Expunging injustice.

Smoking legal weed in a “coffee shop” in Amsterdam, 2015.

As a teenager and and young man in L.A. in the Sixties I smoked a lot of pot.

Everybody did.

It was cheap and widely available.

And illegal.

Although I wasn’t aware of it – even before The War on Drugs – there were already lots of people in jail for marijuana possession.

In June 1971, Richard Nixon officially declared his “War on Drugs,” claiming that drug abuse was “public enemy number one.”

The rise in recreational drug use in the 1960s led to President Nixon’s focus on targeting marijuana and LSD.   For Nixon, and his generation, pot use was an integral part of the counter culture and the radical political movements of the time.

And, of course, it was.

As part of the War on Drugs Nixon increased federal funding for drug-control agencies and proposed strict measures, such as mandatory prison sentencing, for drug crimes.

Nixon went on to create the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973. This agency is a special police force committed to targeting illegal drug use and smuggling in the United States.

At the start, the DEA was given 1,470 special agents and a budget of less than $75 million. By 2017 the agency has nearly 5,000 agents and a budget of $2.03 billion.

By the mid-Seventies I no longer smoked at all and have smoked rarely since then.

On a 2015 trip to Amsterdam I bought a joint in what they call a coffee shop. I asked for low-octane and that was enough to have me tripping all day.

When cannabis becomes legal in Illinois and Chicago on Wednesday there will be a neighborhood cannabis shop a couple of blocks away. It will be more convenient to buy weed than milk or bread.

I doubt I will be much of a customer.

There has been a debate in Chicago over who gets the licenses to sell. So far, the vendors have been all white.

Last month some African American Council members attempted to delay the sale of cannabis in the City because of the issue. 

Community organizer L. Anton Seals Jr. hears the conversations and tries to remind his neighbors, friends and other residents whom he encounters that there are efforts to make sure African Americans and Latinos eventually get into the mix.

“By pausing sales, how does that really advance social equity applicants? What comes after that?” said Seals, who through his organization Grow Greater Englewood has been lobbying and encouraging businesspeople to apply for licenses.

“Are we going to just be mad, or are we going to do something?” he said. “We’ve been out here telling people to please apply for a license in January. Some people think it’s all a done deal, but there is still tremendous opportunity.”

Englewood community organizer Anton Seales Jr.,  will be a guest on Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers on January 17th. Seales was a member of Mayor Lightfoot’s transition team.

Beyond the issue of who gets to sell cannabis, is the role of the criminal justice system and how the war on drugs sent so many Black and Brown people to jail for no more serious a crime than smoking a joint.

In 2010 Chicago Reporter’s Mick Dumke got the story of what he labeled, The Grass Gap.

Chicago police made tens of thousands of arrests in 2009 and 2010 for marijuana possession, including 47,400 in which that misdemeanor was the most serious charge. So how egregious are the racial discrepancies?

• Of those arrested, 78 percent were black, 17 percent were Hispanic, and 5 percent were white.

• In those years 4,255 people pleaded or were found guilty of low-level marijuana possession after being arrested in Chicago: 89 percent were black, 9 percent were Hispanic, and 2 percent were white.

• The racial gap was slightly smaller for all of Cook County, which is less diverse than the city: countywide 76 percent of the 6,303 who were convicted or pleaded guilty were black, 10 percent were Hispanic, and 14 percent were white.

• Blacks accounted for most of the marijuana convictions and guilty pleas out of every police district in Chicago except three on the northwest side: Shakespeare (which is in Logan Square and West Town), Albany Park, and Jefferson Park. Hispanics ranked first in each of these areas.

With the legalization of cannabis in Illinois, that part of racist police enforcement practices will end.

And thanks to Cook County States Attorney Kim Foxx, past cannabis convictions will be expunged.

More than 1,000 pot convictions will soon be off the books in Cook County.

In a hearing Wednesday afternoon at the Leighton Criminal Court Building, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx stood before the circuit court’s chief judge and called for the vacation and expungement of 1,012 low-level, nonviolent convictions for possession of less than an ounce of pot.

The vast majority of the people who were granted relief at the hearing still don’t know it yet — but Foxx said they would be subsequently notified of the expungement of their cases by mail.

In the audience for the hearing were community activists, as well as Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who sat in the courtroom’s jury box, state “Cannabis Czar” Toi Hutchinson and state Rep. Kelly Cassidy (14th), who helped lead the way on legalization. Cook County Clerk Dorothy Brown served as the court clerk to Chief Judge Timothy Evans for the hearing.

With recreational marijuana set to become legal in the state in three weeks, officials called the mass expungement historic and said it demonstrated a key goal of the state’s legalization efforts — justice.

“As a prosecutor who has previously prosecuted these cases, we must own our role in the harm we have caused, particularly to communities of color and we must actively work to play our part in reversing those harms,” Foxx said.

On January 10th, Cook County States Attorney Kim Fox will be our in studio guest on Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers. 105.5fm in Chicago. Live streaming on lumpenradio.com and podcast at http://hittingleft.libsyn.com/