9 ms·

How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom

67 points by swamp40 11y ago

hnmcs 11y ago
Once I met a guy who worked for some Edward Jones-type company, investing the money of moms and pops, making money from watching various markets for opportunities to make profits. He was so in love with how effectively the whole world made sense in terms of dollars, contracts, and trades. He liked the meta-economics of the prevailing world economic order. He would think in terms of "is it worth it to me to buy your debt?" if ever you said anything within a mile's distance of implying that you might want money for some economic purpose. Well, at that time, there was no weed boom. It was illegal for the most part, in the U.S. And his worldview, which always tried to relate everything -- from national or world news, right on down to the conversations of everyone around him after the workday was done -- everything he related to in terms of how our existing systems of money, contract obligations, and legal decisions was so logical and coherent and wonderful. What did he think about weed then? That it was an unproductive (one of his favorite words) and likely immoral industry of drugs, not fit to be placed in his glorious world of markets and trade deals. What does he think about it now? You know already. What do all these full-time market-men think about it: markets are awesome and efficient and now it's just another market service for them to try to arbitrage and to buy ownership of so that they themselves can maximize profit on the margins. What was the difference before and after? Well, in this one respect, there is no difference: he still goes on effusing self-serving pro-US-capitalist rhetoric everywhere he goes. The one difference is that now he doesn't think weed is bad, it's just another thing for him to try to leverage financial/economic advantage out of, behind his Edward Jones-style desk, while there is a whole 'nother entire class of people mentioned in this article who probably don't dig his own worldview as much as he does.
- feintruled 11y ago
  This reminds me of Iain Bank's books "The Business" where the corporation in question was sitting on the perfect cocaine snorting delivery device ('the Incan'), speculatively developed and just waiting for the day the drug might become legal.
  - hnmcs 11y ago
    A tail wagging the dog is the notion I wish to deplore the most. Way too many people think that pure logic (and wisdom of experience) is what leads to their value-judgements and opinions. Like my example mom-and-pop broker above (who is no fat cat in the scheme of things, just someone too invested in the neoliberal capitalist paradigm to think straight anymore), they will switch their value judgements when their one true god (money, joint-stock ownership, and the corporate form of governance) tells them to switch. When weed is blacklisted, they can invent reasons to hate weed. When weed is legal, it's just another glorious benefit of our market system to provide this good/service to all the people who demand it. (And for them to rightfully earn a profit somewhere in the trade, or in the ownership of the business providing the service.) They make up reasons to believe what the markets tell them to believe. A dog wagged by a tail, if you will. Likewise, when you have central banks and too-big-to-fails in this environment buying up everything in the stock markets with an exponentially growing supply of USD, JPYs, and euros, you wind up in a situation where the market tail is actually trying to wag the economic dog. We forgot that it was supposed to be the other way around, because of how far we've gone off the rails into our deficit-spending-until-death mode of existence, since year 19XX, for some value of XX, I favor about the time Reagan took over, but you can go back further if you like. Thanks for sharing your reference, by the way.
    - hnmcs 11y ago
      So I was complaining about the tail wagging the dog. It happens in terms of literal power and ownership, when money is produced and awarded in toxic ways, yet it is all that matters for obtaining power and ownership. And it happens in terms of the mind: of people working in aid of a status quo which is being driven the wrong way. Well guess what, you're not going to let some insane human elitists (how close is that guy Donald Trump to them? anything is too close for my comfort) try to drive me through the tail of the dog that is my life. If you have an insane and toxic system, then it's better to start getting radical. Ah, but now -- how to get radical? There we all explode. update, with recommended reading: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, Milton Mayer We either do or don't have people successfully playing at money/power/mind-game for the stakes of controlling the planet from the top down. Either way, I am afraid. Because a bunch of moronic dictators fighting each other unsuccessfully is no better than a single one successfully winning such a game.
- lmm 11y ago
  > What did he think about weed then? That it was an unproductive (one of his favorite words) and likely immoral industry of drugs, not fit to be placed in his glorious world of markets and trade deals. > What does he think about it now? You know already. What do all these full-time market-men think about it: markets are awesome and efficient and now it's just another market service for them to try to arbitrage and to buy ownership of so that they themselves can maximize profit on the margins. Isn't that exactly how we want our businesses to behave? If a businessman who didn't want to get involved in something when it was illegal now wants to get involved now that it's legal, isn't that good business ethics?
