ACLU Report Condemns “War on Marijuana”
The ACLU on this day issued a report, “The War on Marijuana in Black and White,” condemning U.S. drug policy related to marijuana arrests.
Using official FBI data on marijuana arrests from all 50 states from 2001 to 2010, the report found there were over 8 million marijuana arrests, with the number steadily increasing each year, and that nearly half were for mere possession of the drug. African-Americans were more than three times as likely to be arrested as whites, and in the states with the worst racial disparities, they were more than six times as likely to be arrested.
In 2020 the ACLU issued an updated report: A Tale of Two Countries: Racially Targeted Arrests in the Era of Marijuana Reform (2020). Find the report here.
See the enactment of the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act on August 2, 1937, which many experts believe marked a major escalation of the U.S. policy of treating drug usage as primarily a criminal rather than as a medical and social problem.
Read the original report here: http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/aclu-thewaronmarijuana-rel2.pdf
Learn more at the Drug Policy Alliance: http://www.drugpolicy.org/
Read: Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (1990)
Read the ACLU FBI File (not the complete file): http://vault.fbi.gov/ACLU
Learn about the ACLU today: www.aclu.org