If marijuana is legalized in Virginia, Democratic Delegate Lee J. Carter of Manassas wants all of the tax revenue generated to be devoted to paying reparations to Black people and Native Americans in the state for their suffering.

Delegate Carter floated the proposal Monday and called for the establishment of a commission on reparations to determine how best to allocate future revenue from the tax on cannabis and to explore other ways to provide reparations.

“Every single penny of tax revenue from legalized cannabis should go to reparations — that’s a moral commitment our history demands of us and a necessary first step for the state,” Delegate Carter stated in a news release announcing his position.

He said Black and indigenous communities deserve compensation in recognition of the “historical injustices” visited on them. That includes, he stated, “slavery, genocide, the domestic terrorism of the Jim Crow era, redlining and restrictive covenants in banking and housing, the neglect of public housing, police brutality and mass incarceration and the countless other examples of wrongs that demand equitable and immediate redress.”

He urged all of his General Assembly colleagues to join him to make it happen.

Although reparations have been talked about at the national level and was a regular proposal of the late Congressman John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, this appears to be the first Virginia proposal to surface with a revenue stream that could make it happen.

Henrico Delegate Lamont Bagby, chair of the 23-member Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, did not respond to a Free Press request for comment, nor did the caucus.

Delegate Carter did not present his plan to the VLBC before going public.

He told the Free Press, “I’ve found elected officials tend to be more conservative than the public at large, so I put my policy proposals out there for the public at large to decide on rather than filtering it through the conservative lens of other elected” officials.

Delegate Carter’s call for using revenue from marijuana sales is the latest in the list of policies that he has pushed since winning the Northern Virginia seat in 2017 and securing re-election in 2019.

During his first two GeneralAssembly sessions, he led the fight to cap the co-payment for insulin to $50 and to ban strip searches of children. He also unsuccessfully sought to repeal Virginia’s right-to-work law that limits unions, to allow teacher strikes and to ban the death penalty.