Let’s pivot for a second.

The internet is one of the most unregulated spaces in the American economy. Even as lawsuits attempt to break up tech monopolies, it’s clear that the people who profit most from the rapidly growing tech industry are the pioneers who created the market for it. It would be absurd if Mark Zuckerberg was thrown in prison for creating Facebook simply because it wasn’t a regulated business.

But isn’t that what’s happened to the millions of black-market cannabis operators who’ve been sent to prison, sometimes for life, for non-violent cannabis offenses?

You might say that comparing the developing tech industry to the cannabis one isn’t fair because cannabis is a potentially addictive substance and Facebook and Instagram … Oh.

Now you see it.

Some tech executives are so aware of social media’s addictiveness, they don’t let their kids have accounts. In addition to the disturbing relationship between social media use and poor mental health, we now know that social media platforms can be weaponized by international agents to influence American elections and incite social unrest.

While the mostly white entrepreneurs developing the tech industry have been given space to make mistakes and adapt to a changing legal landscape, the BIPOC entrepreneurs at the helm of cannabis, a far less dangerous “substance” than social media, have been arrested and imprisoned.

From the beginning, cannabis prohibition and the war on drugs targeted Black and brown communities. It was a political weapon designed to disrupt “radical” Black leadership and solidify political power in the hands of the wealthy and white.

To this day, Black people are 3.6 times as likely to be arrested for pot possession as white people, even though both groups use cannabis at nearly equivalent rates. As cannabis is legalized from state to state, Black entrepreneurs with the most relevant industry experience are also the most likely to be in prison or held back by the collateral consequences of criminalization, including cannabis laws that specifically exclude people with cannabis-related records from entering the industry.

Structural racism in cannabis punishes Black entrepreneurs for their adjacence to poverty, a trauma a disproportionate number of Black people experience as a direct result of the criminalization of cannabis.

If you want to see the cannabis industry open its doors to the legacy entrepreneurs who made the way, you can do something to make that happen, and right now is the time.

Dianna K. Benjamin

Writing since February 2022 · 1 story contributed