It’s been more than 20 years since Jim Pugel was a police officer arresting pot dealers on the corner of 23rd and Union, but he can still remember what the suspects looked like. They were almost all black men.
Now, one of Seattle’s busiest pot shops sells millions of dollars’ worth of weed on that same corner. But the African American community reaps only a fraction of the legal weed industry’s profits. And that doesn’t sit well with Pugel.
“I can understand,” Pugel recently said, “how the [African American] community is a little pissed off. We, the system—police, prosecutors, judges—all went after them for relatively low potency dope in the 1980s and ’90s. And now it’s all mainstream. Where are the revenues going to repatriate all of those people who were incarcerated?”
