New coalition pushes for more minority cannabis businesses
Unhappy with the dearth of minority-owned businesses that have secured cannabis business licenses and with the way Cambridge is handling the newly-legal industry, cannabis entrepreneurs and activists on Thursday launched a new coalition to push for equal treatment.
Real Action for Cannabis Equity, a group known as RACE, was founded to protect "opportunity in the emerging cannabis industry for entrepreneurs, communities, and workers of color." The group said that it is "the nation's first trade association specifically formed" for that purpose.
Of the 520 cannabis businesses that have applied for or received a license from the Cannabis Control Commission, only 24, or 4.6%, are owned by people who self-identified as a minority, according to commission data. The Boston Globe reported that just two of the businesses holding active licenses are owned by people in the CCC's program specifically geared towards promoting social equity in the marijuana industry.
[Related: Minorities are hard to find in legal pot industry]
And of the legal industry's 5,300 employees registered with the CCC, about 74 percent identified as white and more employees declined to provide a race or ethnicity than identified as either African-American, Latino or Hispanic.
Before a business can even apply for a license from the CCC, it has to secure its local approvals and execute a host community agreement with the municipality, a process many entrepreneurs have said cities and towns use to pry a larger piece of the business's revenue than the state law allows.
"On the municipal level, this is not unlike the Jim Crow laws or civil rights struggles of the past, whereby higher-level mandates for equity are being intentionally or irresponsibly ignored on the local level," Richard Harding, an equity advocate and RACE co-founder, said. "Statewide, the voters have clearly called for legalization to be carried forth in a manner that promotes equity, but on the municipal level, from Brockton to Cambridge to Western Massachusetts, equity is being sabotaged."
Though RACE intends to be a statewide organization, it is focusing its initial efforts on Cambridge. That city has been embroiled in a debate over how it will handle cannabis businesses, with RACE organizers alleging Thursday that "equity measures are on the brink of being ignored or wiped out."
Equity is a central component of the marijuana law passed by voters in 2016 and the law as rewritten by the Legislature the following year. The law mandates that the Cannabis Control Commission adopt "procedures and policies to promote and encourage full participation in the regulated marijuana industry by people from communities that have previously been disproportionately harmed by marijuana prohibition and enforcement and to positively impact those communities."
Entrepreneurs who qualify for as economic empowerment applicants get priority when the CCC reviews business applications and the CCC has runs a social equity program to provide technical and financial assistance to prospective business owners from communities disproportionately harmed by past drug laws.
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