That is, your odds of being arrested in WA state are much lower because of your skin color, but much of your money is going to a nearly all-white club of pot growers, while we are still arresting black folk for selling the same thing. Those thoughts can't be all that healing, eh?
The ptb have made it so that moneyed - and far and away white - donors who are cultivating and distributing cannabis won't be arrested at their political fundraisers, but outside on the corner police are arresting young black men and putting them in jail for selling a gram. They have shuttered 1500 dispensaries, replacing them with a couple hundred "medical access points", home inspections, and sometimes salespeople who, frankly, don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. Many patients, who used to be able to hold their head up in public are now back in the black market because of the onerous restrictions or lack of access.
Forced into the Black Market
On July 1, Washington State's medical marijuana market disappeared. Here's why the most needy patients will likely suffer.
http://www.thestranger.com/news/2016/07/06/24303868/forced-back-to-the-black-market
and
http://www.thestranger.com/news/2016/07/13/24332114/how-washington-state-screwed-over-its-medical-marijuana-dispensaries
and since we are here
Why Seattle Is Failing at Pot Tourism
It leaves Seattle and other jurisdictions the freedom to keep on arresting black folks on the street, and contrasts those in our prisons now with the white folks paying money for political grease and access. And getting it.
I’s just after four o’clock on a hot Seattle afternoon, and Thomas Terry is standing in the parking lot of a Jack in the Box. Known for fights that end with police sirens and sometimes ambulances, it’s a spot some locals half-jokingly call “Stab in the Box,” but today the scene is quiet.
A man is walking up the street toward Terry and a few other young men who are gathered in the shade of a brick wall where the parking lot meets the sidewalk. As he draws near, one of them opens his mouth, and the words tumble out:
“Kush? You want some weed?”
...
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/legal-pot-and-the-black-market/481506/
“In many ways the imagery doesn't sit right,” said Michelle Alexander, associate professor of law at Ohio State University and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness in a public conversation on March 6 with Asha Bandele of the Drug Policy Alliance. “Here are white men poised to run big marijuana businesses, dreaming of cashing in big—big money, big businesses selling weed—after 40 years of impoverished black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their families and futures destroyed. Now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing?”
Michelle Alexander: White Men Get Rich from Legal Pot, Black Men Stay in Prison
'Course, she was speaking in the past tense about what is now reality.
...Forget Big Pharma and Big Tobacco. Microsoft is getting into the weed game. KIND Financial, a Los Angeles-based cannabis compliance software company, announced yesterday that it is partnering with Microsoft to launch a seed-to-sale tracking program. Given the nascent state of the seed-to-sale traceability software industry, we may be witnessing the birth of its proverbial 800-pound gorilla...
http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016/06/17/24227912/microsoft-jumps-in-the-weed-game-kohl-welles-wants-the-county-to-police-pesticides-on-pot-and-more]
Anyway, you mentioned that you might visit, but if that is what you are coming for, I really think Colorado is a better choice. They still have some of the same things going on, but they made the growing of a few plants legal for everyone, don't have to go ask permission - which all but ends the criminalization of cannabis. And you don't have to feel like you need to run and take a shower after supporting our racist cannabis oligarchy.
Odd, now to stand where knowledgeable and caring people were employed just a few weeks ago. Now all potential criminals again. And the corporate pot store signs are beginning to show up, like trash tossed out of a car window.
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