Jesse Ventura's Marijuana Manifesto by Jesse Ventura

Author:Jesse Ventura
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2016-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

• In 2014, the drug overdose death rate for whites aged twenty-five to thirty-four was five times what it was in 1999.

• The overdose rate for thirty-five-to-forty-four-year-old whites tripled during that same time period.

• Meanwhile, drug-related deaths for black and Hispanic adults have either been falling or have remained the same since 1999.9

So why are more white people dying from drug overdoses than African Americans? Could it be that black people just don’t do as many drugs as white people do, as stereotypes that started with Randolph Hearst would suggest? And if African Americans aren’t doing as many drugs, then why are there more black people in jail for drug-related crimes than whites?

For example, in California, where medical marijuana is legal, African Americans are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana, twelve times more likely to be imprisoned for a marijuana felony arrest, and three times more likely to be imprisoned for that marijuana possession arrest than non-blacks. Overall, when you look at the odds, that means African Americans are ten times more likely to be imprisoned for marijuana than any other racial or ethnic group in California.10

Now I know some of you devil’s advocates are saying, wait a minute, why do you have to make this all about race? What if there are more African Americans in California smoking pot than any other ethnicity? Wouldn’t it then make sense that more African Americans are therefore getting arrested and going to jail for it? Well, get this: according to a 2010 study by the US Department of Health and Human Services, white people across the country between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five use marijuana at a higher rate than their black peers,11 yet black people between the ages of eighteen to twenty-five have higher arrest and incarceration records than whites do—not only in California but nationwide. So the statistics from HHS and the CDC are in agreement: whites use more drugs and die from more overdoses than blacks, but whites are least likely to do the time for the crime.

What this means is that Nixon’s War on Drugs has actually been successful. In Harper’s magazine’s April 2016 issue, (titled Legalize It All), journalist Dan Baum referenced an interview he had with John Ehrlichman in 1994. Ehrlichman was a former Nixon staffer who went to jail for his involvement in Watergate—he was also Nixon’s drug policy advisor. Ehrlichman admitted to Baum that Nixon launched the War on Drugs for one reason, “to decimate his perceived political enemies—the anti-war left, and black people.” Here’s the transcript of the interview:

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the

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