  - burkaman 11y ago
    Yes, it's good business ethics, but it's not good human ethics to completely base your moral judgments of something on whether or not it's legal and profitable.
  - hnmcs 11y ago
    If my rhetoric is too grandiose, or my illogic too hazy, then I have to concede that you can parse details out of it which seem to be incorrect. So, sure, that's exactly how we want our businesses to be, you are right, I concede for the sake of a limited argument under all the rest of the assumptions you have when you make that statement. I have unstated assumptions as well, everywhere. Overall I was trying to make a hard point. I think that people are a just a little too content with the status quo. I believe only radical changes can fix the brokenness of our systems, and only on a long time line. (Our systems are broken at so many, many different levels, we could start by talking about problematic broken hardware/software systems if we wanted, and probably arrive at the conclusion that the present paradigm needs a radical change in the long run, saying nothing of money, law, or politics.) I wanted to complain about how we expect our businesses to behave, because I think it's dysfunctional. But in the pragmatic sense, I'm not making any useful complaint. You are being more pragmatic. The first thing I've come to realize the importance of by now, is that talk is just talk, and radical changes aren't going to happen on any time line, not without a lot of consensus. I sincerely hope that some aspect of the human nature itself does not prevent us from coming to healthier consensuses than what we currently have. All I see is a system that maximizes paper profits while not counting environment damage or exhaustible resource availablity. Accounting is everything, and I fear for all humanity if we don't come to some better system of accounting value.
cholantesh 11y ago
Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11305929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11305929
- elbigbad 11y ago
  To call that link previous "discussion" is generous. There are only a handful of comments, nothing interesting.
  - cholantesh 11y ago
    At the time that I posted, there were only a handful in this thread, too. Besides, there's no objective indicator of 'interestingness' or a rule that states that all discussion must be interesting, or have a minimum length in order to qualify as such.
RodericDay 11y ago
It's shocking to me how the comment section is replete with "a felony is a felony!" and "it's not a race issue- it's a criminal record issue!" messages. A few of them even go further and proudly proclaim they only read the first "paragragh". Too bad, they missed a critical point: > Even though research shows people of all races are about equally likely to have broken the law by growing, smoking, or selling marijuana, black people are much more likely to have been arrested for it. The lesson goes much further than the weed-boom, of course. So many people look at the current legal landscape and say "opportunities are equal for equal candidates", with seemingly no ability to observe for the compounded effects of all the preceding inequality. @ edit: My comments seem to have been flagged so hard that I can't post replies. I guess this place isn't much more sophisticated than BuzzFeed when it comes to race issues. As for that piece you keep posting, ikeboy, I don't think it's nearly as relevant or convincing as you think it is. From the choice headline quote from the research SSX cites: > is small to nonexistent once legally relevant variables (e.g. prior record) are controlled The entire controversy here arises due to the racially-biased source of the prior record. I have a very low opinion of SSX's weasel-word-weaving to pander to his narrow audience, to be honest. > Summary: Blacks appear to be arrested for drug use at a rate four times that of whites. Adjusting for known confounds reduces their rate to twice that of whites. However, other theorized confounders could mean that the real relative risk is anywhere between two and parity. Never trust the media to give you any number more complicated than today’s date. Blacks "appear to be", huh? With a couple of sketchy assumptions, suddenly we're "between two and parity", which then gets reproduced by you in this debate as "misleading and basically parity". Anyway, > There seems to be a strong racial bias in capital punishment and a moderate racial bias in sentence length and decision to jail.
- jgh 11y ago
  The comments section here isnt much better than that Edit: To follow up your edit, I find the attitudes toward race and gender on HN particularly troubling. Whenever there is an article that discusses legitimate race/gender issues it tends to be downvoted/flagged and drop like a rock off the front page. The comments are often calling into question the credibility of the person making the complaint about racism, and even blaming them / their race. The reason that I find the attitudes here so troubling is because there are a number of influential people here. Many are entrepreneurs and future entrepreneurs. If these attitudes are a reflection of the racial attitudes in the tech industry then woe unto us. We are doomed. We fancy ourselves sophisticated, rational, and benevolent leaders of the future world economy but we are too arrogant to look inward at our own flaws.
lycidas 11y ago
The book mentioned in the article "The New Jim Crow" is an extraordinary good read for people more interested in gaining context on the situation between race and crime mentioned in the article. It is also good to gain more insight into how politics can be racially coded without ever mentioning race - great given the current political climate.
