‘Sunny ways’ not just for the privileged

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/04/2017 (3103 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An admission, that within living memory would have had me arrested: I have invested in marijuana, and profited.

In late 2015, I turned 34 years old and found myself panicked by the realization that the personal finance mantra of my 20s — “you could die tomorrow… enjoy life!” — had been somewhat undermined by my continued survival.

Determined to make up for lost time, I opened an RRSP and set about building a sensible portfolio of broad market funds. I bought no stock in any individual company, except for one: a Canadian pot-growing business.

This, I bought only because I guessed that receiving dispatches from “my” pot company would make me laugh. (I was right.) At the time, its shares were trading for $3.20 a pop; I bought five. Just five. It is not the most frivolous way I’ve spent $16 for personal entertainment.

I wasn’t expecting to profit. Within a year of buying those five shares, the company’s share price had more than tripled. For a while, my $16 investment had turned into more than $40 in unrealized capital gains.

That’s not quite enough to retire, but the bright green numbers taunted me. “Oh,” I moaned to my partner, “if only I had been reckless enough to sink our life’s savings into it. We could have made enough for a new Toyota.”

Or, had I been independently wealthy and taken a more generous flyer on the company, I could have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit. If I was running a hedge fund? Could have been millions.

OK, back to reality; this isn’t really a laughing matter. This is big money. Since writing about legalization in a previous column, my email inbox has been filled with notes from publicists hoping I’ll write something about their weed-producing clients.

“Hi Melissa! Just wanted to make sure you got the news,” read one that arrived Tuesday, and “the news” is all business: a press release about a “licensed cannabis producer” preparing for its initial public offering of shares.

Legalization is coming. A lot of people are positioned to grow rich from selling marijuana, and that process is already started. But others, more vulnerable and with less access to capital, are still paying a heavier price.

As July 1, 2018, draws closer, it is time now to reckon with that disparity. The burdens of drug policy have fallen overwhelmingly on the shoulders of the poor; in part, legalization is an admission that this itself is an injustice.

The fact that the heavy penalties of drug enforcement — incarceration, social alienation, the barrier of a criminal record — has disproportionately affected poor communities and people of colour is no historical accident; it’s intertwined with the very roots of prohibition.

This isn’t a hidden history; it’s out there in the open, for anyone who cares to look.

In the United States, federal marijuana prohibition was spearheaded in the 1930s by government drug czar Harry Anslinger, who openly leveraged racism against black and Latino people in order to make his case.

He wrote about the horrors of “coloured” students seducing white women with marijuana; he railed about how pot drove black jazz musicians to create “satanic” music, and its effects on “degenerate” Spanish speakers.

In Canada, the relatively light drug enforcement of the early 20th century was replaced by a harsher regime in the 1920s, fuelled in part by racist panic over Chinese immigration on the West Coast.

The power disparity of prohibition’s birth never went away. Even today, police don’t tend to raid estates in the Hamptons or the bathrooms of posh nightspots; one way or another, vices of the wealthy tend to stay private.

Consider how, in a live interview with Vice News on Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau talked about how his late brother Michel had been caught with a handful of joints after a car crash, six months before his 1998 death.

“My dad said, ‘OK, don’t worry about it,’ reached out to his friends in the legal community, got the best possible lawyer and was very confident that we were going to be able to make those charges go away,” Trudeau said.

“We were able to do that because we had resources, my dad had a couple connections,” the prime minister continued. “We were confident that my little brother wasn’t going to be saddled with a criminal record for life.”

It was the second time Trudeau told that story; he’d said the same to Chatelaine during the last federal election campaign.

Back then, it largely slipped by the news cycle. This time, it made national headlines.

The story isn’t a flattering one for the Trudeau family, but it is honest, and Trudeau is right to be telling it: that eye-opening experience, he said, is partly what animates his support of legalization now.

Speaking to a young, black Toronto man recently charged with marijuana possession, Trudeau said the Canadian government would start “a process” to “make things fairer” for people with existing pot convictions.

The Liberals haven’t said much about what that process will look like.

Meanwhile, NDP Leader Tom Mulcair jumped on that vagueness, slamming Trudeau’s “hypocrisy” for not offering a more concrete plan.

If legalization goes through, and its rationale is understood, in part, as a way of righting a historic injustice that has seen prohibition enforcement primarily used against poor communities, then that fact must be reckoned with, too.

There are people in Canada today struggling to find work or, worse, languishing in prison because of non-violent marijuana-related convictions.

There are also people in Canada today investing in pot, poised to make millions.

If the primary determinant of which category someone belongs to — whether they hire a chirpy publicist or report to a probation officer — is not the substance they trade in, but social power and access to capital, that is not an ethically tenable situation.

Trudeau may not yet want to offer specifics on the “process” of remediating that injustice. In addition to being legally complex, those specifics would likely cost Trudeau more, politically, than legalization itself.

Yet it must be done.

The momentum of legalization offers us a rare chance to right historical wrongs and redress a persistent social injustice. What a waste it would be, if the federal government fails to seize the opportunity.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca