Previously on This Just In…

An excerpt from the update:

Biden announced that he was pardoning all individuals who have ever been federally convicted of marijuana possession. His reason for doing so, Biden said, was to “right” the racial “wrongs” that the criminal justice system has allegedly perpetrated. “While white and Black and brown people use marijuana at similar rates, Black and brown people are arrested, prosecuted and convicted at disproportionately higher rates,” Biden said in a video.

This claim—equal marijuana use, unequal criminal justice treatment—has been a cornerstone of the Left’s war on cops for decades. It is routinely trotted out as Exhibit A in the Left’s narrative about racist policing.

Drug abuse data is a more reliable indicator of drug use than self-reported surveys. Adult surveys exclude prisoners, street vagrants, and other individuals not tied to a stable home; school surveys exclude dropouts. Those excluded populations are precisely the ones with higher rates of drug use.

A core claim, then, of the New Jim Crow anti-cop Left is not supported by the evidence. Even if marijuana use and abuse were spread equally among black and white populations, possessing a small amount of marijuana lands no one in federal or state prison.

Read the update here.