Cannabis equity group names 215 areas for benefits

The state’s cannabis social equity council took up its first major task Thursday, approving a list of “disproportionately impacted” neighborhoods that will receive preferential treatment in licenses and other benefits in Connecticut’s budding marijuana industry.

The idea is to ensure diversity in the industry, although the rules cannot single out race or ethnicity as factors.

The 15-member council met in Hartford for the first time and voted unanimously on list of 215 census tracts in which residents and some former residents will receive a higher share of licenses for cultivation, packaging, transportation, and sale.

Connecticut’s new adult use cannabis law stipulates that at least half of all initial licenses must be reserved for so-called social equity applicants, who must be from these impacted areas as current or longtime former residents. Equity applicants

must also make no more than three times the median income.

Many of the impacted areas are concentrated in the state’s cities including Bridgeport, Hartford and New Haven. In New Haven, the Fair Haven and Newhallville neighborhoods, among others, are included. Most of Bridgeport also qualifies.

The areas were chosen based on unemployment rates and percent of residents who have been convicted in drug crimes — a way of steering benefits to places hardest hit by the now-discredited war on drugs launched by former President Richard Nixon in 1971.

Some wealthier areas such as Morris and the west and south ends of Stamford also made the list.

The targeted communities will also financially benefit from the market. The law direct much of the state revenue from cannabis sales — an estimated $70 million to $75 million annually once the market is “mature” — to those same communities.

“We’ll finally have within the community of Black and brown a way to wealth creation. This is truly an opportunity to see the 40 acres and a mule of our ancestors,” said Joseph Williams, a business adviser and trade specialist at the Connecticut Small Business Development Center at UConn, who was appointed to the council by Gov. Lamont.

The list of impacted areas was generated based on drug-related convictions, including drug paraphernalia, drug possession, and drug manufacturing and sale, from 1982 to 2020 and the 5-year estimate of the unemployment rate in 2019 per Census data.

The impacted areas, 215 of 833 census tracts, represent 23 percent of the state’s population but two-thirds of the drug convictions in the state over the past 38 years.

“We know about those communities that were hardest hit by the war on drugs, a war on drugs that incarcerated a lot of people that shouldn’t have been incarcerated,” Gov. Ned Lamont said at the start of Thursday’s meeting. “It set a lot of communities back. It set a lot of people back in a way that was fundamentally unfair.”

Some equity council members expressed concern with having to vote on the list, seen as critically important to ensuring fairness in Connecticut’s new recreational cannabis market, at their first meeting without much time for deliberation or to review it.

“I just find it just a bit troubling to be voting on disproportionate areas at our first meeting without really having true discussion,” said Corrie Betts, criminal justice chair of the NAACP Connecticut State Conference.

The governor’s office generated the list approved by the council Thursday and said tracts with conviction rates greater than one-tenth of 1 percent or an average unemployment rate greater than 10 percent were marked as disproportionately impacted areas. The law set Aug. 1 as deadline for the council to identify the impacted tracts.