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The American election is still ongoing, but votes for the next president aren’t the only ones that were cast this week.

Drug reform advocates across the country are celebrating a few groundbreaking decisions changing drug laws in a number of states.

Several of the states that passed new measures this week have historically been key players in “the war on drugs”, so the turnaround is a notable victory, reports VICE.

Here’s who has legalised or decriminalised drugs, which drugs they’ve legalised or decriminalised, and in what capacity they can be consumed:

• Mississippi passed initiative 65, a ballot measure that will establish a medical cannabis program.
• Dakota also voted to establish a medical cannabis regime.
• Oregon voted to support Measure 110, which will decriminalise all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. They also voted to legalise access to magic mushrooms for medicinal purposes.
• Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota all voted to legalise cannabis for recreational purposes.
• The District of Columbia passed a measure to decriminalise shrooms.

Oregon was not holding back at all.

The decisions are significant for a number of reasons, not least of which because people of colour are disproportionately arrested for drug crimes.

Here’s hemp company owner Jones Bonner, on cannabis:

“People of color have been disproportionately demonized and incarcerated for this plant. In this era, people of non-color are capitalizing on the economic benefits of this plan and you still have people serving ridiculous sentences that will not be adjudicated,” Jones Bonner said, adding that many farmers in her home state are living in abject poverty.

“But they have land. They can use that land to create economic wealth for their family.”

A spokesman for the Drug Policy Alliance, Matt Sutton, says in support of drug reform, that it is a crucial step in opening up conversations about police brutality and the ways that the criminal justice system has failed American citizens.

Attorneys representing former Minneapolis police officers charged in George Floyd’s death, for example, argued that Floyd was intoxicated, overdosed, and therefore contributed to his own death.

This is one in a long line of court cases where the defence used ‘drugs’ as a supposedly ‘reasonable’ motivation for excessive force. In an overwhelming majority of these cases, the victim was a person of colour.

[Sutton says that] Oregon’s decriminalization measure could result in a 95 percent decrease in racial disparities in arrests, according to the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission.

Sutton said it’s “remarkable” that weed legalization would pass in states like Montana, which has the highest rate of racial disparities in weed arrests, and South Dakota, where 10 percent of all arrests are tied to cannabis.

He further remarked that economic gains, particularly as the pandemic drains economic resources, were also a factor in the support of cannabis reform.

The best scenario for drug reform in states where marijuana and other drugs are still criminalised or illegal would be a Democratic victory in both the White House and the Senate.

Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris support the decriminalisation of marijuana.

[source:vice]