African Americans Struggle to Join Legal Marijuana Industry

Publisher: The Insight Partners

Now that corporate interests and large investors have targeted the mushrooming marijuana industry, some African Americans wonder if racial inequities will prevent them from participating in the leafy economic boom.

Since 2014, when Colorado opened the first regulated weed market, at least 11 states (Illinois being the latest) and the District of Columbia have jumped on the recreational band wagon, ostensibly to ease access to medicinal marijuana, but also grab a share of the estimated $40 billion, legal and illegal, cannabis market.

There are 33 states and D.C. where medicinal marijuana is legal, and there are estimates that 55 million Americans regularly use marijuana.

But despite these developments, many African Americans across the country are concerned that a lack of access to capital and systematic economic racism will exclude them from the burgeoning marijuana business the way they’ve been excluded from other business opportunities in the past.

“One of the things that we have definitely learned since the establishment of equity is that a license doesn’t go as far as need be,” said Jacob Plowden, co-founder and deputy director of the Cannabis Cultural Association, a New York-based nonprofit that helps “marginalized and underrepresented communities” compete in the legal cannabis industry.

The numbers are disturbing. Less than a fifth of the people involved at an ownership or stake-holder level were people of color, a 2017 survey found; black people made up only 4.3 percent.

New Jersey has proposed a bill mandating that 25 percent of all legal licenses be set aside for people of color; black legislators in New York emphatically said they will not vote for any legislation that doesn't redirect some profits from legalization to communities of color; and Massachusetts added social equity programs to their legalization efforts.

Still, the number of African Americans involved in the legal marijuana trade remains low.

Massachusetts has had next to no blacks or Latinos apply for licenses. The financial barriers are obvious, but for many would-be marijuana entrepreneurs, there are personal reasons for having no interest in even applying for a license.

"They're scared of the government, man," Sieh Samura, a cannibis rights advocate, told NPR. "This is still a new thing.”

Samura cited taxes and government as two things that make minorities distrustful of the process. “Just because people say it's legal,” he said. “It's not welcoming for everybody."

Many African Americans are feeling locked out of the process.

Read here