Michael Thompson sold three pounds of cannabis.
He did not sell it to a child. He did not sell it across state lines. He did not use violence. He sold it to a police informant in Michigan. For that, he was sentenced to 15 to 40 years in prison.
He served 25 years. He watched his children grow up through plexiglass. He missed funerals. He missed birthdays. He missed the entire lives of the people he loved. He was released in 2021, at the age of 69, only after the ACLU and a coalition of activists fought for his freedom. The governor commuted his sentence. He walked out of prison into a world where the substance that took his life away was being sold in clean storefronts with credit card readers and loyalty programs.
He cannot get a license to sell it.
In many states, a prior drug conviction disqualifies you from participating in the legal market. The people who built the industry from the ground level, who took the risks, who served the time, are specifically excluded from the profits. The law that punished them now prevents them from participating. Michael Thompson spent 25 years in a cell for a plant that now makes other people rich. The state of Michigan will issue a license to a white entrepreneur with no criminal record and a business plan. It will not issue one to Michael Thompson.
This is not an accident. It is a continuation of the punishment by other means.
The customer walks into a dispensary in Los Angeles. The store is clean. The lighting is soft. The product is displayed in glass cases. The staff wears nametags. They ask for an ID. They make a recommendation. The customer picks a strain, pays with a card, and walks out with a receipt. The transaction is legal, normalized, boring.
The legal market is expensive. The taxes are high. The regulations drive up costs. An eighth of an ounce that cost thirty dollars on the street costs sixty dollars in the dispensary. The people most likely to have been arrested for cannabis are the people least likely to afford the legal product. The class divide is not just about who is in prison. It is about who can participate in the new economy. The poor are still buying on the street. The poor are still getting arrested.
Because the arrests have not stopped.
People are still being arrested for cannabis in states where it is legal. Public consumption. Possession over the legal limit. Unlicensed sales. The war has not ended. It has shifted. The dispensary is open. The patrol car is still driving through the neighborhood. The white customer leaves the store with a paper bag. The Black teenager on the corner is stopped and searched. The law is a line. The line is drawn by race and class. The dispensary is on one side. The prison is on the other.
The federal reality is even starker. Cannabis is still a Schedule I substance under federal law. The classification means the government considers it to have no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Heroin is in the same category. Cocaine is Schedule II, considered less dangerous. The dispensaries operate in a gray zone. They are legal under state law, illegal under federal law. The president has issued pardons for federal possession offenses. But the pardons do not cover everyone. People are still in federal prison for cannabis. The dispensary customer buys a product that the federal government considers equivalent to heroin. The federal prisoner sits in a cell for the same product. The contradiction is the system.
The states promised to fix this. They created social equity programs to help the communities harmed by the war on drugs. They promised licenses for people with prior convictions. They promised loans and grants and training. The promises were made. The promises were broken.
In New York, the social equity program was a disaster. The licenses were delayed. The funds were diverted. The market was captured by multi-state operators with deep pockets and political connections. The people the program was designed to help are still waiting. In California, the barriers to entry are so high that only the wealthy can compete. The cost of a license, the cost of compliance, the cost of security, the cost of testing. The legal market is a playground for capital. The people who built the demand are locked out of the supply.
The generational impact is the wound that does not close. Michael Thompson missed 25 years of his children’s lives. His children grew up without a father. They grew up with the stigma of having a parent in prison. They grew up with the economic instability that comes from losing a breadwinner. The prison sentence does not end when the prisoner is released. It echoes through generations. The child of an incarcerated parent is more likely to struggle in school, more likely to experience poverty, more likely to interact with the criminal justice system. The prison creates the conditions for more prisons. The cycle feeds itself.
The legal cannabis industry generated over thirty billion dollars in sales last year. It is projected to reach fifty billion by the end of the decade. The tax revenue flows to state coffers. The profits flow to shareholders. The licenses flow to entrepreneurs with clean records and access to capital. The prisoners flow out of their cells one by one, if they are lucky, into a world that moved on without them.
The customer in the dispensary does not think about Michael Thompson. The transaction is too easy. The store is too clean. The receipt is too final. The product is just a product. The history is not in the glass case. The history is in the cell.
But the history is the reason the product exists. The demand was built by the people who are now locked out. The market was created by the people who are now locked up. The culture of cannabis in America was forged by the people who took the risks, served the time, and built the industry from the shadows. The legal market walked in and took the keys. The people who built the house are not invited inside.
Legalization without reparations is theft. The state does not get to criminalize a substance, lock up millions of people, destroy communities, and then pivot to a profitable market without addressing what it did. The licenses should go to the people who were arrested. The tax revenue should go to the communities that were destroyed. The prisoners should be released. Their records should be expunged. The debt should be paid.
The debt has not been paid. The prisoners are still inside. The records are still on the books. The licenses are going to people who never served a day. The tax revenue is going to general funds. The social equity programs are underfunded jokes. The promise of legalization was a promise of justice. The reality of legalization is a promise broken.
The store is open. The cell is locked.
The product on the shelf is the same product that took 25 years from Michael Thompson. The receipt in the customer’s pocket is the same transaction that sent thousands of people to prison. The law changed. The people did not.
The question is not whether the market should exist. The question is whether the people who paid for it will ever be free. The question is whether the people who built it will ever be allowed to participate. The question is whether a country that locked up its own citizens for a plant will ever acknowledge what it did.
The dispensary is clean. The lighting is soft. The product is displayed like jewelry. The customer pays with a card and walks out into the sunlight.
Two hundred miles away, a man sits in a cell. He is serving a ten-year sentence for possession with intent to distribute. The substance is the same. The transaction is the same. The only difference is the date on the calendar and the color of his skin.
The store is open. The cell is locked.
The market does not care. The state does not care. The customer does not care.
The product sells anyway.
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“The tax revenue should go to the communities that were destroyed.”
The communities that were decimated by legalization are largely “white” communities (e.g., Mendocino, Humboldt, Trinity counties). It’s caused a collapse in property/housing values there, as well. (Probably a good time to buy one.)
Some of them have also spent significant time in prison, when their properties were raided in the past.
Prostitution is also illegal in most states, but not in Nevada (under controlled conditions).
Perhaps the moral of the story is, “don’t break whatever law currently exists”, unless you’re willing to face the consequences. God forbid if you get caught with drugs in some other countries, as it can result in the death penalty.