Senator Cory Booker reacts: • BOOKER: It is stunning. As a person who went to Stanford and Yale and grew up in high school in an affluent area, lots of people used marijuana. You saw it very prevalent. We've had former presidents, senators, congresspeople admit to doing it, but very low risk, low consequence. The people who often are getting these charges for simple possession and getting criminal records are disproportionately low-income, disproportionately Black and brown, and it's a lifetime sentence. In other words, they're - they may not serve any jail time, but they, for the rest of their lives, will have a hard time getting a job, getting a business license, getting loans, getting certain housing opportunities. • The American Bar Association says there are 40,000 collateral consequences for people with a criminal conviction. And it's just so profoundly unjust because of the way we enforce the war on drugs or the - in this case, the war on marijuana - because even African Americans are almost four times more likely to be convicted of that than whites are, even though their usage rates are about the same. • BOOKER: Well, again, we have to be a country that, No. 1, doesn't treat this plant like a Schedule I drug.
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs