The Communal Impacts of Drug Criminalization in Maryland

“groupthink”. Also, I realize this framing has limitations. This analysis, after all, frames
the issue through the lens of “cost savings,” which can work against the notion of
economic redistribution, and “elite expertise,” which can work against notions of
participatory democracy.
I, Lawrence, a co-author of the research report, is a community researcher working with a
grassroots think tank which does extensive political advocacy on issues ranging from
police accountability to cannabis legalization from an explicitly Pan African/Black
nationalist lens. This puts me in conversation with a broad cross-section of “black civil
society,” the community groups which make up so much of Black political and civic life in
a city like Baltimore. Upon being presented with this standard narrative of drug
decriminalization, I was not surprised to find many of those who heard this argument
were generally unenthusiastic or even resistive to drug decriminalization, despite
supporting progressive policy and even progressive drug policy in the past. The comments
presented in the “standard narrative” on decrim varied, but mostly diverged from one
central point; White supremacy and anti-blackness create addiction, street-level drug
sales, survival economics, and the nonprofit industrial complex, and these operate in
ways that decrim theorists do not fully understand, turning the solutions decrim
advocates present, which sound good in theory, into ineffectual or even dangerous in
reality.
Given that many of the civic groups that have been essential to the successful passage of
progressive legislation in the state capital of Annapolis in the past have been resistant to
this standard narrative of decrim, it did not bode well for the political stakes for this
essential issue.
This research project is an attempt to bring these stories to the larger drug policy
community, to create a space for these voices to be heard, as they are often not sought out
to engage in conversation on drug policy, or worse, actively seen as antagonistic to drug
policy reform.
The result, we hope, is the beginning of redefining how advocates and researchers
understand the harms of drug criminalization. Instead of a story of individuals being
harmed by a bad policy, drug criminalization should instead be seen as communities
being harmed by a system of White supremacy that produces anti-Black policy (of which
drug criminalization is just one example).
Seen from this perspective, a new frame for drug decriminalization can emerge, one
which places reparation for the War on Drugs at its center. This reframed
decriminalization policy is not only more socially just, but it may also be politically
necessary for decriminalization to pass in a state like Maryland, whose population is over
30 percent African-American and which has one of the largest state legislative Black
caucuses in the United States (1).
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