Rochelle Rayne
“If the people from this neighborhood were policing, things would change.”
My name is Rochelle Rayne and I'm from West Baltimore.
My earliest memories of weed would be in the house with my mother. She would smoke before watching scary movies so she could laugh at them. She told us that's what it was and told us not to touch it, so we wouldn’t touch it. We would just sit around her while she's smoking, and watch movies with her. The smell of it never really bothered me and people that was on it they never really bothered me. I was so used to it growing up, I just thought it was something people did.
Law enforcement has had a very big impact in my life. My oldest nephew and my oldest son is scared of the police due to everything they see, and from our house being raided over some things that had nothing to do with us, and wasn’t cannabis related. It’s traumatizing.
My eleven-year-old son automatically assumes that that’s what's gonna happen. The police are going to arrest them, pull them over, or try to hurt them. They still know there's some good out there, but he’s scared and says, ‘Why do they always mess with people? Why do they have to do this to people?, They're not bothering nobody.’
I would like to see law enforcement change by having people who grew up in those neighborhoods and actually know about these neighborhoods working here instead of sending in officers that know nothing about us; and they coming in scared! Most people are actually really nice. But they come in scared, and they assume that cannabis leads to dope and all that other stuff when it doesn’t, those are two different things. If the people from this neighborhood were policing their own neighborhood, things would change.
Once I got older, I thought of it as healing. I take any cannabis like I take any other herbs, like Rosemary and Eucalyptus. It's herbal, it's helpful. It comes from the earth. So I do feel as long as a person is in their right mind it’s cool because you can't overdose from it. You can go to sleep, but you can’t overdose.
If they want us to sell it to us as an herb versus giving it a name that sounds derogatory then fine, but it's still an herb. I can go out here and buy other herbs without it being a problem. But yeah, just stop criminalizing cannabis because it’s really not as bad as you think.
