By Bridget Carolan
“Honestly, you are giving them $200, they aren’t going to not approve you for a medical card,” the woman at the front desk of Blair Wellness Center in Belvedere tells me. Blair Wellness is one of nine medical marijuana dispensaries that seem to be multiplying throughout Baltimore—Mission, in Hamden, opened just last April. These dispensaries are accessible only if you carry a medical marijuana card. Although, legally, there is a distinction between medical marijuana and recreational use, in practical terms, the difference amounts to a $200 visit to a nurse practitioner who has been vetted by the State of Maryland, with an additional $50 fee for the medical card itself.
That has chilling racial implications in Baltimore City, where black workers are, on average, three times more likely to be unemployed and earn half of the income of white residents. These wealth disparities impact access to this new medical market. This matters given the history of racial discrimination in arrests for marijuana possession. While statistics show that black and white people consume marijuana at the same rate, black people in the United States are almost four times as likely to be arrested for possession, as study after study shows.
Beyond arrests for possession, marijuana law is leveraged for other arrests, with equally disparate racial impacts. The smell alone, for instance, can be used as a tool to justify an otherwise unconstitutional search.
Sonia Kumar, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, points out that “one of the big flaws of the way our law is currently structured is that we can never disprove that a cop did not smell marijuana and lots of police have been explicit about that this is the way that they are trained.” Kumar says ACLU attorneys have examined records of police searches that were justified by the smell of marijuana and found that these searches were far less likely to result in the finding of an illegal substance in the cars of black and brown people than they were for white people.
Susan Francis, Deputy Director of Maryland’s Volunteer Lawyers Service, sees these disparities first hand. She regularly looks at criminal records as part of her expungement work—the process by which a criminal conviction is removed from a person’s record. She says that she can “tell someone’s race based on what they have been charged with.” Charges for petty offenses such as “spitting on the sidewalk or having a bicycle with the light not working” and “many of the marijuana charges” just don’t appear on the criminal records of white clients. The injustice in this disparity only grows when, with $250 dollars of disposable income, residents can buy their way out of the illegal market.
Unlike with a typical prescription, medical marijuana card holders are not prescribed a set amount, but are all permitted purchase up to the legal limit. This means they can buy 120 grams, or about 4 ounces of leaf, or up to 36 grams of THC per month, no matter their diagnosis. Blair Wellness offers patrons a wide variety of products at a variety of prices: dozens of flavors of tablets, concentrates, flowers, and cartridges. On a recent visit to Blair Wellness, a staffer emphasized that the variety allows people to “take control of their own health and wellness.”
Of course, the latest and biggest step in the incremental path towards legalization in Baltimore was the State’s Attorney for Baltimore City Marilyn Mosby’s announcement that she will no longer prosecute marijuana possession cases.
The conversation at Blair Wellness, set in a well branded front waiting room with newsletters and informational packets advertising the health benefits of marijuana, sharply contrasts with the conversation held at Mosby’s Court in the Community event at Baltimore City Community College on February 27, following her announcement. One was grounded in the health benefits to individual wellness and one was grounded in evaluating a public safety risk. Although this division is natural considering the professional perspectives of a for-profit enterprise and a public prosecutor’s office, the racially charged nature of this issue informs the rhetoric.
At the Court in the Community event hosted by Mosby, other panelists include representatives from the Drug Policy Alliance, the Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service, the ACLU, Marijuana Policy Project, Job Opportunities Taskforce, and the State’s Attorney’s office itself. They can all agree that prosecution of marijuana is highly discriminatory and that legalization from Annapolis is right around the corner. Mosby contends that prosecuting marijuana possession cases right now would be like “prosecuting alcohol possession right at the end of prohibition.”
The State’s Attorney’s office is currently pushing a vacature statute in Annapolis, which would allow them to vacate the convictions of past marijuana possession cases. This bill would let prosecutors petition judges for a proceeding to vacate problematic convictions, according to The Afro. In addition, the bill would allow the State’s Attorney more leeway to vacate convictions associated with the Gun Trace Task Force. Although many of the proponents of the bill believe it will help undo the racial injustice caused by these laws in the past, it was met with a lukewarm reception in Annapolis. Many of the bill’s opponents believe that in order to vacate these convictions, statewide law should be changed—complaining that this bill empowers local jurisdictions creating inconsistent outcomes across the state.
The process towards legalization has been an incremental one. In 2014, Maryland decriminalized up to 10 grams of cannabis, which is actually a significantly higher threshold than most other states, who have decriminalized much larger quantities. This means that, under this threshold, penalties are civil resulting in a fine rather than criminal penalties. Current marijuana law for the State of Maryland does allow the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. This was legalized in 2014, but dispensaries only began popping up in 2018 after the legal battles around licensing had finally been resolved. To access marijuana medicinally, one must obtain a medical card. In addition to showing identification, providing a social security number and proof of address, one must get a recommendation from a list of approved care providers.
As Maryland and Baltimore policymakers gear up for what seems to be the inevitable legalization of marijuana, the conversation has begun to shift from whether it will be legalized, to how it should be legalized. The new medical dispensaries foreshadow what that might look like as the medical market expands, but the prospects for race equity are grim.
Blair Wellness is typical of the many dispensaries in the city. Take Maggie’s in Hamden, Pure Life Wellness in the Inner Harbor, or ReLeaf in Mount Vernon. They are sleek buildings with well branded logos, in decidedly white parts of town. The front page of the Maggie’s website even advertises that it is on a “safe, well-lit road,” making every effort to distance themselves from the illegal drug trade. The dispensaries are branded and both clinical and cool, reminiscent of a tattoo and piercing shop.
The dispensaries in Baltimore have mostly white employees and all have white owners. There is a great and disturbing duality in the way that at the very same time that black people in Baltimore are serving time for marijuana possession and distribution in the cluster of jails at Madison and Fallsway, a ten minute walk up Chase Street and Baltimoreans can purchase legal weed from white owners for $250 a prescription.
The story of medical marijuana in Baltimore is a “story of how segregated our city is and a story of how inequitable our society is,” says Kumar. She points out how those who sold marijuana when it was illegal are excluded from the legal market, which is both inherently unfair and irrational. The fact that the legal industry generates so much wealth and is so whitewashed is a striking disparity that is difficult to ignore. Kumar says, “I lose my language around it. How can you not see it?”
Olivia Nugar of the Marijuana Policy Project shares a similar sentiment. She advocates for a true commitment to undo the racial harm of years of discriminatory enforcement when it comes to the legalization. Data from the states that have already legalized marijuana shows that the big money makers in the dispensary scene have been overwhelmingly white. Nugar thinks that conversations should focus on how to tax the drug upon legalization and how to appropriate that tax money to undo the damage that years of discriminatory enforcement have done to people of color.
Even though there are many outlets for legal marijuana already, until the full legalization, there remain ways to leverage the prohibition to the advantage of law enforcement, and the racial disparities thus remain persistent. The great and disturbing irony is that the obvious solution to discriminatory arrests and prosecutions—the legalization of cannabis—unless done deliberately, will continue to perpetuate racial disparities and wealth gaps between black and white Baltimoreans.