Celebrating the removal of cannabis from Schedule I of the Federal Controlled Substances Act and recognizing the urgent need for equitably distributed cannabis sales revenue that restores and repairs communities historically targeted by the war on drugs, and calling on the Legislature of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to legalize and equitably tax cannabis.

Celebrating the removal of cannabis from Schedule I of the Federal Controlled Substances Act and recognizing the urgent need for equitably distributed cannabis sales revenue that restores and repairs communities historically targeted by the war on drugs, and calling on the Legislature of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to legalize and equitably tax cannabis. WHEREAS, The Drug Enforcement Agency has not re-scheduled a controlled substance in forty years. Cannabis was added to Schedule I in the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, as a result of a now-public strategic, racist and classist political effort by the Reagan Administration, led by Lee Atwater - adviser to President Ronald Reagan - to criminalize certain segments of society that Reagan’s Republican party deemed political enemies; and WHEREAS, That strategy worked, incarcerating thousands of individuals at the federal level and millions at the state level across the country for possessing, using or distributing cannabis. To this day, the pretext of cannabis smell is used to conduct warrantless searches; and WHEREAS, About the same percent of every race, across all age groups, has at some point used cannabis. But despite equal use of cannabis across races, 8 out of 10 people arrested for cannabis-related offenses in the City of Philadelphia are Black or Brown - even though the City decriminalized cannabis possession less than 30 grams in 2014, and even though prosecution of cannabis-related offenses has declined dramatic…