In 2020, House Bill 2870 established the Marijuana Social Equity Program, an application-based process intended to provide people of color, harmed by the war on drugs, opportunities to become more involved in the burgeoning marijuana economy.
The bill currently before the Legislature incorporates many of the policies recommended by the task force, and would create 38 new retail and 25 new producer and processor licenses each year through 2029.
According to a July 2021 self-identified survey from the state’s Liquor and Cannabis Board, 388 retail cannabis stores, making up 81% of the market, are white-owned, while 19 stores, representing 4% of the market, are Black-owned.
“Why aren’t we getting an equitable amount of licenses, specifically in an industry that we were so harmed by and went to jail for consistently?” said Buchanan, who grew up in Seattle’s predominantly Black Central District during the war on drugs.
Drawing parallels between the Black community’s relationship to the cannabis industry and Native Americans’ relationship to the gaming business, Buchanan hopes HB 2022 will open the doors for Black Washingtonians to build generational wealth by becoming more involved in the profitable trade.
HB 2022 would give Black entrepreneurs the opportunities that many in the community say should have been made available to them nine years ago, when marijuana was first legalized in 2012.
The criteria for licensing recommended by the task force, which aims to bring justice to the industry by weighting a social equity application process, are designed to benefit Black applicants and, to lesser extents, Latino and Native American applicants.
The LCB, which initially requested the 2020 bill establishing the task force, testified that it wants to retain the authority to prioritize applications and offered an alternate rubric.
The new legislation would have reduced the distance requirement to 500 feet from schools, on par with alcohol restrictions, but these buffer reductions were dropped from the current version of the bill.
“It’s very hard to find a location that is not next to a playground, a library, a transit center.
There isn’t complete consensus among those in the industry, though.
Several opponents of the bill expressed concern that the hundreds of licenses set to be released through the social equity program would saturate the market with more businesses than consumer demand requires.
“That’s simply what we are asking for in totality, whether it be about buffer zones or whether it be about licenses.
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