Thursday, March 26, 2015
Associated Press
DENVER
The legalization of marijuana in Colorado hasn’t solved the racial disparities in enforcement that drug-policy reformers had hoped to end, with blacks still far more likely than whites to be charged with pot-related crimes, a new report says.
The report, issued Wednesday by the pro-legalization Drug Policy Alliance, showed that marijuana arrests in Colorado all but stopped after voters made the drug legal in small amounts for those 21 and older.
But the report noted continuing racial disparities involving the marijuana crimes that remain, including public use and possession in excess of the 1-ounce limit.
The study examined drug arrests in all 64 Colorado counties for two years before and two years after legalization in 2012.
The total number of charges for pot possession, distribution and cultivation plummeted almost 95 percent, from about 39,000 in 2010 to more than 2,000 last year.
Even after legalization, blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to be charged with public use of marijuana. Blacks were also much more likely to be charged with illegal cultivation of pot or possession of more than an ounce.
Still, the overall drop-off in arrests is good news for minorities, said Tony Newman, also of the Drug Policy Alliance.
The analysis did not break out data for Colorado’s largest ethnic minority, Latinos. That’s because data comes from the National Incident-Based Reporting System, which does not tally numbers for Latinos.