Several weeks ago, the New Orleans City Council voted to decriminalize marijuana possession. The law allows police officers to ticket people for possession instead of arresting them, lowers the fines and moves the cases from being tried in the District Criminal Court to the Municipal Court. This is a policy everyone should support —and applaud policy makers for changing — but it doesn’t go far enough. The time for the city of New Orleans to legalize marijuana is long overdue.

Like many laws in our political system, the roots of marijuana prohibition are soaked in bigotry. Henry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics — the predecessor to the Drug Enforcement Agency — and one of the earliest proponents of the war on drugs generally, has been attributed with many blatantly racist quotes. One of them being, “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” States throughout the south used drug laws as a part of the irrefutably racist Jim Crow system.

One objection could be that while these laws had racist intentions, we should let the results of prohibition stand on their own. When looking at those results, though, the story stays the same. The American Civil Liberties Union conducted a report which showed that while black people and white people consumed marijuana at roughly similar rates, black people were almost four times more likely to be arrested for possession.

Prohibition makes marijuana less safe to consume. The potency of marijuana can be three times as high in places where it’s illegal as in places where it’s legal so distributors and sellers can carry less of it. Potency isn’t a problem in itself, but adding to that the inability to know exactly what it is you’re smoking when you buy marijuana from the black market, smoking becomes much riskier. One can have a moral or personal objection to the drug and still want people who use it to be safe.

In a debate between Louisiana’s gubernatorial candidates last year, John Bel Edwards said that he opposed legalizing marijuana for recreational use. Based on that, it’s probably unlikely that Louisiana will legalize the drug anytime soon — even though it seemed as though Louisiana was headed in that direction when Bobby Jindal signed multiple bills last year which loosened laws on the drug.

If Louisiana continues to drag its feet in legalizing marijuana, there’s no reason why the city of New Orleans can’t nullify, or refuse to participate in, state law and legalize it on its own. There is a precedent for cities legalizing marijuana in states where it’s still illegal. In 2013, Portland, Maine, legalized marijuana via ballot initiative, even though it was — and still is — illegal in that state. Denver legalized marijuana in 2005, seven years before Colorado legalized it.

If we value the Jesuit identity of our university, there’s good reason why we should support New Orleans legalizing marijuana in spite of state law. A tenet of Catholic social teaching is the principle of subsidiarity, which says that every task should be performed by the lowest possible unit of society. In other words, we should try to cause change on a local level because that’s where the change will be felt the most.

Subsidiarity matters to this discussion because, at its core, nullifying state law and legalizing marijuana at the municipal level is an echo of that Catholic principle. Adding to that the irrefutable fact that marijuana prohibition harms minorities the most — a patent offense to social justice — anyone who walks onto Loyola’s campus should acknowledge current marijuana prohibition is a contradiction of our most basic values as an institution.

If New Orleans were to legalize marijuana, it would see a decrease in the number of people imprisoned for a victimless crime. Legalization would allow a transparent marijuana industry to enter the city and empower consumers with the knowledge of what it is they’re consuming. It would also give the city another stream of revenue from taxes; considering that New Orleans is incapable of paying the pensions of the city’s firefighters and maintaining an effective police force, a new stream of revenue might not be a bad idea.

Of course, there is another choice. We could continue entrusting distant bureaucrats in Baton Rouge and Washington, D.C. with the well-being of people they rarely, if ever, interact with, so they can continue to reap the benefits that flow in from prison guard unions, private prison companies and pharmaceutical corporations. We trust our readers to decide on their own which of the two is the more humanizing of our options.

In light of the New Orleans City Council taking a step in the direction of legalization, the time is ripe for all of us to work for a more just world and help force the city’s hand into legalizing marijuana.