Until All of Us Are Free
IN THE UNITED STATES, legal cannabis pulled in a smooth $10.4 billion in 2018, making it a banner year for pot profits. And the industry is on track to smash that record in 2019. All that prosperity is cause for good cheer—unless you or someone you love is one of the 40,000 people sitting in US jails for the same cannabis-related actions that are now making others rich. Over the past 10 years, as the recreational- and medicinal-marijuana industries have grown, 15 million people have been arrested on cannabis-related charges. Not all of them have been able to erase the negative marks that this encounter with the justice system had on their lives.
Cannabis entrepreneurs (and even consumers) benefiting from now-legal marijuana should feel some responsibility to help those who were penalized for growing and selling the same plant prior to legalization. That’s the reasoning behind groups like Cage-Free Cannabis and, more recently, the Last Prisoner Project (LPP), a retroactive-justice advocacy organization that launched in September.
“This is something we reiterate
