Black women using cannabis should not be a newsworthy item but it is. The reason behind the novelty is because generationally (since at least the marijuana prohibition of 1923) our community has been targeted, ridiculed, threatened and persecuted for using a plant. The propaganda further generated by the War on Drugs succeeded in teaching multiple generations to fear, or hide their cannabis use for fear of prosecution and incarceration.
While the Cannabis Act passed in Canada liberated our ability to use this plant without fear of criminal conviction, for many of my community, the trauma perpetuated by the racial targeting of Black bodies for using cannabis has created significant mistrust. Many in my community didn’t automatically feel free to use this plant without consequence. For example, when I would ask members of our Facebook group: Afro Cannada Budsistas if they purchased cannabis through the Ontario Cannabis Store, a few expressed trepidation at having their credit card information being held in government databases. Their concern was that the government could change it’s mind on legal cannabis and suddenly members of our community would find themselves prosecuted for a product they fear was never really be accessible to them.
While to some Canadians of privilege, this type of fear may seem irrational, it is certainly not displaced. How do you imagine it must look to Black & indigenous communities to see one career policeman become a board member & shareholder of one of the biggest cannabis licensed producers in Canada, while another retired chief of police becomes Canada’s minister of marijuana. The fact that each individual led the largest police force in the country and perpetuated the policies that targeted Black & brown bodies while letting our white friends and counterparts use cannabis with almost no enforcement makes the irony even more bitter. I invite you to make it make sense…
So it’s for reasons like these that whenever a Black woman learns that another sista also uses cannabis, it’s figuratively Christmas in July for us, the most unexpected of delightful surprises. It’s why Natalie Cox slid into my DMs on Facebook almost one year ago after she read a comment by me promoting a recent visit to dispensaries in indigenous territories with “I didn’t know you bun weed?!” and the rest as they say, was HERSTORY….
Where we started…
How it’s going…
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