Reclaiming Black joy and cannabis use as resistance

Pleasure has never been neutral. For Black Americans, rest, gathering, intimacy, and altered states have often existed under measurable surveillance. 

In 2020, the ACLU reported that Black people were 3.64 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession than white people, despite similar usage rates.¹ In some states, that disparity was far higher. The arrests were overwhelmingly for possession, not trafficking or violent crime.

Usage rates tell a different story. Federal data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health consistently show that Black and white Americans use cannabis at comparable rates.² The enforcement gap has never reflected consumption.

That gap was not incidental. Drug policy in the United States has long functioned as a tool of social control. In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one,” launching what would become the War on Drugs.³ Decades later, former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman admitted that the administration associated antiwar activists with marijuana and Black communities with heroin, then criminalized both to disrupt those groups.⁴

Cannabis prohibition cannot be separated from that history.

Between 2010 and 2018 alone, there were more than 6 million cannabis-related arrests in the United States, the vast majority for possession.⁵ Those arrests carried collateral consequences: barriers to employment, housing, education loans, and voting rights.

Legalization has shifted the market, but not evenly. By 2023, legal cannabis sales in the U.S. surpassed $28 billion annually, with projections continuing to climb.⁶ Yet many states have struggled to implement meaningful expungement or equity programs. In California, for example, automatic expungement provisions were enacted, but implementation has varied widely by county.⁷ In Illinois, one of the more proactive states, over 770,000 cannabis-related records had been expunged or pardoned by 2023 — still only part of the total affected population.⁸

Meanwhile, incarceration rates and arrest disparities continue in states where cannabis remains illegal.⁹ All of that history sits beneath the idea of pleasure.

Rest itself is also political. Research in public health has documented the disproportionate stress burden carried by Black Americans, often described through the concept of “allostatic load” — the cumulative physiological impact of chronic stress.¹⁰ Studies show that structural racism contributes to higher stress biomarkers, which correlate with long-term health disparities.¹¹ Rest is not indulgence in that context. It is regulation.

The Nap Ministry founder Tricia Hersey has framed rest as resistance precisely because productivity culture has historically extracted labor from Black bodies without granting recovery.¹² Academic literature echoes that rest reduces cortisol levels, improves immune response, and mitigates chronic stress markers.¹³

Pleasure, in that framework, becomes less about celebration and more about sovereignty.

Cannabis now exists in a contradictory space. It is legal in many states. It is profitable. It is marketed with wellness language. And yet the communities most criminalized under prohibition have not proportionally benefited from legalization’s wealth generation.¹⁴

This is not a liberation narrative and cannabis is not a cure for systemic inequity. It is not a solution to structural violence. But it exists inside a broader conversation about autonomy about who gets to alter their state without punishment and who historically has not.

Reclaiming joy is not about branding resilience. It is about refusing to exist exclusively in survival mode.

What does rest look like when it isn’t earned?
What does pleasure look like when it isn’t optimized?

For communities historically policed for gathering, music, movement, or altered states, choosing softness is not escapism. It is a refusal to internalize the logic that survival must be the only mode available.

Pleasure was criminalized. The data makes that clear. Protecting it now — carefully, soberly, without pretending the system is repaired — is not indulgence but autonomy.

Citations

1. ACLU. A Tale of Two Countries: Racially Targeted Arrests in the Era of Marijuana Reform (2020).
   

2. SAMHSA. National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH).
   

3. Nixon, 1971 Drug Policy Address. National Archives.
   

4. Harper’s Magazine, 2016 interview with John Ehrlichman.
   

5. FBI Uniform Crime Reports, 2010–2018.
   

6. MJBizDaily 2023 Industry Report.
   

7. California DOJ Expungement Implementation Reports.
   

8. Illinois Office of the Governor, 2023 Expungement Data.
   

9. ACLU & FBI UCR 2022 arrest data.
   

10. McEwen & Stellar, 1993; Allostatic Load research.
    

11. Geronimus et al., 2006; Weathering Hypothesis research.
    

12. Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance.
    

13. Journal of Health Psychology; American Journal of Public Health.
    

14. Brookings Institution & Minority Cannabis Business Association reports.