The Human Cost — DeLisi, Angelos, Thompson & Cannabis Prisoners

Statistics describe systems. Stories describe what systems do to people. The War on Drugs produced statistics that are staggering — 6.1 million marijuana arrests in eight years, 2.3 million Americans incarcerated — but the statistics cannot convey what a 90-year sentence for a first marijuana offense feels like from the inside. These four cases can.

Richard DeLisi: 31 years

DeLisi was a contractor from Brooklyn who was arrested in Florida in 1988 for cannabis trafficking. It was his first offense. The sentencing guidelines recommended 12 to 17 years. Judge Dennis Maloney imposed three consecutive 30-year sentences — 90 years, more than five times the guidelines recommendation.

While DeLisi was in prison, his wife died. His son Stephen died. Both of his parents died. He could not attend a single funeral. He could not hold a single hand. He spent more than three decades in a Florida prison for a nonviolent first offense involving a plant that Florida voters would later approve for medical use.

DeLisi walked out of prison at 71, having entered at 40. He had served more time than many murderers. The Last Prisoner Project, which had championed his case, called him the longest-serving nonviolent cannabis prisoner in American history. The distinction is not one any country should be capable of producing.

Weldon Angelos: the judge who resigned

In 2002, Weldon Angelos — a 24-year-old first-time offender and music producer who ran Extravagant Records in Salt Lake City — sold marijuana three times to a government informant. Each sale was approximately $350. During two of the sales, Angelos was carrying a firearm.

The sentence was driven by 18 U.S.C. §924(c), which mandated that each firearm count run consecutively. The stacking provision — designed for violent drug traffickers — produced a sentence for a first-time marijuana seller that exceeded the federal guidelines for aircraft hijacking, second-degree murder, and rape of a child.

A federal judge — appointed by a Republican president, not known for judicial activism — found a mandatory sentence so unjust that he resigned rather than continue imposing similar ones. The law did not change. The judge left.

After his release and pardon, Angelos founded the Weldon Project, an organization advocating for other cannabis prisoners still serving disproportionate sentences.

Michael Thompson: legalization came too late

Michael Thompson, a Black man from Flint, Michigan, sold approximately three pounds of marijuana to a confidential informant in 1994. He was sentenced to 40 to 60 years in prison.

Michigan legalized recreational cannabis in 2018. Thompson was still in prison. The same substance that Michigan was now licensing entrepreneurs to sell — the same substance generating tax revenue, creating jobs, and filling dispensary shelves — was the reason Thompson had spent nearly a quarter-century behind bars. He contracted COVID-19 in prison.

Thompson walked out of prison at approximately 4 AM on January 28, 2021. He had entered in the mid-1990s, when cannabis legalization was a fringe position. He left in a state where cannabis was legal, the governor had commuted his sentence, and the drug war that had consumed his adult life was, in Michigan at least, officially over — except for the decades it had already taken.

Jeff Mizanskey: life without parole

Jeff Mizanskey was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in Missouri for three nonviolent cannabis offenses. Under Missouri's prior-and-persistent offender statute, the third offense triggered a mandatory life sentence. No parole. No release date. Cannabis possession, adjudicated three times, was treated as equivalent to murder.

Mizanskey served more than 21 years before Governor Jay Nixon commuted his sentence. He had entered prison expecting to die there. The commutation was an act of executive mercy that implicitly acknowledged what the sentencing statute could not: that life without parole for marijuana was a sentence no civilized legal system should impose.

What these cases share

DeLisi, Angelos, Thompson, and Mizanskey were convicted under different statutes, in different states, by different judges, across different decades. What they share is a legal system that treated cannabis offenses — nonviolent, victimless, involving a substance that a growing majority of Americans believe should be legal — as crimes warranting sentences measured in decades or lifetimes.

They also share this: not one of them would have served a single day if they had been arrested in the same states ten or twenty years later. The laws changed. The men who had already lost their years did not get them back.