The drug war devastated Black and other minority communities
Is marijuana legalization helping?
When Washington state opened some of the nation’s first legal marijuana stores in 2014, Sam Ward Jr. was on electronic home detention in Spokane, where he had been indicted on federal drug charges. He would soon be off to prison to serve the lion’s share of a four-year sentence.
A decade later, Ward, who is Black, recently posed in a blue-and-gold throne used for photo ops at his new cannabis store, Cloud 9 Cannabis. He greeted customers walking in for early 4/20 deals. And he reflected on being one of the first beneficiaries of a Washington program to make the overwhelmingly white industry more accessible to people harmed by the war on drugs.
“It feels great to know that I’m the CEO of a store, with employees, people depending on me,” Ward said. “Just being a part of something makes you feel good.”
A major argument for legalizing the adult use of cannabis was to stop the harm caused by disproportionate enforcement of drug laws that sent millions of Black, Latino and other minority Americans to prison and perpetuated cycles of violence and poverty. Studies have shown that minorities were incarcerated at a higher rate than white people, despite similar rates of cannabis use.
But efforts to help those most affected participate in — and profit from — the legal marijuana sector have been halting.
Since 2012, when voters in Washington and Colorado
approved the first ballot measures to legalize recreational marijuana, legal adult use has spread to 24 states and the District of Columbia. Nearly all have “social equity” provisions designed to redress drug war damages.
Those provisions include
erasing criminal records for certain pot convictions, granting cannabis business licenses and financial help to people convicted of cannabis crimes, and directing marijuana tax revenues to communities that suffered.
“Social equity programs are an attempt to reverse the damage that was done to Black and brown communities who are over-policed and disproportionately impacted,” said Kaliko Castille, former president of the Minority Cannabis Business Association.
States have varying ways of defining who can apply for social equity marijuana licenses, and they’re not necessarily based on race.
In Washington, an applicant must own more than half the business and meet other criteria, such as having lived for at least five years between 1980 and 2010 in an area with high poverty, unemployment or cannabis arrest rates; having been arrested for a cannabis-related crime; or having a below-median household income.
Legal challenges over the permitting process in states like New York have slowed implementation.
After settling other cases, New York — which has issued 60% of all cannabis licenses to social equity applicants, according to regulators — is facing another lawsuit. Last month, the libertarian-leaning Pacific Legal Foundation alleged it favors women- and minority-owned applicants in addition to those who can demonstrate harm from the drug war.
“It’s that type of blanket racial and gender preference that the Constitution prohibits,” said Pacific Legal attorney David Hoffa.
Elsewhere, deep-pocketed corporations that operate in multiple states have acquired social equity licenses, possibly frustrating the intent of the laws. Arizona lawmakers this year expressed concern that licensees had been pressured by predatory businesses into ceding control.