Cynthia Nixon wants to prioritise black people for marijuana licences as a form of ‘reparation’

Cynthia Nixon wants to legalise marijuana and issue licences to African-Americans first.

The Democratic candidate for governor of New York spoke to a crowd of people at the NYC Cannabis Parade, where she told then that she intended to legalise cannabis in an effort to end the “racist war on drugs”.

She said:

Arresting people – especially people of colour – for cannabis is the crown jewel in the racist war on drugs and we must pluck it down.

We must expunge people’s records; we must get people out of prison.

This is Nixon’s foundation policy, and she often cites recent NYPD data that confirms black and brown people are 10 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession despite the fact that white people are just as likely to use the drug.

In fact, 86 per cent of marijuana arrests made were people of colour.

The Democrat sees this racial disparity as an indication of racism, and told Forbes:

It’s a racial justice issue because we’re incarcerating people of colour in such staggering numbers.

Now that cannabis is exploding as an industry, we have to make sure that those communities that have been harmed and devastated by marijuana arrests gets the first shot at this industry. We [must] prioritise them in terms of licences. It’s a form of reparations.

Amanda Chicago Lewis’ landmark BuzzFeed report found that black Americans are being “shut out of America’s weed boom”, in part by banning those with marijuana felonies from working in the industry.

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