Why Cory Booker Cares So Much About Legal Weed
In the fight to legalize pot, enthusiasts have largely pointed to the unjust demonization of the drug itself. Weed is no more harmful than alcohol, the argument goes, so why not tax it and regulate it the same way? That logic has carried the day in nearly a dozen pot-legal states from Alaska to California to Maine.
But when Cory Booker, the New Jersey senator and 2020 presidential candidate, looks at the question of legalizing cannabis, he sees the stakes very differently. For Booker, the real problem is the unjust enforcement of marijuana laws against black and brown Americans, whose usage rates are no different than their white counterparts but who are arrested at astronomically higher rates.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/2020-cory-booker-legal-weed-pot-cannabis-why-826232/
This is one reason I feel Bernie Sanders was right to say people in prison should be allowed to vote. Mass incarceration and over charging of minorities has been the leading de facto way to disenfranchise men of color in this country. As democrats we are all against voter suppression, so let's end what has been the largest tool to suppress minority voters for once and for all.
There are hundreds of thousands on minority prisoners that have been "convicted" of crimes white people just don't get charged with, at least not nearly at the same rate.
Let the handful of really bad apples, the bombers, the murderers vote, they are too few in number to matter compared to the tens and tens of thousands of people unfairly imprisoned.