Legalizing marijuana is about more than just allowing recreational use, or the potential medicinal benefit, or the money that can be made from this new market.

It’s about undoing a century of racist policy that disproportionately targeted Black and Latinx communities. It’s about rebuilding the communities that have suffered the most harm. And it’s about ensuring that everyone has access to the opportunities that the new cannabis market provides.

Here’s the way I see it: It’s not justice when we lock up kids caught with an ounce of pot while hedge fund managers make millions off of the legal sale of marijuana.

It’s time to end that broken system, regulate the industry so it’s safe and legal, reinvest the tax revenue earned from marijuana sales to begin to rebuild communities devastated by the policies of the failed War on Drugs, and ensure that those communities are equally able to participate in the budding cannabis industry.

Add your name if you agree — it’s long past time to legalize marijuana, erase past convictions, create a cannabis industry that’s open to all, and begin to repair the damage caused by our current criminal justice system.

Here’s part of how we’ll do it:

• Legalize marijuana and erase past convictions.


• Roll back Trump’s guidance to block immigrants who work in the legal cannabis industry from becoming U.S. citizens.


• Fight for veterans’ right to access marijuana.


• Increase federal funding for marijuana research to understand its potential medical uses and ensure that marijuana products being sold are safe and effective.


• Respect Washington, D.C.’s 2014 decision to legalize marijuana. Since then, Republicans in Congress have been blocking the District from taxing and regulating marijuana. That’s led to public safety concerns and a burgeoning underground market. We need to lift that ban and encourage the District to develop a legal market that includes affected communities and fulfills the racial justice goals of the original referendum.


• Support Tribal sovereignty to make their own drug policies.


• Support the sovereignty of other nations that wish to legalize — recognizing the role our War on Drugs has had in destabilizing Latin America, a root cause of migration to the United States.


• Make sure that cannabis-related businesses finally have access to the banking system.


• Use the revenue collected from regulated marijuana businesses to establish a fund specifically to support women- and minority-owned small cannabis businesses.


• Fight a market takeover from Big Tobacco that edges out fledgling small businesses before they can ever get off the ground.


• Remove collateral sanctions that prohibit people with drug convictions, disproportionately people of color, from entering cannabis farming, including farming hemp.


• Invest federal and state revenue from the cannabis industry into communities that have been disproportionately impacted by enforcement of our existing marijuana laws.

Legalizing marijuana gives us an opportunity to repair some of the damage caused by our current criminal justice system, invest in the communities that have suffered the most harm, and ensure that everyone can participate in the growing cannabis industry.

Because look: We can’t let rich and predominately white hedge-funders and capital investors hoard the profits from the same behavior that led to the incarceration of generations of Black and Latino youth.

We have an opportunity now to get this right. I’ll fight to make that happen, but I can’t do it alone — it’s going to take a grassroots movement. And that’s exactly what we’re building together.

Add your name if you’re in this fight for a just and equitable cannabis industry.

Thanks for being a part of this,

Elizabeth