How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
Once I met a guy who worked for some Edward Jones-type company, investing the money of moms and pops, making money from watching various markets for opportunities to make profits.<p>He was so in love with how effectively the whole world made sense in terms of dollars, contracts, and trades. He liked the meta-economics of the prevailing world economic order. He would think in terms of &quot;is it worth it to me to buy your debt?&quot; if ever you said anything within a mile&#x27;s distance of implying that you might want money for some economic purpose.<p>Well, at that time, there was no weed boom. It was illegal for the most part, in the U.S.<p>And his worldview, which always tried to relate everything -- from national or world news, right on down to the conversations of everyone around him after the workday was done -- everything he related to in terms of how our existing systems of money, contract obligations, and legal decisions was so logical and coherent and wonderful.<p>What did he think about weed then? That it was an unproductive (one of his favorite words) and likely immoral industry of drugs, not fit to be placed in his glorious world of markets and trade deals.<p>What does he think about it now? You know already. What do all these full-time market-men think about it: markets are awesome and efficient and now it&#x27;s just another market service for them to try to arbitrage and to buy ownership of so that they themselves can maximize profit on the margins.<p>What was the difference before and after? Well, in this one respect, there is no difference: he still goes on effusing self-serving pro-US-capitalist rhetoric everywhere he goes. The one difference is that now he doesn&#x27;t think weed is bad, it&#x27;s just another thing for him to try to leverage financial&#x2F;economic advantage out of, behind his Edward Jones-style desk, while there is a whole &#x27;nother entire class of people mentioned in this article who probably don&#x27;t dig his own worldview as much as he does.