The former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson has urged Joe Biden to follow through on his commitment to “correct our country’s failed approach to marijuana” and give clemency to the thousands of nonviolent cannabis offenders still languishing in federal lockups.
“President Biden has the power to effect real change – he can right these wrongs and grant clemency to those who are sitting in prison for cannabis offenses,” Tyson told the Guardian. “We know the failed war on drugs was wrong and no one should be sitting in jail for cannabis. It’s time our country moves forward and end cannabis prohibition once and for all.”
Legal cannabis sales in the US could soon reach $40bn annually. And campaigners say it is an injustice that more than 2,000 people – overwhelmingly people of color – are in federal jails sentenced for conduct that today is essentially legal in almost half of the country, with recreational cannabis legal in 24 states.
About 30,000 more are in state penitentiaries for non-violent cannabis offenses, activists say, with data patchy. Biden does not have the power to pardon those offenders, but Tyson pleaded with the president to pressure those states to do so.
Biden has been accused of misleading voters in his messaging over his pardon for people convicted of simple marijuana possession offenses, in line with his campaign promise to decriminalize cannabis.
“No one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana,” he said in October 2022. However, as of nine months earlier, “no offenders sentenced solely for simple possession of marijuana remained in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons”, according to the US Sentencing Commission. (Those who remain in prison face charges including drug trafficking.)
In a video for Reeform, a campaigning cannabis brand founded by Weldon Angelos, who served a 13-year prison sentence for selling less than $1,000 worth of cannabis before he was granted clemency in 2016, Tyson said it beggared belief that people were doing “murderers’ time” for trafficking a “mild medicine”.
The White House will receive a letter on Tuesday penned by Tyson, a cannabis advocate and entrepreneur, which says it is high time the authorities reconcile with communities, including poor people and people of color, who have paid the heavy cost of the US’s so-called drug war.
Even for those who sold cannabis and are now free, their criminal records are often a serious impediment to finding work.
“The war on marijuana is over, Mr President, as seen in legalization efforts across the country and in polls showing that most Americans oppose marijuana prohibition,” Tyson wrote in the letter to Biden. “Through a categorical clemency grant you can declare an end to federal warfare on our own people and mark a new era based on peace and prosperity.”
Tyson’s letter comes after the rappers Drake, Killer Mike and a host of other chart-topping artists told Biden in a letter in 2021 that, “Enough is enough. No one should be locked up in federal prison for non-violent marijuana offenses.”
In 2019, Jerry Haymon, a former college football player, was federally sentenced to 10 years for distributing large amounts of cannabis, despite his home state of California having legalized medical cannabis in 1996. The state sanctioned recreational sales in 2016.
“I’m loyal and love helping people in need,” he wrote in an online bio. “Prior to this incarceration … I graduated [college] and was launching a dispensary. I am a man of God – most importantly I am a kindhearted person.”
Danny Trevino of Michigan, another state that has legalized recreational cannabis, in 2019 was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison. “Another Mexican goes to prison and leaves his little girl behind,” his mother, Berta Garcia, said previously of his three-year-old daughter. “This is such an injustice.”
In November, the rapper Ralo – born Terrell Davis – was released after five years in federal prison over $1m worth of cannabis that police found on his plane in Atlanta, Georgia. Georgia decriminalized possession of small amounts of cannabis in 2017.
Luke Scarmazzo became the last known Californian to be released from prison for federal cannabis trafficking charges in February 2023, after serving nearly 15 years for running a licensed medical cannabis dispensary that was ruled to have sold to patients without a prescription.
“It didn’t feel like we were wrongly convicted but it felt like it was an injustice, not only for the amount of time we received on a first-time drug offense,” Scarmazzo told CBS.
The US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has long maintained that cannabis is among the most addictive and dangerous drugs and has no medical value, despite a growing wealth of evidence to the contrary. A top adviser to Richard Nixon, the president who first placed cannabis into the most restrictive drug scheduling category, previously admitted: “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
The DEA has been reviewing cannabis’s status as a schedule I drug, on par with heroin, after the department of health recommended its rescheduling to the lowest category.
