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President Joe Biden has pardoned all Americans who have been convicted at the national level of possessing small amounts of marijuana.

It is an act which will impact an estimated 6,500 people, and in his TV address, Mr. Biden gave his reasons noting the racial impact of the current legal framework. He added that racial minorities were statistically far more likely to be jailed for cannabis.

Republicans have called it a desperate attempt to distract from failed leadership. But rights activists have welcomed the move.

Chelsea Higgs-Wise, executive director of Marijuana Justice, a Virginia-based activist group spoke to Newsday, saying: "Ever since marijuana prohibition came into our federal code, it has been targeting black, Latino, and indigenous people. In fact many years later, President Nixon's aid actually admitted that marijuana prohibition was truly only to target such groups, so this was always something that was manufactured by our government to be a really racially unjust policy black Americans are four times more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts here."

(Photo: Marijuana plant. Credit: Getty Images)

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