Ben Cohen just launched a weed brand with a high-minded purpose-giving away 100% of its profits to right some of the racial injustices from America’s War on Drugs. Ice cream sold separately.
One summer night in 1970, years before Ben Cohen teamed up with Jerry Greenfield to launch one of America’s most successful ice cream companies, he was smoking a joint with some friends under a lifeguard tower at Jones Beach on Long Island, New York.
Cohen saw the lights of a police car driving towards them and told a friend to get rid of the roach. At that time, marijuana was just as illegal in New York as heroin. And a small doobie could land you in jail.
“‘Ronnie, eat the jay!’” Cohen, now 72, remembers telling his friend. “The cops get out and they're searching around with their flashlight and sure enough Ronnie didn't eat it-they found the jay and arrested us.”
At the stationhouse, the two recent high school graduates were strip searched, and things weren’t looking good for a couple of longhaired dopers. “Eventually, as we were white middle-class guys, we ended up getting tickets for littering a lighted cigarette butt on the beach,” says Cohen, in his home office just outside Burlington, Vermont.
The run-in could have changed the course of Cohen’s life-and those of chubby hubbies everywhere. Instead of going to jail, he went to college, dropped out, drove a taxi in New York City, tried his hand at pottery before starting Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream in 1978 with his childhood friend, Jerry, out of an abandoned gas station in Burlington. By 2000, after Ben & Jerry’s was acquired by Unilever for $326 million (around $580 million in current dollars), Cohen pocketed about $40 million, the equivalent of $70 million today.
But all these decades later, Cohen still can’t shake the feeling that if he had been Black, that night in 1970 would have ended very differently. He has good reason to believe that the color of his skin gave him a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card: Black people are nearly four times as likely to get arrested for marijuana possession than white people, despite similar usage rates, according to a report by the ACLU.
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