Under a cloudless sky full of twinkling stars and free of light pollution, we stood in a circle, far from urban bustle and city chatters. It was the perfect night in the great outdoors and naturally, a great night for a little bit of green.

I reached into my pocket and fished out my source of serenity for the next few hours, brought it to my lips, inhaled and exhaled as if the weight of the world had been lifted.

Against the vast stretch of sky and dark silhouettes of trees swaying in the dark, my cart looked like an eyesore. Its bright orange plasticky exterior belonged in an overlit convenience store display, not in the middle of a field. Each drag lit up a white beam, nothing like the warm ash sizzling at the butt of a real joint. And yet something so engineered, artificial and processed still gave me the same wide-eyed awe at the constellations I got from messy, hand-rolled joints passed around.

But I digress. That piece of plastic made me feel amazing. And all I needed to do was put it back in my pocket and ignore how ironic it was that something manufactured could sharpen the experience of being out in nature. After all, getting high was just about getting high. Who cares to think about anything beyond the feel-good side of weed?

As college students living in one of the most marijuana-progressive states, it’s easy to take full advantage of that without much thought. A handful of dispensaries are scattered within walking distance of campus. For many of us, weed is a harmless little indulgence, hitting it on a hike on a random Thursday afternoon or after a long day at work. Our experience of weed is relaxed because we are entering it at a point of legalization and from an affluent campus that’s generally insulated from the harsher reality of drug enforcement.

At the turn of the 20th century, marijuana was a little-known and little-used drug in the U.S. It wasn’t until the Mexican Revolution in 1910 when Mexicans immigrants began moving through the border did the government start politicizing marijuana, painting it as an insidious drug capable of even encouraging a “lust for blood.” What followed was a crusade against communities of color disguised as a war on drugs.

From jazz musicians to hippies, the government used marijuana as a tool to police culture under the guise of policing substances. As those policies hardened, the disparities did too: Black people were arrested for drug offenses at about 4.5 times the rate of white people. More importantly, research showed this can’t be chalked up to Black people using or selling drugs more, or even to where they live. Taken together, the evidence points most clearly to racial bias in how drug laws were enforced.

So when decriminalization of marijuana started to roll in, hopes of fixing this racial disparity seemed to be within reach. After all, the logic checked out: if prohibition racialized weed, then decriminalization should reverse that and let the people who were punished for cannabis participate in and profit from the newly legal market.

Even before recreational legalization, the NAACP was calling the War on Drugs “the new Jim Crow” and arguing that cannabis prohibition had been used to criminalize Black people for generations. Its solution was to end that punitive model and redirect resources toward communities of color, essentially asking for a stop on the kind of enforcement that produced the racial disparity in the first place.

But the present-day reality is far from what marijuana decriminalization had promised. Decriminalization did not magically erase who police stop more often. In fact, as recently as 2020, when sixteen states and the District of Columbia had legalized recreational marijuana, and many others had decriminalized possession, the ACLU continued to report racial disparities in marijuana arrests, with Black people being 3.6 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession despite similar usage rates.