After listening to the podcast for this week’s blog post, I thought that the example using marijuana use was really accurate. Today, there are so many examples of how drug use is perceived across different cultures. It’s very interesting that white people are able to start businesses selling marijuana, and are praised for building that business “from the ground up.” However, it’s concerning that individuals of color are still arrested and jailed for smoking or selling marijuana on a smaller scale, like in their neighborhoods. Even white celebrities, like Seth Rogen, get to comfortably share about their weed on social media, but if it were the other way around, it would be a problem.<\/p>\n
America has an interesting perception of drugs. In my US Borderlands class that I took second semester of freshman year, we talked about the drug trade across the US-Mexico border, and the “war on drugs.” Although many in the US tried to pin the entire thing on Mexico, the only reason that Mexican drug lords invested in travel to the States was because there was a demand<\/em> for drugs. It’s not that they simply wanted to spread their influence, but those in the US are as equal to blame for what some call the “drug epidemic” as those in other countries. The US continues to spread the blame to other countries, groups, and even individuals, but much of the so-called “problems” we have with the movement of illicit drugs begins in white communities. Of course, this isn’t to say that there aren’t black and brown communities investing in the trade, but that it is necessary to recognize that it isn’t solely their fault.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After listening to the podcast for this week’s blog post, I thought that the example using marijuana use was really accurate. Today, there are so many examples of how drug use is perceived across different cultures. It’s very interesting that white people are able to start businesses selling marijuana, and are praised for building that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4599,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6443"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6472,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6443\/revisions\/6472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}