fiatmoney 11y ago
"Henderson was more than qualified, so why didn’t he get the gig? ... he has two drug possession felonies on his record" You know, people with illegal bookmaking convictions are kept out of the gambling industry for good reasons. It started off as a dirty industry, and to the extent you keep anyone with a hint of grime out of it, you avoid it regressing to that state. That keeps regulators off your back and eventually helps you turn it into a family-friendly mass market industry. It's also really difficult for people with fraud convictions to get job as accountants, no matter how good they are at forensic accounting. Trust is the commodity being sold. Do you really want someone with a shitload of existing drug connections, being the poster face for the industry you're trying to vanillify? The whole premise of legalization wasn't that your local corner boys get to go industrial after they gain mass market access, it was that the "drug trade" becomes roughly parallel with the "tobacco trade", where the worst thing that happens is penny-ante tax evasion.
- RodericDay 11y ago
  > Even though research shows people of all races are about equally likely to have broken the law by growing, smoking, or selling marijuana, black people are much more likely to have been arrested for it.
  - fiatmoney 11y ago
    And? If Italians are much more likely to be arrested for illegal bookmaking & racketeering due to targeted efforts to take them down, does that mean it's a great idea to let Fat Tony with a felony conviction, a ball-peen hammer and a shitload of shady friends he has unclear relationships with open a casino?
    - RodericDay 11y ago
      It's a better idea than letting equally-as-dirty-but-white-and-uncaught Joe Trustfund take over in his absence. The former at least equalizes the second-order race issue, whereas yours naively compounds it.
    - 11y ago
greenisland 11y ago
I read the entire article. The man was duly convicted of a crime in Oklahoma. He broke the law, regardless of what anyone thinks. Fast forward to when selling dope in certain places is now legal and this guys want a piece of the action, but... he cannot legally do so because he's a convicted felon. Should we undo his conviction? No. He was tried fairly and found guilty based on the laws of the time and place. His fault. His color has nothing to do with it, and quite frankly, I'm sick to death of everything in this country now revolving around race, homosexuals, feminists. The man made a choice, he now lives with the repercussions of that choice, whether anyone agrees or disagrees. I realize my outlook is likely unpopular, but like I tell my children -- there are consequences for your actions, and it may take years to see them. This story will be read by my kids tonight to reinforce my good advice. Besides, the morality of the people involved in a business like legal dope would put me off. Just because they don't have convictions means nothing. The type of people attracted to the dope business are off putting.
- mtalantikite 11y ago
  The point here is that there are more consequences when you're Black in the US. Statistically speaking people of color, and in particular Black Americans, are arrested and convicted of marijuana related crimes at a much higher rate than any other group [1]. That translates into Black Americans being kept out of the newly legal business because of racist policing policies. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-blackwhite-marijuana-arrest-gap-in-nine-charts/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-b...
  - greenisland 11y ago
    I appreciate your remarks. But -- what I'm saying is that no one should feel sorry for this guy. It pains me to see the vast numbers of Americans who but a few years ago were for tough legislation and tough policies and who now desire to see criminals released from prison because the sentence may be too harsh. Really? If you do the crime, you do the time. We should not undo sentencing. It was all done legally at the time and it should stand. I don't like the dope industry. It attracts children who think that smoking marijuana is harmless. It's not. The dopeheads can trot out all the industry-inspired crap they like, but it's not healthy. I'm all for ACTUAL medical patients who are in severe pain using it, but so many go to these quack doctors who will give a medical reason for a few dollars. Actual doctors with hospital admitting privileges should be the law. Marijuana is not harmless and just a few years ago the majority of Americans agreed. The morality in America has slipped precipitously since our heyday as a nation in the 1950s.
traviswingo 11y ago
> But it can’t be someone who got caught. Which for the most part means it can’t be someone who is black. It's thinking like this that pisses me off. Henderson wasn't hired because of a record. Yes, racism still unfortunately exists, but in order to move towards an equal future we need to stop bringing it up and searching for problems where there are none. Fucking Buzzfeed and Huffington post are constantly using they're over-sensitive audience to start drama.
- knughit 11y ago
  Ignoring up problems won't fix them.
  - lsaferite 11y ago
    But how does demonizing the legal weed industry by accusing it of being racists accomplish anything useful? They are clearly NOT being racist and just following the legal requirements for their industry. The fact that the ones being excluded are mainly black is not some conscious decision to exclude blacks but the result of the current laws and enforcement saddling them with felony drug convictions. The author's time would be better spent addressing the real problem of the disproportionate number of black males with drug felonies for simple possession.
