I can't believe this guy actually has a chance of being elected president.
Regarding Bernie's comment about marijuana arrests:
On the subject of the racial disparity in drug arrests, despite similar rates of use:
Marijuana possession accounts for 43% of all drug related arrests.
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/persons-arrested/persons-arrested
The vast majority of arrests for marijuana possession are the byproduct of being apprehended for an unrelated, more serious manner.
>The first half of the War on Drugs focused largely on relentless enforcement of heroin and crack cocaine laws in poor communities of color.7 But with the ebb of the crack epidemic in the late 1980s, law enforcement agencies began shifting to an easy target: marijuana. As a result, over the past 20 years police departments across the country have directed greater resources toward the enforcement of marijuana laws. Indeed, even as overall drug arrests started to decline around 2006, marijuana arrests continued to rise, and now make up over half of all drug arrests in the United States. In 2010, there were more than 20,000 people incarcerated on the sole charge of marijuana possession.
>Stated simply, marijuana has become the drug of choice for state and local police departments nationwide. Between 2001 and 2010, there were 8,244,943 marijuana arrests, of which 7,295,880, or 88%, were for marijuana possession. In 2010 alone, there were 889,133 marijuana arrests - 300,000 more than arrests for all violent crimes
https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/aclu-thewaronmarijuana-rel2.pdf
>While illicit drugs are implicated in three quarters of incarcerations (75.9 percent), few inmates are incarcerated for marijuana possession as their controlling or only offense. Inmates incarcerated in federal and state prisons and local jails for marijuana possession as the controlling offense accounted for 1.1 percent (25,235) of all inmates and 4.4 percent of those incarcerated for drug law violations. Those incarcerated for marijuana possession as their only offense accounted for 0.9 percent (20,291) of all inmates and 2.9 percent of those incarcerated for drug law violations.
http://www.casacolumbia.org/articlefiles/575-report2010behindbars2.pdf
Very few people are going to prison simply for marijuana possession. Blacks have a higher rate of arrest for drug possession because they are more likely to have their person/property searched by the police in general. Harsher prison sentences are likely the result of having prior convictions.
>ACLU report: Blacks in South Carolina arrested at nearly three times rate of whites for marijuana possession in 2010
>“This is biased research,” Charleston County Sheriff Al Cannon said. “This is a case of someone starting off with a theory and then interpreting the facts to support that theory.”
>Cannon said it’s hard to make judgments about the numbers without knowing the stories behind the arrests. “If you look at the folks in the jail who are charged with marijuana possession, it’s almost never the sole charge,” he said. “It’s usually marijuana found incidentally to an arrest on a number of other charges.”
http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20130606/PC16/130609519
and see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fkZUrT7t4o