Reword and rewrite the following article in HTML, use a hip journalistic writing style and make the heading statements in H3 or bold font where necessary: In 2025, cannabis is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Everywhere in the sense that you can buy it legally in glittery storefronts, order it for delivery like pizza, see it advertised on billboards, hear politicians brag about the tax revenue, and watch corporate executives talk about “innovation” with the same straight face Big Tobacco used to sell “healthier cigarettes.” Nowhere in the sense that the country still refuses to tell the truth about what cannabis prohibition actually was—and who it was designed to punish.
Because while the legal market keeps expanding, Parker Coleman is still sitting in federal prison serving a 60-year sentence for a cannabis case.
Sixty years.
Think about that number for more than a second. Not a five-year bid. Not a decade. Not even one of those obscene twenty-something sentences we’ve come to accept as normal in drug cases. Sixty years means “die in here.” It means your life ends behind concrete. It means a judge and a prosecutor decided your existence was worth less than the political theater of a drug war that even the government now pretends is outdated.
And let’s be clear right out of the gate: in 2025, that kind of sentence for cannabis isn’t just unfair. It’s a national embarrassment. It is a moral gut-punch. It is a flashing red siren that proves legalization has moved faster than justice, and that the country still hasn’t dealt with the human wreckage prohibition left behind.
Parker’s case is not a dusty relic from a distant era. It is not some fringe anomaly. It is a living, breathing example of how America can legalize a plant, monetize its culture, and still keep the people it caged for that plant locked away like yesterday’s garbage. His story sits right on the fault line between the shiny new cannabis economy and the brutal old drug war machinery that never stopped grinding.
Parker Coleman and the “Goldilocks” Dragnet
Parker Antron Coleman Jr. was arrested in Charlotte, North Carolina, in his early twenties during a federal crackdown called Operation Goldilocks. If the name sounds like a joke, it’s because the operation itself was treated as a numbers-driven dragnet rather than a focused public-safety effort. The operation targeted a large cannabis distribution network and swept up around seventy defendants. It wasn’t a surgical strike against violent crime. It was a wide-area blast from a federal system built to chase trophies and rack up numbers.
Parker was convicted of conspiracy to distribute cannabis, money laundering, and firearms-related charges. Now here’s where the federal government does what it does best in drug cases: it stacks charges like Legos until the sentence turns grotesque. Thirty years for the cannabis and laundering counts. Then another thirty years piled on through firearms statutes run consecutively. That’s how you get to sixty. That’s how you manufacture a life sentence without ever saying the words “