    - evilDagmar 11y ago
      Accomplish anything useful? Buzzfeed is about _generating ad revenue through clicks_, not about being useful or educational.
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    Blaming B for discrimination done by A only makes B less likely to care.
- atonparker 11y ago
  There is a very real problem here, and you don't have to search hard for it. An entire sub-population of this country was disproportionately sentenced to felony convictions. If we don't recognize that for what it was, we are condemning a generation of black people to just "suck it up, because we're thinking about the future now". That is a mistake because these people are part of the future, and they deserve a fair chance in it. Laws preventing felony offenders from finding work in their field only make sense if the felony conviction actually made sense. Preventing non-violent drug offenders from finding work in the burgeoning drug industry is as nonsensical as the offense they were charged with. You can't just hit a reset button on racism and say all our mistakes our behind us, now we're all on the same level. Especially not when those mistakes were felony charges with lifelong consequences.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
matwood 11y ago
A secondary issue here is that a joints worth of pot was cause for a felony conviction. How is that punishment in any way fitting the crime.
- lsaferite 11y ago
  And this is the real issue the author should be addressing instead of trying to accuse the legal weed industry of being racist.
- zeveb 11y ago
  This, right here. Felonies are supposed to be crimes which deserve execution: murder, rape — that kind of thing. They shouldn't be things which deserve a slap on the wrist at the absolute most.
pakled_engineer 11y ago
Here activists called legalization the new prohibition because of all the regulations like no dispensaries within a X distance from each other, a school, church ect so drove them out or cemented monopolies for the existing dispensaries which can raise prices. Then they created high barriers to entry with massive licensing fees and other regulations. This of course spawned online purchasing and delivery business models that's worked well for now, until more regulations on delivery. One problem with the distributor in this story is he is constantly getting high off his own supply while in care and control of a vehicle which makes nobody want to work with him. That's heatbag behavior asking for problems. His comment on firearms about pulling out a gun during an argument is also something only heatbags do, the guys with side arms on the farm he went to are only armed to deter getting jacked for their product not win arguments. You can't have a record and operate a dispensary here either, which was designed to keep bikers and other org crime out but they get around this by partnering with somebody that has a clean record. Also wondering why the guy in Colorado can't apply for a pardon if it was only for teenage possession. Friend in Seattle did that to erase his record and open a weed business.
- evilDagmar 11y ago
  | Also wondering why the guy in Colorado can't apply for a pardon if it was only for teenage possession Because that would dilute the click-baity narrative that Buzzfeed is trying to drive home. We wouldn't want their efforts in conflating cause and effect to go to waste now, would we?
treerunner 11y ago
Black underemployment is not an issue specific to the weed industry, it's a problem in all industry. Duh. Also, legal weed is supposed to deal with racial inequalities. Legal weed means less people being caught and jailed. This is good. Though, to be perfectly honest, I am not into the idea of states using Marijuana as a profit vehicle. It's about as cynical and without class as state run gambling. Hopefully more people will grow their own and once the rest of the US legalizes, weed will be about as profitable, no more or less, than a tomato.
githubber123 11y ago
If most DUI convictions were white males and a delivery company didn't hire you if you had a DUI then that too would be racist? Seems like a reach.
notlisted 11y ago
I don't believe for one second that the people running the dispensaries never 'partook'. It takes a fan of the merchandise to run these things and communicate with the clientele. They just weren't caught. Why not? I suspect it still works like this: Some 10-odd years ago, I had a (white) colleague who really enjoyed smoking mary-j. He lived on the 48th floor of a deluxe high-rise in Manhattan. He, like his wealthy neighbors, didn't have to get their fix off the street. Instead, they called 1-800-greenhouse and ordered two "theatre tickets". Within 30 mins, a bike messenger (African-American) came over to deliver 2 ounces of stuff to his front door. He never left the house. Last I heard, he got a job with the government… He still has the right to vote too.
Grue3 11y ago
Why would anyone want to be part of something called "Weed Boom" is beyond me. Also why literal Buzzfeed clickbait is being posted on HN.
tzs 11y ago
I'd expect states to be strict in this area for now, especially states that legalized recreational use, because the weed business is not legal under Federal law. The Federal government is currently taking a hands off approach to see how this works out. The cleaner the states can keep their weed business, the more likely the Feds are to leave them alone.

