Reparations for the War on Drugs

For decades, the War on Drugs has been narrated through the familiar vocabulary of crime, punishment, and public safety. Far less attention has been given to its afterlife: the neighborhoods hollowed out by incarceration, the wealth never permitted to accumulate, the families reshaped across generations, and the civic institutions expected to thrive after decades of deliberate neglect. As Dr. Khalilah Harris, Chair of Baltimore's Community Reinvestment and Reparations Commission, observes, "This war was waged on the community; it was not of the community."

Maryland is now attempting something that would have seemed improbable not long ago, not merely to acknowledge those harms, but to build a public infrastructure for repair.

The Community Reinvestment and Repair Fund (CRRF) is among the state's most consequential approaches in reparative policy. Rather than just folding all of the  tax revenue from Maryland's legal cannabis market into the general treasury, lawmakers directed a portion of those dollars toward the communities that endured the heaviest burdens of cannabis prohibition and the broader War on Drugs. 

The premise is deceptively simple: legalization, by itself, cannot undo decades of unequal enforcement. Justice requires more than ending a policy; it requires investing in the places that policy systematically diminished.

The Community Reinvestment and Repair Fund (CRRF) also referred to as Reparations for the War on Drugs, the initiative distinguishes itself from many governmental equity efforts for one essential reason. The question of what repair should look like has not been reserved for elected officials or policy experts alone. It has been entrusted to the communities that have lived with the consequences.

In Baltimore, that responsibility rests with the Community Reinvestment and Reparations Commission (CRRC), a community-led body charged with answering a question that is as philosophical as it is practical: What does repair require? The Commission is responsible for determining the use of those public resources for neighborhoods that have experienced generations of disinvestment strengthening local institutions, expanding economic opportunity, supporting community development, and creating conditions for long-term restoration.

As Sadiq Ali, Vice Chair of the Commission, explains, "The Baltimore City Commission, along with the twenty-three other counties across Maryland, were designated to create commissions to disperse community reinvestment in the form of dollars that come from tax sales from legal recreational cannabis."

The policy is statewide, but its geographic distribution tells a larger story. Baltimore receives the largest share of the fund, not by political favor, but by historical record. Allocation is determined by each jurisdiction's share of nonviolent cannabis arrests over the previous two decades, a formula that transforms arrest statistics into a measure of public obligation.

Ali explains:

"How those numbers were determined were based on that jurisdiction's contribution to nonviolent marijuana arrests over the preceding twenty years. Based on what we know about how over-incarceration works, especially in areas where there are concentrations of Black and Brown folks, Baltimore City is receiving the lion's share of those funds to be redistributed with an investment lens to help undo some of that harm."

The Commission's work asks a profound civic question: Can government repair what government helped break? It suggests that reparations need not remain an abstract moral aspiration or a distant national debate. They can become administrative practice, budgetary decisions, public meetings, and neighborhood investments. In this framework, repair is measured not by symbolic gestures, but by whether public institutions are willing to redirect resources with the same intentionality that once directed harm.

Rev. Dr. Robert Turner (CRRC Commissioner) situates the effort within an even broader ethical tradition:

"I think, as any society that wants to ground itself on morality and ethics, if you have done wrong, it is vitally important to correct, to repair that wrong. This work is important, and America has done that, in large part, for a lot of other people."

His observation lingers beyond Maryland's borders. The question is no longer whether the harms of the War on Drugs can be documented; history has already rendered its verdict. The more urgent question is whether democratic institutions possess both the imagination and the resolve to make repair more than a promise. In Baltimore, that question is no longer theoretical. It is being tested in real time.