Quote:
Philadelphia NAACP President Jerry Mondesire told PW that the NAACP was taking steps to call the war on drugs a “civil-rights issue.”
This comes after telling PW in March that he “attributes the racially disparate arrests to police ‘acting what they see on the street.’ While Mondesire says the NAACP has not taken a position on legalization, he’s clear on one thing: Black kids are getting arrested because they ‘[smoke weed] on the street. White kids do it in private.’”
One of the issues associated with making marijuana a civil-rights issue, we reported last week, is black people’s “fear of becoming even more of a target for harassment or arrest than they already are.”
Continued, “Another issue, says Linn Washington—a Temple journalism professor who has written extensively about the war on weed and is an advocate of marijuana legalization—is that Philly’s minority community leaders lack the will to encourage the cause of legalization to their constituents.”
But that all changes now…or actually will change in the summer.
Los Angeles will host the 2011 NAACP Conference in late July, where NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous is now expected to officially call the war on drugs (or just marijuana?) a civil-rights issue, according to Mondesire.
This comes after telling PW in March that he “attributes the racially disparate arrests to police ‘acting what they see on the street.’ While Mondesire says the NAACP has not taken a position on legalization, he’s clear on one thing: Black kids are getting arrested because they ‘[smoke weed] on the street. White kids do it in private.’”
One of the issues associated with making marijuana a civil-rights issue, we reported last week, is black people’s “fear of becoming even more of a target for harassment or arrest than they already are.”
Continued, “Another issue, says Linn Washington—a Temple journalism professor who has written extensively about the war on weed and is an advocate of marijuana legalization—is that Philly’s minority community leaders lack the will to encourage the cause of legalization to their constituents.”
But that all changes now…or actually will change in the summer.
Los Angeles will host the 2011 NAACP Conference in late July, where NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous is now expected to officially call the war on drugs (or just marijuana?) a civil-rights issue, according to Mondesire.
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