67 points by swamp40 11y ago

hnmcs 11y ago

Once I met a guy who worked for some Edward Jones-type company, investing the money of moms and pops, making money from watching various markets for opportunities to make profits. He was so in love with how effectively the whole world made sense in terms of dollars, contracts, and trades. He liked the meta-economics of the prevailing world economic order. He would think in terms of "is it worth it to me to buy your debt?" if ever you said anything within a mile's distance of implying that you might want money for some economic purpose. Well, at that time, there was no weed boom. It was illegal for the most part, in the U.S. And his worldview, which always tried to relate everything -- from national or world news, right on down to the conversations of everyone around him after the workday was done -- everything he related to in terms of how our existing systems of money, contract obligations, and legal decisions was so logical and coherent and wonderful. What did he think about weed then? That it was an unproductive (one of his favorite words) and likely immoral industry of drugs, not fit to be placed in his glorious world of markets and trade deals. What does he think about it now? You know already. What do all these full-time market-men think about it: markets are awesome and efficient and now it's just another market service for them to try to arbitrage and to buy ownership of so that they themselves can maximize profit on the margins. What was the difference before and after? Well, in this one respect, there is no difference: he still goes on effusing self-serving pro-US-capitalist rhetoric everywhere he goes. The one difference is that now he doesn't think weed is bad, it's just another thing for him to try to leverage financial/economic advantage out of, behind his Edward Jones-style desk, while there is a whole 'nother entire class of people mentioned in this article who probably don't dig his own worldview as much as he does.

feintruled 11y ago
This reminds me of Iain Bank's books "The Business" where the corporation in question was sitting on the perfect cocaine snorting delivery device ('the Incan'), speculatively developed and just waiting for the day the drug might become legal.
- hnmcs 11y ago
  A tail wagging the dog is the notion I wish to deplore the most. Way too many people think that pure logic (and wisdom of experience) is what leads to their value-judgements and opinions. Like my example mom-and-pop broker above (who is no fat cat in the scheme of things, just someone too invested in the neoliberal capitalist paradigm to think straight anymore), they will switch their value judgements when their one true god (money, joint-stock ownership, and the corporate form of governance) tells them to switch. When weed is blacklisted, they can invent reasons to hate weed. When weed is legal, it's just another glorious benefit of our market system to provide this good/service to all the people who demand it. (And for them to rightfully earn a profit somewhere in the trade, or in the ownership of the business providing the service.) They make up reasons to believe what the markets tell them to believe. A dog wagged by a tail, if you will. Likewise, when you have central banks and too-big-to-fails in this environment buying up everything in the stock markets with an exponentially growing supply of USD, JPYs, and euros, you wind up in a situation where the market tail is actually trying to wag the economic dog. We forgot that it was supposed to be the other way around, because of how far we've gone off the rails into our deficit-spending-until-death mode of existence, since year 19XX, for some value of XX, I favor about the time Reagan took over, but you can go back further if you like. Thanks for sharing your reference, by the way.
  - hnmcs 11y ago
    So I was complaining about the tail wagging the dog. It happens in terms of literal power and ownership, when money is produced and awarded in toxic ways, yet it is all that matters for obtaining power and ownership. And it happens in terms of the mind: of people working in aid of a status quo which is being driven the wrong way. Well guess what, you're not going to let some insane human elitists (how close is that guy Donald Trump to them? anything is too close for my comfort) try to drive me through the tail of the dog that is my life. If you have an insane and toxic system, then it's better to start getting radical. Ah, but now -- how to get radical? There we all explode. update, with recommended reading: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, Milton Mayer We either do or don't have people successfully playing at money/power/mind-game for the stakes of controlling the planet from the top down. Either way, I am afraid. Because a bunch of moronic dictators fighting each other unsuccessfully is no better than a single one successfully winning such a game.
lmm 11y ago
> What did he think about weed then? That it was an unproductive (one of his favorite words) and likely immoral industry of drugs, not fit to be placed in his glorious world of markets and trade deals. > What does he think about it now? You know already. What do all these full-time market-men think about it: markets are awesome and efficient and now it's just another market service for them to try to arbitrage and to buy ownership of so that they themselves can maximize profit on the margins. Isn't that exactly how we want our businesses to behave? If a businessman who didn't want to get involved in something when it was illegal now wants to get involved now that it's legal, isn't that good business ethics?
- burkaman 11y ago
  Yes, it's good business ethics, but it's not good human ethics to completely base your moral judgments of something on whether or not it's legal and profitable.
- hnmcs 11y ago
  If my rhetoric is too grandiose, or my illogic too hazy, then I have to concede that you can parse details out of it which seem to be incorrect. So, sure, that's exactly how we want our businesses to be, you are right, I concede for the sake of a limited argument under all the rest of the assumptions you have when you make that statement. I have unstated assumptions as well, everywhere. Overall I was trying to make a hard point. I think that people are a just a little too content with the status quo. I believe only radical changes can fix the brokenness of our systems, and only on a long time line. (Our systems are broken at so many, many different levels, we could start by talking about problematic broken hardware/software systems if we wanted, and probably arrive at the conclusion that the present paradigm needs a radical change in the long run, saying nothing of money, law, or politics.) I wanted to complain about how we expect our businesses to behave, because I think it's dysfunctional. But in the pragmatic sense, I'm not making any useful complaint. You are being more pragmatic. The first thing I've come to realize the importance of by now, is that talk is just talk, and radical changes aren't going to happen on any time line, not without a lot of consensus. I sincerely hope that some aspect of the human nature itself does not prevent us from coming to healthier consensuses than what we currently have. All I see is a system that maximizes paper profits while not counting environment damage or exhaustible resource availablity. Accounting is everything, and I fear for all humanity if we don't come to some better system of accounting value.

