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Senator Cory Booker Seeks Justice With New Marijuana Legalization Bill
Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) is working to proactively improve our nation at a time when most of our energy is spent combating Trump and Republicans to prevent the next awful thing they want to implement. Booker has introduced a bill to legalize marijuana in the U.S. and combat the racial injustices surrounding it at a time when embattled Attorney General Jeff Sessions and fellow Republicans are attempting to reverse state legalization.
The senator announced his plans for the Marijuana Justice Act on Tuesday. The bill would remove weed, which is currently a Schedule 1 drug ― from the list of controlled substances. It also would cut federal funding for states where people of color and low-income individuals are disproportionately arrested or incarcerated in order to motivate those states to change their laws.
Though black and white people have been found to use marijuana at around the same rate in the United States, black people are 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for possessing it. Even in Colorado and Washington, where recreational use is legal, black people are twice as likely to be arrested for breaking the states’ marijuana laws.
Senator Booker's bill would create a Community Reinvestment Fund of $500 million to communities that were impacted by the war on drugs by providing funds for job training, reentry services, expenses for the expungement of convictions, public libraries, community centers, youth programs and health education programs. “Descheduling marijuana and applying that change retroactively to people currently serving time for marijuana offenses is a necessary step in correcting this unjust system,” he said in the statement. “States have so far led the way in reforming our criminal justice system and it’s about time the federal government catches up and begins to assert leadership.”
While we fight hard against the alt-right, Trump, Bannon, Republican agenda, we must applaud and support our Senators and Representatives who are keeping their heads above water to work for all of us.
ACTION: Sign this petition by MoveOn or others like it: https://pac.petitions.moveon.org/sign/its-time-to-reverse-decades