Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Gary Chambers of Louisiana is on the frontline of marijuana legalization in his home state and used the first ad of his Senate campaign to bring attention to underlying systemic issues tied to criminalized marijuana possession/use.
The ad, titled “37 seconds,” highlights the uneven statistics associated with criminalizing marijuana. “Every 37 seconds, someone is arrested for possession of marijuana,” Chambers says in the clip. “Since 2010, state and local police have arrested an estimated 7.3 million Americans for violating marijuana laws — over half of all drug arrests. Black people are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana laws than white people.”