Cannabis advocates criticized the draft rules in a big way this week, decrying the weak equity effort and saying the most likely result if these rules went into effect would be a swift grab of the 26 licenses by established cannabis companies.
The state set up a poll for the public to weigh in: Click here to access the survey once you’ve read up on the draft rules and the assorted opinions about them.
Proposition 207, which voters approved by a 60-40 margin in November, was written and promoted by the state’s marijuana dispensary industry and primarily benefited the holders of about 130 medical marijuana licenses already active in the state.
The agency hopes to refine and improve the draft rules, and will provide “multiple opportunities for the public to weigh in on the rules to best meet both the letter and intent of the voter-approved initiative,” he said.
The DHS schedule for future public comment isn’t clear, but Elliott said the department’s goal was to file the rules by June 1, the general deadline for all rules related to the new recreational law.
Unlike the old rules, the social equity rules would allow people to obtain a license 18 months before they need to provide proof that they have a physical location for their planned dispensary.
She had hoped to qualify in a different way — by partnering with other people of color who have experience in the cannabis and business worlds.
“They put no thought in it,” she said of the 12-page document, noting that the rules for social equity program in Illinois consisted of about 200 pages.
For instance, a 2020 study by the American Civil Liberties Union showed how Black people and Latinos spent more time in jail for marijuana offenses and were less likely to have their cases dismissed, among other things.
The draft rules’ criteria require license applicants to have earned no more than twice the federal poverty limit in 2019, which would be about $25,000 annually for an individual and $50,000 for a family of four.
She and three other women of color who assert “prior or current experience” in cannabis-related businesses — Shakirah Martinez, Blake Humphrey, and Zsa Zsa Simone Brown — recently started a company called Acre 41 with the hope of securing one of the social equity licenses.
Winners of the license lottery in the draft-rule system would be besieged by “multi-state license holders,” Rodriguez predicted.
The Marijuana Industry Trade Association of Arizona has been gathering potential social-equity license holders and holding seminars to help them move forward with the process.
License applicants, or one of their family members, should have a nonviolent marijuana offense on their record, and the licensed business should be located in, and hire from, the targeted ZIP codes.
Ingrid Joiya, a Black woman, author, and cannabis business consultant who helped write the letter, said the draft rules look more like “social inequity,” with no requirement for the license holder to help people in the “communities disproportionately impacted” as the law required, she said.
Yet Joiya admitted that while other states have tried, or are trying to implement a program that addresses past wrongs that hurt minority communities, none have yet got it right.
First, he wrote, the DHS needs to define the terms it’s using, like “disproportionate impact,” and “speak to these qualities.” The state should have hired professionals to set this up, he said.
“Race is an electrified rail that no one wants to touch, but isn’t that what we’re talking about?” he told New Times.
Yet back in 2012, when the state was first considering how to apportion a limited number of medical marijuana dispensary licenses, a random lottery was chosen out of concerns that anyone who didn’t get a license on their “merits” would sue the state and challenge how the state chose the winners.
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