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A High Injustice
That’s racist.
The Washington Post reports on the “modern-day civil rights fight” to correct the historical, systemic discrimination in… Maryland’s medical marijuana industry:
Black Maryland state lawmakers are planning to propose emergency legislation to address the dearth of minority-owned businesses approved to grow medical marijuana in the state and may demand scrapping the results of a nine-month application process and starting over. […] The ideas floated at Friday’s meeting included eliminating caps on marijuana growing licenses to allow all minority companies to compete, conducting another round of licensing exclusively for minority-owned businesses and even starting the entire application process over, with race taken into account.
As NR’s Roger Clegg points out on the Corner, it may not be that simple:
There’s a federal constitutional problem here, though: A predicate for racial preferences in government contracting is a demonstration that there has historically been discrimination in the industry involved. Medical marijuana was legalized in Maryland only a couple of years ago, so one wonders how much discrimination there has been, historically, in a industry that does not yet actually exist.
There is no subject the Left will not attempt to racialize and demagogue. None.
Published in Domestic Policy
It has been over 30 years since I made a purchase, but I always bought it from a black guy.
#supportdiversity
I thought that legalization would solve all these problems. It has been sold as a magic bullet to end the War on Drugs and get the government out of the way.
Does not seem to be working out that way at all.
Long before Medical Marijuana was legalized there were entrepreneurs, many of whom were minorities, working to meet the public’s need for marijuana. This industry had self-enforcing standards, ways of adjudicating disputes over business leadership, sales territories and the like. Many of the consumers this industry served were purchasing their supplies to meet medical needs.
The problem is that while minorities were well represented among pre-legalization providers of Medical Marijuana, they are decidedly underrepresented in today’s marketplace. This inequitable result represents a dangerous loss of expertise in serving this important market and requires government intervention.
Tom, after reading your essay this acerbic former police officer has had an epiphany. We have been fighting the war on drugs with the wrong tactics. Like electricity and fossil fuels we should let Washington regulate it. With new regulations imposed year after year on recreational drug production and sales it will be regulated out of existence. The shelves will be empty. We could call it the Venezuelan option.
Ummmm, what? Who exactly proposed that legalizing pot would end liberal racial demagoguery?
Libertarians. Legalizing drugs is there #1 platform item. We can tax it and regulate it, and then heaven would form on Earth.
That’s not an answer. No one on earth has stated that legalizing pot would stop liberals from being racial demagogs. If you can find evidence that proves me wrong please present it.
Legalization of Drugs = Freedom
That is what I have been told for years, ANd I have been told there are no downsides.
Okay but lots of things = Freedom. What does that have to do with liberal race hucksterism?
Conservatives and libertarians both believe Religion = Freedom. Should we expect Religion to banish all bad liberalism?
I am making a great point here, in a sarcastic way. That is, that there are no silver bullets.
I don’t believe that all libertarians believe that about Religion. The current Libertarian Candidate does not.
It must be a syndrome of some kind.
Here’s a case where legalizing marijuana was pushed as a way to let “market forces” restrict and control drug distribution. But now, once legalized, the same people argue that the free market isn’t working because blacks aren’t proportionally represented. The respect for the free market, I’d say, lasted only long enough to get them what they wanted. As soon as the bill passed, they abandoned their “commitment” to the free market.
In the early 1960s, the proponents of birth control pushed a case to the Supreme Court, where William O. Douglas thundered indignantly against the atrocity of the government making decisions within “the sacred precincts of the marital bedroom.” The policy was pushed on the argument of the sanctity of marriage. Then, a handful of years later, the same Court decided that if married couples could have it, it would “discriminating” against non-married couples not to have it either, so birth control was then legalized for everyone. So much for the sanctity of marriage. The issue here isn’t birth control, but the absolutely shameless ability of partisans to turn rhetorically on a dime.
Indeed.
Who is claiming there is a silver bullet to racial demagoguery in legalizing pot? Who? WHO?
Well done, you side stepped that question with Clintonian efficiency.
I know you’re joking, but I’d like to point out that this isn’t legalization, at least of the “magic bullet” sort.
I mean, I don’t know any libertarians who would say “I think our problems would go away here if the state used its coercive power to effectively create a drug cartel that can only be joined through rent seeking.”
Clearly. After all, when markets fail, the last thing we should ever do is try more markets. Especially in essential areas of our economy where the laws of supply and demand are understood not to apply, even though there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. After all, all of that is just evidence that the government is not doing enough, even if it looks as though the government doing anything is causing the problems.
Naturally, given the essential nature of medical marijuana, which is part of medicine, which is part of health care, which is a human right, the only appropriate action to solve this racial inequality is to fully nationalize the industry. That way the simultaneous goals of ensuring just employment and healthcare for all can be met in a perfectly equal fashion.
It seems the only solution is for the government to assign professions at birth. It seems the first episode of Futurama was predictive.
So, libertarians call for the legalization of a drug which is, subsequently, legalized.
Leftist racial demagogues then do their usual thing, which is among the sort of thing libertarians object to.
This is, somehow, libertarians’ fault.
My concern is that the disparate impact of a legal marijuana industry will fall on blacks, a la cigarettes. And, marijuana, especially in today’s form, is more addictive than it’s ever been. I’m afraid they’ll set up shops in black neighborhoods where they’ll get most of their revenue from addicts. We may hear in a few years about how blacks are disadvantage because of this.
Well now, if was still illegal, then the racial types could not do their thing, could they?
On a more serious note, though, I am playing around to make the point that Libertarians focus far, far too much on drug legalization and the war on drugs. They might get more traction with something else.
Granted, if that something else is doing away with public roads, maybe the drug thing is better.
Libertarians do no think it is addictive at all, and if it is legal there is more freedom. People addicted to drugs are “Free” since it is legal. How anyone who is an addict can be considered “free” is beyond me, but we have got to legalize those drugs, as the #1 priority of Libertarians.
For Bryan everything is libertarians fault. Libertarians and pot. Because reasons.
I didn’t mean to respond to the other comments about what libertarians think about the issue. My comment was directly addressed to the OP.
I see nothing about women owned businesses or disabled veteran set-asides. There should also be a separate program for Native Americans, since it will have different funding and separate regulations for narcotics used in religious rituals. A certain quota for small businesses will also help prevent take-over by “Big Marijuana” or “Marijuana Gigante” as he is better known by the Mexican drug cartels.
See, this does concern me because my not-so-joking plan for independent wealth is to open a dispensary when the federal government legalizes and taxes marijuana.