Voters in five states, including four that are among the most conservative in the country, are deciding on whether to legalize recreational marijuana this election. If passed in each state, Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, North Dakota and South Dakota would join 19 other states and the District of Columbia where cannabis has already been legalized for personal use.
Every time the Linda Ronstadt Stone Ponies comes on the radio, I am compelled to be reminded that cannabis is very toxic to horses, so they’re not stoned ponies.
With recreational marijuana now legal in New York, employers and workers are confronting a host of thorny questions about the drug and the workplace.
Can you be fired if you smoke on the job? What if you use at home? Can you be tested? The state Labor Department has some new guidance out that attempts to answer some of those questions.
Fifty years ago this summer, President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. Today, with the U.S. mired in a deadly opioid epidemic that did not abate during the coronavirus pandemic’s worst days, it is questionable whether anyone won the war.
Yet the loser is clear: Black and Latino Americans, their families and their communities. A key weapon was the imposition of mandatory minimums in prison sentencing. Decades later those harsh federal and state penalties led to an increase in the prison industrial complex that saw millions of people, primarily of color, locked up and shut out of the American dream