cholantesh 11y ago

Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11305929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11305929

elbigbad 11y ago
To call that link previous "discussion" is generous. There are only a handful of comments, nothing interesting.
- cholantesh 11y ago
  At the time that I posted, there were only a handful in this thread, too. Besides, there's no objective indicator of 'interestingness' or a rule that states that all discussion must be interesting, or have a minimum length in order to qualify as such.

RodericDay 11y ago

It's shocking to me how the comment section is replete with "a felony is a felony!" and "it's not a race issue- it's a criminal record issue!" messages. A few of them even go further and proudly proclaim they only read the first "paragragh". Too bad, they missed a critical point: > Even though research shows people of all races are about equally likely to have broken the law by growing, smoking, or selling marijuana, black people are much more likely to have been arrested for it. The lesson goes much further than the weed-boom, of course. So many people look at the current legal landscape and say "opportunities are equal for equal candidates", with seemingly no ability to observe for the compounded effects of all the preceding inequality. @ edit: My comments seem to have been flagged so hard that I can't post replies. I guess this place isn't much more sophisticated than BuzzFeed when it comes to race issues. As for that piece you keep posting, ikeboy, I don't think it's nearly as relevant or convincing as you think it is. From the choice headline quote from the research SSX cites: > is small to nonexistent once legally relevant variables (e.g. prior record) are controlled The entire controversy here arises due to the racially-biased source of the prior record. I have a very low opinion of SSX's weasel-word-weaving to pander to his narrow audience, to be honest. > Summary: Blacks appear to be arrested for drug use at a rate four times that of whites. Adjusting for known confounds reduces their rate to twice that of whites. However, other theorized confounders could mean that the real relative risk is anywhere between two and parity. Never trust the media to give you any number more complicated than today’s date. Blacks "appear to be", huh? With a couple of sketchy assumptions, suddenly we're "between two and parity", which then gets reproduced by you in this debate as "misleading and basically parity". Anyway, > There seems to be a strong racial bias in capital punishment and a moderate racial bias in sentence length and decision to jail.

jgh 11y ago
The comments section here isnt much better than that Edit: To follow up your edit, I find the attitudes toward race and gender on HN particularly troubling. Whenever there is an article that discusses legitimate race/gender issues it tends to be downvoted/flagged and drop like a rock off the front page. The comments are often calling into question the credibility of the person making the complaint about racism, and even blaming them / their race. The reason that I find the attitudes here so troubling is because there are a number of influential people here. Many are entrepreneurs and future entrepreneurs. If these attitudes are a reflection of the racial attitudes in the tech industry then woe unto us. We are doomed. We fancy ourselves sophisticated, rational, and benevolent leaders of the future world economy but we are too arrogant to look inward at our own flaws.

lycidas 11y ago

The book mentioned in the article "The New Jim Crow" is an extraordinary good read for people more interested in gaining context on the situation between race and crime mentioned in the article. It is also good to gain more insight into how politics can be racially coded without ever mentioning race - great given the current political climate.

