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Cannabis Connection
When Illinois legalized adult-use marijuana, Democratic governor J.B. Pritzker gave his state until 2025 to expunge marijuana arrests records for more than 700,000 people. As we enter 2021, after just one year of legal pot, nearly 500,000 have already been expunged.
Illinois keeps breaking record after record as the marijuana legalization success story of the United States. The automatic expungement process is now complete at the state level, but county clerks still need to proceed with the expungements required by the Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act. Only 10 Illinois counties—including the very populous DuPage, Will and Lake counties—have accomplished their duty so far. The remaining 92 counties are still held to the 2025 deadline to complete the process.
Not all cannabis records are eligible to be automatically expunged; only the arrests for possession of 30 grams of cannabis or less are eligible to be automatically removed from law enforcement databases. People whose record does not fall in that category have to file a court petition to see their names cleared.
More than 20,000 low-level cannabis convictions were also pardoned by Gov. Pritzker in 2020, half of which were pardoned on the last day of the year. That represents nearly one-fifth of the 116,000 convictions that the state’s official estimates assumed could be overturned.
The First State
Illinois, which was the first state to legalize adult-use marijuana by a legislative act rather than a ballot measure, has chosen a very progressive-minded approach to legalization, adding many social justice elements to the reform. Under the law, 25% of revenues collected from recreational cannabis sales will be directed to communities that have been disproportionately impacted by the justice system. Making a priority of cleaning the records of non-violent drug offenders is the natural progression of this humanist approach.
“Statewide, Illinoisans hold hundreds of thousands of low-level cannabis-related records, a burden disproportionately shouldered by communities of color,” Pritzker said. “We will never be able to fully remedy the depth of that damage. But we can govern with the courage to admit the mistakes of our past—and the decency to set a better path forward.”
The importance of expunging records cannot be understated. Even for a tiny infraction, a marijuana-related arrest can be heavy with consequences. It can make finding a job or housing more difficult, and it can impact access to some government benefits. For immigrants, it can bar access to naturalization or a visa; it can be grounds for deportation.
“From 2003 to August 2018, more than 45,000 people were deported nationwide for possession of marijuana,” the Associated Press reports. “An immigrant who acknowledges using marijuana—even if it was in a state where it is legal—can face denial of an application for a visa to visit or a green card to become a legal permanent resident.”
“Eleven states in the nation have legalized cannabis for recreational use, but no other state has done the important work we're doing here in Illinois, where equity intentionality takes center stage," said Toi Hutchinson, cannabis adviser to the governor.
In Wisconsin, there have been roughly half a million marijuana-related arrests in the past four decades, the same amount that Illinois expunged in a single year, proving it can be done. Illinois not only went down the path of legalization, but it also put forth proposals to heal communities and put some of the legal cannabis revenue towards funding the expungement process. All that is missing in Wisconsin, now, is a forward-looking legislature.
