POT PROS AND CONS

Re "It's a love/hate thing" (Cover package, Sept. 22):

Sadly, CN&R's "pot issue" reflects our community's collective
nearsightedness with regard to this critical topic. It is deeply
troubling that the ongoing debate about medical marijuana,
dispensaries and the like continues to completely eclipse a national
human-rights crisis that many are calling "the new Jim Crow."

While a good number of patients benefit from our state's massive
marijuana industry, some simple arithmetic confirms that the majority
of California-grown pot hits the streets-both in and out of state.
Let's be honest. Many Chicoans and seasonal workers, the vast
majority of them white, profit from this illegal market. The
medical-marijuana system, with its nebulous legal framework, provides
cover for many of them.

People in Chico are reluctant to talk about the full picture of the
suffering that keeps this industry profitable. Despite statistics
that consistently show drug use and sales are equal across racial and
socio-economic lines, the blood-and-guts trenches of the drug war
have almost always been in poor communities of color. With all due
respect and compassion for the whites who also suffer, we need to
recognize and deal with the fact that communities of color across the
United States have been utterly decimated by the war on drugs.

Right to grow? Fine. Right to use? Sure. Right to profit? Not when
such profit is bound up with grossly disproportionate arrests,
incarceration and felonization of people of color.

Before you opt to grow or trim weed that may well end up on the
street, ask yourself if you really want to work the supply side of a
brutal and racist drug war-a drug war that deliberately targets
people who are all too conveniently distant, geographically and
psychologically, from Chico profiteers.

Chris Moore-Backman

Chico