Push for cannabis equity in S.D. promising, but more work ahead
Cannabis equity efforts have gained momentum in San Diego over the past few months.
Recently we’ve seen both the county of San Diego and the city of San Diego take significant steps to launch cannabis equity programs similar to those that have already gotten off the ground in places like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland.
But a lot of work lies ahead to make sure those efforts truly deliver change in an industry that’s long struggled to increase minority representation and to alleviate the disproportionate impact of the war on drugs.
In late January, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors passed a series of measures that overhauled the county’s cannabis policies — policies that in the past have prevented the legal cannabis industry from expanding into the county’s unincorporated communities. The new policies will create a county cannabis program that officials hope will expand opportunities for entering the industry in a socially equitable way.
Specifically, officials hope to create greater opportunities for people with past cannabis convictions to apply for permits. The program also is intended to open doors for people from communities harmed by the war on drugs, which disproportionately impacted Black and Latino communities.
“Our county’s new position on cannabis brings us in line with the will of the voters but also takes the extra step toward the future to establish equitable opportunities for economic prosperity and goodpaying jobs, rights the wrongs of the war on drugs and establishes safeguards to ensure cannabis is safe, regulated and legal,” Board Chair Nathan Fletcher said when the measures were passed.
Last week we saw the city of San Diego — where council members have discussed pursuing a cannabis equity program since 2019 — make progress toward launching a program as well after
the city was awarded a $75,000 grant from the state. That grant will be used to study the damage past cannabis criminalization laws have done to local neighborhoods, evaluate potential opportunities and constraints in the current regulatory framework, and provide policy recommendations to support equity and diversity in the still fledgling industry.
It’s encouraging to see San Diego take steps toward cannabis equity, especially since San Diego — like much of the country — disproportionately arrested people of color for cannabis-related offenses,
both before and after the drug was legalized. This is despite the fact that several national studies suggest that White and Black Americans consume cannabis at a similar rate.
Between 2012 and 2017, Black people were arrested on cannabis-related charges at six times the rate of their White counterparts in San Diego, according to a 2019 study from Mid-City Community Advocacy Network.
The study also found that Pacific Islanders and Latinos were arrested at rates much greater than White people — four times and two times, respectively.
Given the disproportionate enforcement of cannabis laws historically and the harm and lingering impact anti-cannabis policies continue
to have, it’s important that San Diego aims for equity and greater inclusion in the local cannabis industry.
Still, launching an equity program is a long way away from ultimately establishing a successful one. And the mixed record of success of equity programs in other parts of the country suggests that San Diego officials have an awful lot of complex work ahead to ensure that their program truly makes a difference.
It’s difficult to quantify exactly how dramatic the disparity is in regard to who owns and operates cannabis businesses, be it in San Diego or other parts of the country. However, NBC News reported that a 2017 survey showed that less
than a fifth of the people involved at an ownership or stakeholder level were people of color, and only 4.3 percent were Black people.
There are a lot of factors that contribute to minorities’ underrepresentation in the cannabis industry. In addition to disparities in access to adequate capital and the prohibition some municipalities had against people with prior drug convictions entering the industry, some cannabis equity programs have been delayed or hampered by lawsuits, computer glitches and corruption allegations.
For example, Massachusetts, one of the first states to create a program to diversify the cannabis industry, identified 122 women, minorities and veterans in 2016
as having “economic empowerment” priority in the licensing process. Yet, as of 2020, only eight of those applicants had been granted licenses and none had opened for business, according to Politico.
In Los Angeles, policymakers created social equity criteria that incorporated residency requirements, income limits and criminal history. From the jump, the program struggled when a technical glitch allowed some candidates to apply early, sparking a citywide audit and lawsuits that paused retail licensing.
In Ohio, the state succeeded in increasing the diversity of the medical cannabis industry by mandating that at least 15 percent of medical licenses go to businesses that were owned by racial minorities. However, that racial quota rule was ultimately deemed unconstitutional — albeit after licenses had already been issued and more than 16 percent of licenses went to minorities.
This is all a long way of saying that San Diego is still in the very early stages of a complicated process. The progress toward cannabis equity so far is encouraging and important, but it’s going to take a lot of research, creative thinking, industry buy-in and significant community involvement. It’ll be interesting to see what concrete proposals the city and county come back with later this year.