As with many things in America, the cannabis experience for white people has been different from the cannabis experience for people of color. White citizens have used and traded cannabis at nearly the same rates as Black and Brown people, but Black and Brown people have been arrested nearly four times as often. In most cases, people of color have done jail time while people like me were able to grow wealth in the cannabis industry—both underground and, more recently, legally. There is no doubt that the color of my skin has given me untold advantages others do not enjoy.

The racist history of federal cannabis prohibition in the United States is the subject of Fab 5 Freddy’s Netflix documentary masterpiece Grass Is Greener. With his cast of musical icons, the filmmaker exposes the story of how mid-level bureaucrat Harry J. Anslinger ascended to be the nation’s first drug czar on the backs of Black jazz musicians and Brown citizens, a tale both shocking and unsurprising for 1930s America.

For 30 years Anslinger promoted racist propaganda and policy that resulted in much higher rates of drug-related arrests and imprisonment for people of color. Then in 1970 President Richard Nixon, another racist in a position of great power, launched the Controlled Substances Act, famously classifying cannabis as a Schedule 1 drug so he could go after his two biggest enemies, Blacks and hippies, and the DEA was born. Old Anslinger even came out of retirement for the ceremony.

“It was never about the cannabis,” Freddy tells me, “but about the people who were using it, plain and simple.”

Cannabis prohibition was really just a war on people of color, another way to rob them of opportunity and justice.

Ronald Reagan rode a wave of conservative promises to the White House in 1980. With the launch of the “Just Say No” campaign promoted by First Lady Nancy Reagan, mandatory minimums and racial sentencing disparities proliferated. Widespread workplace urinalysis testing arose in the 1980s, further putting pressure on communities of color as jobs were lost, income obliterated and children removed from families due to a failed drug test or a weed possession charge. As funding for the drug war skyrocketed, even public schools began to embed police and practice urinalysis screening. The so-called school-to-prison pipeline that haunts some Black and Brown communities to this day is due in large part to the unjust cannabis policies and overpolicing that targeted those communities.

So how do we right these wrongs now?

“The fight is trying to clean the American house of this evil infection called racism that is the root cause of everything from drug wars to a lack of ownership in the legal cannabis industry, or any other industry,” says Freddy.

Today Black Americans own just 4 percent of the legal cannabis industry, while whites own 81 percent. Those in the cannabis business have a moral obligation to commit to social equity (not least because that aligns with the values the plant teaches us). Given the gross injustices of the past, Black and Brown people must be empowered in the legal cannabis industry to have ownership, equity and wealth created for and by themselves. This is the true promise of cannabis law reform.

Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, put it simply in Grass Is Greener: “The solution has to be more comprehensive than the damage that has been done.”

Most importantly, social equity represents a sacred promise that our industry must keep to right the wrongs of the past and begin to heal the inequities that permeate our society. That promise cannot be kept until more people of color attain positions of power and ownership in the legal cannabis industry.