom bill pass, we're going to have children victimized everywhere. And none of that has come true. Some might argue that it is even fear mongering based on discrimination. So I think marijuana is a very similar thing.

So even with all the pushback, this is going to happen, right? It's on like Donkey Kong? Yeah, basically the marijuana companies are going to be able to open up shop in the very near future. I believe this calendar year. I want to put the marijuana revenues to the best possible thing. And I believe that's education, especially considering we lost 35 teachers two years ago. Some people have said, oh, well, you're going to take drug money and spend it on kids. And it's like, no, we're putting that money towards, you know, the best possible use.

I often have joked that if marijuana was taxed when I was in high school, my classmates would have paid for their own education. All joking aside, legalization and decriminalization is serious business. There are billions of dollars to be made. But who's going to get that money? I like Thai food because the way that they use the flavor is unmatched, man. Unmatched. They get real creative with the names. You know, man. Unmatched. They get real creative with the names. You know, Bowtie, Typhoon. Come on. David's going to get at least

some of it. My name is David Omei and I'm the founder of High Speed Technologies. We have over 8,000 clients while being a black-owned business in an industry that has been marginalized for years. David runs a marijuana service in D.C. where it's legal to have, but not legal to buy, weed. You have to find a service where you can purchase either artwork, you can purchase cold-pressed juice, you can purchase And you will, in exchange, receive a gift, if you will. If you want to buy legal weed in D.C., you got to buy something else that will come with some legal weed. And David's entire business exists in this sort of weird legal gray area. But it isn't the cops who are making his life harder. It's the banks.

Marijuana is still federally illegal under the law. It's hard to run a business, you know, that you want to be legit with payroll and everything like that if you can't have proper access to banking. Oftentimes, entrepreneurs in this space are forced to hide themselves or disguise themselves as other types of companies. That takes a toll.

They make you feel like you're a criminal. The banks are scared to work with you. The processors are scared to work with you. They don't want to touch your money because they're scared of Visa and MasterCard or anybody in the feds coming down on them. You know, High Speed has been able to grow to be a substantial startup. We deserve to be heavily funded just like any other company in the space. Maybe the reason why that hasn't happened is because I am a young black entrepreneur. You know, VCs are not inclined to work with people that look like me. Most of my counterparts in this industry are actually behind bars.

The reality is this thing is federally illegal and people are being, for lack of better words, fucked over day and night, left and right, for just trying to operate in this space. Well, for lack of a better word, would you fuck with John Boehner if he knocked on your door tomorrow? He was super anti-weed when he was Speaker of the House, and now that he's retired, he's investing in weed. Yeah, he needs to reach out to me because at the end of the day, that really saddens me that politicians can change their mind. But it's funny because when a politician changes their mind, it's at the expense of so many people. And it's like, if you would have had that feeling at heart before, things would be a lot different. But when politicians are on that side of the fence and then all of a sudden change their mind, what happens to the people that were

victims under that previous mindset. That shift of consciousness has casualties. How can the legalization of marijuana account for all of the people, most often people of color, who have been punished for using and selling the drug in the past? That's after the break. So Andy, why should someone come to a store to buy a mattress instead of just going online where you've got so many options to do it there? Totally. As convenient as it is to sit on your butt in your pajamas and shop for mattresses

from the ease of your computer, what I learned as a mattress salesman was that there are indeed some benefits to going to an actual physical store. One of them is people are side sleepers, stomach sleepers, back sleepers, and it's really important to try one out yourself so you actually know what you're getting without blindly just getting something to your home and it's too firm and you're waking up and tossing and turning and you're not getting good rest and you have to go through all the hassle of returning it and it's a big mess. As someone who knows mattress policy, do you think something like a 120-night sleep trial and the 120-night low-price guarantee,

the kinds that Mattress Firm offers at mattressfirm.com, and you can get 10% off with the code PODCAST10 by May 2nd, is that a reasonable, good policy for returns? Yeah, that was better than what I could offer for my old business. So yeah, that sounds awesome. Great. The first marijuana laws in the Midwest and the Southwest,

early 20th century, they were directed at Mexican migrants and Mexican-Americans. Even the fact that the drug is referred to as marijuana and not cannabis today, it was out of a desire to tie it to those Spanish-speaking immigrants. Marijuana smoking, experts point out,

can make a helpless addict of its victim within weeks, causing physical and moral ruin and death. It was called the marijuana menace. This terrible weed is reaching out like a mad killer, mowing down the youth of our land, distorting their minds and leading them into lives of degradation and crime. Some of those perceptions continued into the 70s.

The Nixon White House declared there were no more drugs. America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive. Pushing through measures like mandatory sentencing, commonly pointed to as drivers of mass incarceration. The history of marijuana prohibition is definitely one that's been heavily racialized. Michael Thomas is the president of the Harvard Law Review. And earlier this year, he wrote about a plan for legal marijuana's bright future that would actually deal with illegal marijuana's dark past.

It's called the Marijuana Justice Act. We believe that states should be moving in the same way, to legalize marijuana, to end racial disparities, the enforcement of marijuana laws, and frankly, to end the targeting, the disproportionate targeting of poor people. It was introduced by Cory Booker, and it's been co-signed by Senators Kristen Gillibrand, Ron Wyden, and just yesterday, Bernie Sanders. How does the plan work?