fiatmoney 11y ago

"Henderson was more than qualified, so why didn’t he get the gig? ... he has two drug possession felonies on his record" You know, people with illegal bookmaking convictions are kept out of the gambling industry for good reasons. It started off as a dirty industry, and to the extent you keep anyone with a hint of grime out of it, you avoid it regressing to that state. That keeps regulators off your back and eventually helps you turn it into a family-friendly mass market industry. It's also really difficult for people with fraud convictions to get job as accountants, no matter how good they are at forensic accounting. Trust is the commodity being sold. Do you really want someone with a shitload of existing drug connections, being the poster face for the industry you're trying to vanillify? The whole premise of legalization wasn't that your local corner boys get to go industrial after they gain mass market access, it was that the "drug trade" becomes roughly parallel with the "tobacco trade", where the worst thing that happens is penny-ante tax evasion.

RodericDay 11y ago
> Even though research shows people of all races are about equally likely to have broken the law by growing, smoking, or selling marijuana, black people are much more likely to have been arrested for it.
- fiatmoney 11y ago
  And? If Italians are much more likely to be arrested for illegal bookmaking & racketeering due to targeted efforts to take them down, does that mean it's a great idea to let Fat Tony with a felony conviction, a ball-peen hammer and a shitload of shady friends he has unclear relationships with open a casino?
  - RodericDay 11y ago
    It's a better idea than letting equally-as-dirty-but-white-and-uncaught Joe Trustfund take over in his absence. The former at least equalizes the second-order race issue, whereas yours naively compounds it.
  - 11y ago

greenisland 11y ago

I read the entire article. The man was duly convicted of a crime in Oklahoma. He broke the law, regardless of what anyone thinks. Fast forward to when selling dope in certain places is now legal and this guys want a piece of the action, but... he cannot legally do so because he's a convicted felon. Should we undo his conviction? No. He was tried fairly and found guilty based on the laws of the time and place. His fault. His color has nothing to do with it, and quite frankly, I'm sick to death of everything in this country now revolving around race, homosexuals, feminists. The man made a choice, he now lives with the repercussions of that choice, whether anyone agrees or disagrees. I realize my outlook is likely unpopular, but like I tell my children -- there are consequences for your actions, and it may take years to see them. This story will be read by my kids tonight to reinforce my good advice. Besides, the morality of the people involved in a business like legal dope would put me off. Just because they don't have convictions means nothing. The type of people attracted to the dope business are off putting.

mtalantikite 11y ago
The point here is that there are more consequences when you're Black in the US. Statistically speaking people of color, and in particular Black Americans, are arrested and convicted of marijuana related crimes at a much higher rate than any other group [1]. That translates into Black Americans being kept out of the newly legal business because of racist policing policies. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-blackwhite-marijuana-arrest-gap-in-nine-charts/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-b...
- greenisland 11y ago
  I appreciate your remarks. But -- what I'm saying is that no one should feel sorry for this guy. It pains me to see the vast numbers of Americans who but a few years ago were for tough legislation and tough policies and who now desire to see criminals released from prison because the sentence may be too harsh. Really? If you do the crime, you do the time. We should not undo sentencing. It was all done legally at the time and it should stand. I don't like the dope industry. It attracts children who think that smoking marijuana is harmless. It's not. The dopeheads can trot out all the industry-inspired crap they like, but it's not healthy. I'm all for ACTUAL medical patients who are in severe pain using it, but so many go to these quack doctors who will give a medical reason for a few dollars. Actual doctors with hospital admitting privileges should be the law. Marijuana is not harmless and just a few years ago the majority of Americans agreed. The morality in America has slipped precipitously since our heyday as a nation in the 1950s.

traviswingo 11y ago

> But it can’t be someone who got caught. Which for the most part means it can’t be someone who is black. It's thinking like this that pisses me off. Henderson wasn't hired because of a record. Yes, racism still unfortunately exists, but in order to move towards an equal future we need to stop bringing it up and searching for problems where there are none. Fucking Buzzfeed and Huffington post are constantly using they're over-sensitive audience to start drama.

