MLK Day 2026: Cannabis and Civil Rights

It’s MLK Day once again.

I have written an MLK Day post on this blog for nine consecutive years. The theme of all these posts is that cannabis is a civil rights issue, and that Dr. King would have advocated for ending marijuana prohibition based on that fact.

Each year, I have demonstrated with facts (upon facts upon facts) that the War on Drugs continues in insidious ways. In, 2024, which is the most recent year that FBI data is available, law enforcement officials made nearly 190,000 arrests for marijuana possession and distribution, comprising over 22% of all drug-related arrests. Of those arrests, 92% were for marijuana possession. The other 8% of marijuana-related arrests were defined as “sales/manufacturing.”

Those numbers are a slight and welcome downtick from 2023, but they remain shockingly large. Sadly, marijuana-related arrests of black people continue to be disproportionate to population size, at 42% of all recorded arrests. (Black people comprise roughly 14% of the U.S. population.) I doubt this troubling dynamic will change anytime soon.

Heading into MLK Day weekend last year, President Biden announced that he was commuting the sentences of nearly 2,500 people convicted of non-violent drug offenses. The focus was predominantly on individuals “who received lengthy sentences based on discredited distinctions between crack and powder cocaine…”, as opposed to cannabis-related crimes. It wasn’t what he promised, but at least it was something.

Trump hasn’t made a similar effort, saving his pardons for large scale narcotraffickers and those who can afford to pay. Elsewhere, the President gets some credit for picking up the ball on Biden’s stalled marijuana rescheduling effort, but rescheduling is no solution to the plague of marijuana-related arrests nationwide. As we’ve explained many times, moving marijuana to Schedule III will not legalize the plant federally, and it does nothing to change state laws—which is where most arrests are made.

Forgive me if I sound a little grouchy today: in the nine years I’ve been writing this MLK Day post, scant progress has been made on cannabis decriminalization. Instead, we’ve seen states roll out cannabis licensing programs, with business opportunities for those who can marshal resources. That’s all well and good, but so many people are left behind—some literally behind bars, and on account of race.

On MLK Day, it’s important to remember that there is still a lot of work to do at the intersection of race and drug law enforcement. Here is a short list of organizations if you’d like to get involved: