These days, there’s a lot to celebrate about marijuana legalization where the regulated markets are working as intended.

But what about where it’s still prohibited for legal sales? In those places, people are still buying weed, but it’s coming from an underground market, which too often includes human trafficking.

We know that unregulated markets lead to organized crime and the horrific treatment of workers. In just the last week, both NBC News and Politico published stories exposing how modern-day slavery is growing the cannabis that flows around the country in illicit markets.

Legalizing marijuana would put an enormous dent in the modern-day slavery economy.

While Mitch McConnell and his prohibitionist allies stand in the way of federal reform, real people are being trafficked. But we’re working to beat Mitch and legalize America – and we need your support now more than ever.

NBC News reports, “As more states legalize cannabis, law enforcement officials say they are seeing an uptick in [illicit] market operators using suspected human trafficking victims to grow and trim marijuana sold in legal dispensaries.” ^[1]

“Human trafficking” is just a nicer-sounding way of saying slavery. We should call it as such.

Republican leadership is unsurprisingly A-OK with this. Their cruelty and desire to have primarily young and poor people arrested for marijuana offenses is justification enough for them to turn a blind eye to slavery that could be stopped with legalization.

That’s appalling. It’s up to us to defeat them at the ballot box so we can build a more just and fair government. Will you take a stand and aid our efforts to defeat prohibitionists in Congress?

Politico summed it up pretty succinctly: “There is not a solitary solution to treating this problem, but most proposals come down to reducing the demand for illegal weed.”^[2]

Together, we can defeat the allies of Mitch McConnell and build the coalition needed to legalize marijuana and fix a number of other problems in our country. Thank you for your support in defeating the prohibitionists.

In solidarity,

Craig

Craig Johnson
Co-Founding Organizer
BOWL PAC

Image: NBC News: Captives of Cannabis: Human Trafficking In The Marijuana Industry
[1] NBC News: Raids on black market cannabis farms uncover human trafficking victims
[2] Politico: ‘Real People That We Care About Are Being Exploited’