Step one in Booker's bill would be to legalize marijuana at the federal level, opening opportunity to those who've previously feared federal prosecution for the sale of marijuana. And again, that would also diminish some of the hurdles, you know, like a lack of access to banking services. That makes it, you know, pretty unattractive to sell marijuana. Okay, step one, legalize marijuana nationwide. Step two? Step two, states that show a racial or class bias in marijuana arrests would be deemed ineligible for federal funding for prison construction. Step two, penalize states with racial bias. Step three.

Step three, any money withheld under that second provision that I just mentioned would be redirected to a community reinvestment fund. Things like job training, reentry services, public libraries, and youth programs. Okay, use the drug money to invest in communities. Anything else? Is there a step four? Yeah. It would direct federal courts to expunge all convictions for marijuana use or possession offenses. So those currently serving terms for marijuana offenses would be eligible for sentence reductions. It sounds like a lot of the Marijuana Justice Act has to do with the fact that it's a really good time right now to get rich off weed, depending on where you live in this country.

But that hasn't always been the case for a lot of people who have suffered, I guess, because of their enthusiasm for marijuana. Definitely. You know, today, for a variety of reasons, many white entrepreneurs have had a head start in the business, particularly because, you know, they've escaped enforcement, whereas their black and Hispanic counterparts have not. They actually did a report between 2001 and 2010.

There were 8 million arrests for marijuana in the United States. 88% of those were just for possession. Whites and African Americans use marijuana at roughly similar rates. You know, anyone who's spent any time on, like, a college campus will be able to tell you that. But nationally, a Black person is 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person. Those numbers are pretty consistent across the country. So 96% of the counties with more than 30,000 people, in which at least 2% of the residents are black,

blacks are arrested at higher rates than whites for marijuana possession. In New York City, where I'm from, 86% of the people arrested for marijuana possession in 2017 were people of color. It kind of takes the fun out of the spirit of all this expansion of marijuana, I guess. I think so. I think it would at least give us some reason to pause and consider the racial composition of those who actually get to benefit from marijuana legalization. So you critique this bill for the Harvard Law Review. What do you think of it? Does it

go far enough? I think it's generally a good bill. But I think that specifically, if you don't account for the money that's going to be generated by the legal marijuana markets, you're going to be leaving behind a pretty important tool in accomplishing the goal of bridging racial and economic inequality. So current markets in the states that are already legalized marijuana, they show that without some level of intervention, many of the black, Latino, and the lower class victims of marijuana prohibition aren't necessarily going to benefit from the wealth generated by legalization. So I think that a federal policy should encourage frameworks that increase representation of some of these populations in a legalized market.

That sounds like reparations, Michael, marijuana reparations. Is that happening anywhere? Yeah. You know, Oakland has a program that actually takes into account someone's past history of punishment for marijuana in terms of the way that they distribute marijuana licenses. They grant priority. The first grant of licenses will go to people who are previously affected by marijuana prohibition.

Will Oakland's program actually do anything to help the people who've been affected by criminalized marijuana in the past? I think it remains to be seen in a lot of ways, you know, what those types of programs can accomplish on the system-wide level, and also whether granting business licenses is enough to overcome some of the challenges associated with business ownership. Opening businesses are difficult to do. So I'm personally interested to know how, you know, smaller entrepreneurs will compete with the Budweiser or Marlboro of marijuana. I think direct cash transfers would have a much wider reach, and it doesn't necessarily require people to open a marijuana business. Would anyone support that? I would.

I think at least we should be talking about it. How far away do you think some of this stuff is? It seems that President Obama was into the idea of decriminalization. President Trump and the Justice Department, especially under Jeff Sessions, seem to take a different approach? You know, in 2016, national support for legalizing marijuana use reached 60%. And that's the highest it's ever been in Gallup's 47-year polling history. There's been recently bipartisan federal bills that have been introduced

that would either reschedule or deschedule marijuana. So there's definitely a considerable amount of momentum behind legalization. Legalizing marijuana throughout the country seems like it'd be pretty radical, even at this point where states are starting to do it. Are some of these ideas that basically sound like reparations? Is it so radical that it's just sort of pie in the sky at this point? Or does it make sense to start having these conversations just to sort of shift the perception of this issue? I think that's exactly right.

You know, when we're talking about legalizing marijuana, it's important to, before the markets actually get up and going, talking about how we actually will build equity into any legalization plan that moves forward. In failing to account sort of for like the money that's going to be generated by the marijuana market, you know, you might be actually deepening some of the inequality that was actually put in place by prohibition in the first place. It's hard to point to any more unfair laws on the books today that are so clearly, you know, racialized, particularly again when, you know, we know that whites and African-Americans use marijuana at the exact same rates. I think it's very clear to point to this as one of the remaining components of our legacy of white supremacy in the United States. Thank you. andy friend of mine before we go and stop talking for a few days about mattress firm.com and the

code podcast 10 that gets you 10 off before may May 2nd. I'm wondering how, how long did you sell mattresses? As painful as it is to admit this, about eight years. Amazing. So you must have, you must have some stories from the, from the trenches. Yeah, I, indeed I do. Um, one that really comes to mind was there is this very eclectic couple that came into the store one day and they decided to get the full pajama hat. I didn't even know people wore those and the full pajama gear. And they went from mattress to mattress trying it and they actually bought one. They were true to what they wanted to do and they committed. That's pretty good. Have you seen them since? No, no, we didn't. We didn't keep in touch.