One Drug, Two Realities: Exploring the Racial and Political Divide in Public Support for Marijuana Legalization and Expungement Policies

Abstract

As support for marijuana legalization rapidly spreads across the United States, and individual states eagerly adopt recreational use policies, measures to expunge the records of past cannabis offenses remain stagnant. Existing research has thoroughly documented the economic benefits and growing public support for recreational marijuana legalization (RML), yet far less attention has been paid to the lack of expungement protocols and why expungement remains so controversial. This thesis argues that while legalization primarily boosts a profit-driven and largely white-owned industry, automatic expungement targets the deeply racialized harms primarily inflicted on Black communities through decades of disproportionate arrests and convictions. To test this argument, and to investigate how individuals’ race and political identities determine support for marijuana legalization and automatic expungement, I conducted a national survey experiment of 1,500 white and 1,000 Black adults. Participants were randomly assigned to policy prompts emphasizing legalization alone, legalization with economic/tax benefits, or legalization coupled with expungement. Alongside demographic and partisan measures, the survey included scales of racial resentment among white respondents and politicized racial identity among Black respondents. By analyzing these results within the broader history of racially-skewed drug enforcement, the study illuminates the factors that reinforce or undermine expungement as a truly restorative remedy. While overall support for RML remains robust, subsetting the sample ultimately reveals more stark racial and ideological divides: conservatives are notably more opposed, especially to expungement, and racial attitudes, specifically, high politicized racial identity among Black respondents and high racial resentment among white respondents, drive support or opposition for both legalization and automatic expungement, underscoring the extreme racialization embedded in this thesis’s theory.