Good Day Farms is giving customers in four states, including Arkansas, the opportunity this week to ask their governors to follow President Joe Biden’s lead and forgive some cannabis convictions. 

Known as Pardons for Progress, the initiative provides customers with an online customizable template of a letter they can immediately send to their respective governors. 

Good Day operates a cultivation facility and four dispensaries in Arkansas and has various cultivation and dispensary operations in Missouri, Louisiana and Mississippi, where the letter-writing campaigns are also underway this week. 

Here’s the sample letter we pulled up for Arkansans: 

I am your constituent in the great state of Arkansas. This October, when President Biden pardoned more than 6,500 people convicted of federal marijuana possession, he encouraged the country’s governors to use their clemency authority to issue similar relief for the tens of thousands still suffering harm from past cannabis criminalization. 

I urge you to take action by undertaking such an initiative in Arkansas. Drug possession for personal use remains the offense for which people are arrested the most in the United States, with the largest share of drug possession arrests being marijuana-related. Over the past five decades, over 28 million people have been arrested for a cannabis-related violation–the majority of these arrests occurring at the state level.

Additionally, the racial disparities in these arrests remain acute. Despite using drugs at similar rates as white people, Black adults are more than two-and-a-half times as likely as white adults to be arrested for simple possession. Redressing the harms of cannabis prohibition can be a tool for your administration to also redress racial disparities in our criminal legal system.

Not only is cannabis clemency the right thing to do, but it’s also extremely popular. After all, 72% of voters support President Biden’s recent cannabis pardons. It is unconscionable that so many individuals continue to suffer the devastating consequences of a cannabis conviction while so many others can now legally profit from the exact same activity. For all these reasons, I urge you to take swift executive action to grant clemency to those most harmed by cannabis offenses here in Arkansas.

Thank you for your time and consideration. 

Last year, President Biden announced he would pardon all prior federal offenses for simple marijuana possession and encouraged governors to follow suit at the state level. Two states, Pennsylvania and Oregon, have done so since Biden’s announcement, although more than 20 states have enacted some sort of expungement of past marijuana crimes in recent years, according to Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Kentucky also took some steps toward pardoning some marijuana offenses, Armentano said. 

Good Day Farm said its goal is to send a total of 250 letters to the four governors. 

Pardons for Progress is a national initiative of the Last Prisoner Project and Headcount’s Cannabis Voter Project. The Last Prisoner Project is a nonprofit dedicated to cannabis criminal justice reform and the Cannabis Voter Project works to inform, register and turn out voters who want to change cannabis policy. 

Alexa Henning and Judd Deere, spokespeople for Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, did not return emails seeking comment.

The post Good Day Farm helps Arkansans ask governor to support cannabis clemency appeared first on Arkansas Times.