knughit 11y ago
Ignoring up problems won't fix them.
- lsaferite 11y ago
  But how does demonizing the legal weed industry by accusing it of being racists accomplish anything useful? They are clearly NOT being racist and just following the legal requirements for their industry. The fact that the ones being excluded are mainly black is not some conscious decision to exclude blacks but the result of the current laws and enforcement saddling them with felony drug convictions. The author's time would be better spent addressing the real problem of the disproportionate number of black males with drug felonies for simple possession.
  - evilDagmar 11y ago
    Accomplish anything useful? Buzzfeed is about _generating ad revenue through clicks_, not about being useful or educational.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  Blaming B for discrimination done by A only makes B less likely to care.
atonparker 11y ago
There is a very real problem here, and you don't have to search hard for it. An entire sub-population of this country was disproportionately sentenced to felony convictions. If we don't recognize that for what it was, we are condemning a generation of black people to just "suck it up, because we're thinking about the future now". That is a mistake because these people are part of the future, and they deserve a fair chance in it. Laws preventing felony offenders from finding work in their field only make sense if the felony conviction actually made sense. Preventing non-violent drug offenders from finding work in the burgeoning drug industry is as nonsensical as the offense they were charged with. You can't just hit a reset button on racism and say all our mistakes our behind us, now we're all on the same level. Especially not when those mistakes were felony charges with lifelong consequences.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

matwood 11y ago

A secondary issue here is that a joints worth of pot was cause for a felony conviction. How is that punishment in any way fitting the crime.

lsaferite 11y ago
And this is the real issue the author should be addressing instead of trying to accuse the legal weed industry of being racist.
zeveb 11y ago
This, right here. Felonies are supposed to be crimes which deserve execution: murder, rape — that kind of thing. They shouldn't be things which deserve a slap on the wrist at the absolute most.

pakled_engineer 11y ago

Here activists called legalization the new prohibition because of all the regulations like no dispensaries within a X distance from each other, a school, church ect so drove them out or cemented monopolies for the existing dispensaries which can raise prices. Then they created high barriers to entry with massive licensing fees and other regulations. This of course spawned online purchasing and delivery business models that's worked well for now, until more regulations on delivery. One problem with the distributor in this story is he is constantly getting high off his own supply while in care and control of a vehicle which makes nobody want to work with him. That's heatbag behavior asking for problems. His comment on firearms about pulling out a gun during an argument is also something only heatbags do, the guys with side arms on the farm he went to are only armed to deter getting jacked for their product not win arguments. You can't have a record and operate a dispensary here either, which was designed to keep bikers and other org crime out but they get around this by partnering with somebody that has a clean record. Also wondering why the guy in Colorado can't apply for a pardon if it was only for teenage possession. Friend in Seattle did that to erase his record and open a weed business.

evilDagmar 11y ago
| Also wondering why the guy in Colorado can't apply for a pardon if it was only for teenage possession Because that would dilute the click-baity narrative that Buzzfeed is trying to drive home. We wouldn't want their efforts in conflating cause and effect to go to waste now, would we?

treerunner 11y ago

Black underemployment is not an issue specific to the weed industry, it's a problem in all industry. Duh. Also, legal weed is supposed to deal with racial inequalities. Legal weed means less people being caught and jailed. This is good. Though, to be perfectly honest, I am not into the idea of states using Marijuana as a profit vehicle. It's about as cynical and without class as state run gambling. Hopefully more people will grow their own and once the rest of the US legalizes, weed will be about as profitable, no more or less, than a tomato.

githubber123 11y ago

If most DUI convictions were white males and a delivery company didn't hire you if you had a DUI then that too would be racist? Seems like a reach.

notlisted 11y ago

I don't believe for one second that the people running the dispensaries never 'partook'. It takes a fan of the merchandise to run these things and communicate with the clientele. They just weren't caught. Why not? I suspect it still works like this: Some 10-odd years ago, I had a (white) colleague who really enjoyed smoking mary-j. He lived on the 48th floor of a deluxe high-rise in Manhattan. He, like his wealthy neighbors, didn't have to get their fix off the street. Instead, they called 1-800-greenhouse and ordered two "theatre tickets". Within 30 mins, a bike messenger (African-American) came over to deliver 2 ounces of stuff to his front door. He never left the house. Last I heard, he got a job with the government… He still has the right to vote too.

Grue3 11y ago

Why would anyone want to be part of something called "Weed Boom" is beyond me. Also why literal Buzzfeed clickbait is being posted on HN.

tzs 11y ago

I'd expect states to be strict in this area for now, especially states that legalized recreational use, because the weed business is not legal under Federal law. The Federal government is currently taking a hands off approach to see how this works out. The cleaner the states can keep their weed business, the more likely the Feds are to leave them alone.