When prohibition also leaves dead

There is one question that deserves to be asked every time the United States revisits the future of its cannabis laws:

What has been the human cost of the war against a plant?

This is not to say that cannabis is harmless. It isn't. It's a psychoactive substance, it can produce adverse effects, and its use also poses risks that deserve to be discussed seriously.

But there is another conversation, much less frequent: that of the people who ended up losing years —and in some cases their lives— within the system created to prohibit it.

The DEA itself acknowledges in its cannabis fact sheet that no overdose deaths attributable to marijuana have been reported. But this discussion about toxicity doesn't answer another question: what happens when a person enters the criminal justice system for a cannabis-related offense?

The story of Antonio “Tony” Bascaro offers a dimension that is hard to ignore.

The Cuban pilot received a 60-year federal sentence in 1982 related to a conspiracy to import marijuana. He ended up serving approximately 39 years in prison and was released in 2019 at the age of 84. Justice Department documents from that time record the 60-year sentence.

Bascaro was free again.

Others do not.

Richard Flor, from Montana, was a registered caregiver in the state's medical marijuana program. He was 68 years old when he received a five-year federal sentence. He died a few months later while in federal custody after suffering serious health problems. His case subsequently became a case study in the debate over compassionate release of sick prisoners.

Steven Sutherland received a ten-year sentence in Missouri. His case involved 110 grams of marijuana and 21 plants. He already had health problems when he entered the prison system; he died less than a year after beginning his sentence.

And then there's the case of Jonathan Magbie.

He was 27 years old. He had been a quadriplegic since childhood and required respiratory assistance. He had no criminal record. In September 2004, he was sent to a Washington, D.C. jail to serve a ten-day sentence for marijuana possession.

He never returned home.

He died four days after beginning his sentence due to respiratory failure. An official investigation found deficiencies in the care he received, and his family subsequently filed a lawsuit alleging that he was not provided with the medical care he needed.

This is where the discussion stops being exclusively about cannabis.

It becomes a discussion about proportionality, justice, health, and state responsibility .

Because it's one thing to ask what risks a substance poses.

It is quite another thing to ask what risks the system may produce when a person is imprisoned for a crime related to that substance.

For decades, the war on drugs turned certain quantities, conspiracies, and distribution offenses into sentences that could consume an extraordinary portion of a person's life. In some cases, the laws continued to be enforced even as the societies that created them began to shift their stance on cannabis.

This creates a paradox that the United States has not yet fully resolved:

A person can spend decades in prison for conduct related to a plant that, in many parts of the same country, is now part of a legal industry.

Time doesn't just change the laws.

It also changes the perception of what those laws did.

And that is perhaps the most uncomfortable question:

What do we do with people who have grown old within a political system that the country no longer views in the same way?

Not all cannabis-related cases are the same. Not all convictions were unjust. And not every person imprisoned for marijuana was simply a disproportionately punished user.

That is precisely why this conversation needs fewer slogans and more research.

You need to review the sentences.

• You need to look at the medical conditions.

• He needs to examine the possibilities for clemency and compassionate release.

• You need to ask yourself how many people continue to grow old behind bars for convictions that would be viewed very differently today.

Because the history of cannabis in the United States is not written only in dispensaries, crops, taxes, and multi-billion dollar markets.

It is also written in court records.

In lost years.

In separated families.

In men who grew old in prison.

And in people who never had the opportunity to return home.

Cannabis can be the subject of medical, social, and legal debate.

But we must also talk about the other side of the equation:

When a public policy ceases to be questioned, its consequences can become part of history before anyone stops to measure them.

The question is no longer just how much damage a drug can do.

The question is:

How much damage can a policy designed to combat it do?