NEWS
GOOD DEED WEED
ILLUSTRATION BY JACOB WALSH
Social justice fuels the fight for legal pot BY GINO FANELLI
C
@GINOFANELLI
edric Cotton was 14 when he fell in with the wrong crowd. He left his mother’s house, dropped out of school, and started slinging bags of weed on the streets of Rochester. Like many dealers, he built a criminal record and served stints in jail on a variety of charges. Every time he was released and contemplated going straight, he found himself trapped in the same cycle: further from finishing school, finding a job, and ditching dealing. With each new charge was a new obstacle to building a better life for himself. 8 CITY
APRIL 2021
GFANELLI@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM
So he stuck with it. He felt he had no choice. “A drug dealer is one of the lowest people on the totem pole, besides pedophiles and stuff,” Cotton said. “A person hears you’re a drug dealer, they say, ‘Oh, I don’t want him in my house, we don’t know what he’s going to do.’ You always go back.” Cotton spent almost 20 years “hustling,” as he calls it, before leaving it behind in 2014. Today, at 43, Cotton looks back on his younger years with regret. He sees a young man who missed opportunities to attend school and develop a career.
His story is not unusual. The front on the war on drugs that focused on low-level marijuana possession has cost generations of people the chance at a better life. This is particularly true for Black people, like Cotton, for whom the rate of marijuana arrests are higher than for whites, despite similar rates of cannabis use. Legalizing the recreational use of marijuana in New York is often framed as a budgetary issue. Feasibility studies cited by the governor and legislators, who have introduced their own dueling packages of legislation, project a tax
windfall of anywhere from $300 to $430 million annually. But many legislators, including those with the most pull in Albany who are pushing back on the governor’s measure, say they are motivated to legalize marijuana less by the creation of a new tax revenue stream than to exact a form of social justice that addresses the harms inflicted by current and past marijuana laws, chiefly on low-income neighborhoods whose residents are primarily people of color. The disproportionate number of Black Americans jailed on
