Falisha Sanchez
“I see cannabis as a powerful tool for social justice.”
My name is Falisha Sanchez and I am a Puerto Rican woman from Brooklyn, New York.
My earliest memories of weed were not at home, no one ever smoked around me. I first encountered it at a high school party when I was in middle school and I was really curious about what these older kids were doing. I wanted to try it, so I did and after that, it became a regular thing to do after school. Sometimes before or during school. It honestly just made me feel a little dizzy and like, super sleepy. But because everyone else was doing it, I thought it was the cool thing to do.
When my family found out though, they were really upset! They couldn't understand why I had chosen that route. I honestly couldn’t explain it either. I think having moved around so much, I was using this community and substance to ground me and to cope. In my younger years I was drug tested often, and told that it was a really horrible habit that would only lead to self-destruction. As I grew older, it was more accepted by my family as like, “Oh that’s what Falisha does.”
I was the first in my family to graduate from college. I run a community organization in Baltimore, I have been published by the Smithsonian magazine and I’m pursuing a Masters Degree in Cultural Sustainability. So yeah, since then, we as a family have learned so much about dosing and the array of benefits to the herb that it doesn't cause as much tension as it used to. In fact, here's a shocker, at Thanksgiving recently a family member - I won’t say who - offered me a hit of their cannabis pen. Now that's growth!
With law enforcement, cannabis was definitely demonized. If I was ever in a park smoking with friends and the police came, they would make us put it out and dispose of what we had left to make sure that we couldn't use it later. We basically had to hide and keep it a secret so there's definitely a stigma that still exists. The stigma from law enforcement kind of has bled over into other social aspects of my life as well. Feeling the stigma at work having lost jobs due to cannabis related drug tests. Even in school or other professional social settings, it’s definitely harder for me to be comfortable with being public about my cannabis consumption.
I'm hopeful now that laws are starting to reflect the benefits of healthy, safe, access and use of cannabis. I think that there are so many benefits to this! It'll be rough at first, like how legalizing alcohol was but there is so much more that can be done here! There is great opportunity for reinvestment into systematically oppressed and over-policed communities as it relates to cannabis. We have a real chance now to no longer be taboo on the subject but instead to find out like, “Ok, what's really happening here?” and begin to heal generational trauma by having real conversations about mental health.
There is an opportunity to create generational wealth in these communities as well. Providing the right skills and workforce development needed to support the hoodfessional infrastructure these young people have been employing for years, would only help them legitimize these young people and their futures. I’m hopeful that in our personal lives members of our families and our communities destigmatize cannabis and see it as a powerful tool for social justice.
