African American Leader Offers Profoundly Emotional Account of Her Personal Journey to Make the End of the Drug War on Minorities Her Priority

I know we’re all here for different reasons. Some of you are here because you just want your individual rights. Some of you are here because you have people who are benefiting from cannabis because of the medicinal laws that have been passed, and you want to further it so that everybody can benefit.

I am here because I am sick and tired of my people being the pawns, and being destroyed by a stupid war called the drug war.  It is my community, and the Latino community, that my fellow government has declared war on. And we need to stand up against it. Whether you love marijuana and you want to advocate the use of marijuana, or you want to further your rights, It doesn’t matter to me, because we’re all here together. And together we can end this war on drugs.

I have to tell you a little personal story. I did not come to this war on drugs very easily. I was one of those who had her head in the sand. I had a sister who used to go out in the community -- there was 18 of us -- and then, I had a sister who had fourteen. And of the twelve of us that lived, I’m the only one with no children. So, I was the one who could critique everybody else’s children. And I was a law and order girl. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was a law and order girl because I worked in government. And so I had this sister who had all these children and she would spend her time in Sacramento, walking the streets trying to rescue these little kids on drugs. We would fear for her life.

But I couldn’t hear her when she kept  telling me, “There’s a conspiracy. This is being done by the government. They are trapping our kids. Our kids are getting in for low-level crimes-- she didn’t call it that, she called it ‘for smoking pot’ -- and then they come out, they get another felony because they’re driving without a driver’s license.”

She just walked those streets. She became the hero of Sacramento, because she started a school, and she tried to bring those kids off the streets and into her school. But I couldn’t hear her conspiratory theories because she was a fundamentalist Christian, and I was the “educated” one in the family. I go, “My sister’s just got to stop with all these conspiracies. She’s got to just stop telling me that my own government, who has the war on drugs to protect us, is a government that’s oppressing us.”