First of two parts
Most people in the legal weed industry viewed the state of California’s Cannabis Equity Grants Program for Local Jurisdictions as a good-faith attempt to right historical wrongs. And when Sonoma County applied for a slice of the revenue stream to pass along to qualifying businesses, it felt like that mission was being fulfilled locally.
But the first round of grant recipients may have triggered more bickering than backslapping.
Some small producers and people of color working in the legal cannabis trade claim they were left behind in the process, calling the county’s qualifying criteria misguided and exclusionary.
“The goal was to achieve equity, which essentially is an attempt to ensure fairness and justice, by acknowledging that not everyone starts from the same place,” said Natasha Khallouf, owner of Agricola, a cannabis farm near Penngrove. “However, this approach seems to be giving a bigger boost to those who were already at a more advantageous starting point.”
When California voters legalized marijuana in November 2016, they ratified a proposition that called for regulating cannabis in a way that “reduces barriers to entry into the legal, regulated market.”
The decadeslong war on drugs, which publicly focused on more addictive substances like crack and heroin, also heavily impacted sellers and users of weed. And it took a particularly devastating toll on poor Black and Latino communities.
From 2006-2015, Black Californians were twice as likely to be arrested for cannabis misdemeanors and five times more likely to be arrested for cannabis felonies than white Californians, according to California Department of Justice data. During the same period, Latino Californians were 35% more likely to be arrested for cannabis crimes than white Californians.
When weed was decriminalized, many of the people most severely impacted were not in position to take advantage.
As the authors of the California Cannabis Equity Act of 2018 wrote, “Persons convicted of a cannabis offense and their families suffer the long-term consequences of prohibition. These individuals have a more difficult time entering the newly created adult-use cannabis industry due, in part, to a lack of access to capital, business space, technical support, and regulatory compliance assistance.”
Poverty and criminalization
Sonoma County recognized that cruel irony when it applied for the equity grant money. But defining who was harmed has proved to be contentious.
For guidance, the county contracted with Humboldt State University’s California Center for Rural Policy in 2021 to perform a comprehensive analysis. The researchers found plenty to write about. And much of it addressed racial disparities.
That began with the goal of the Humboldt State assessment, clearly stated at the beginning of the report: “Provide a data-informed look at the history of impacts of poverty and the criminalization of cannabis on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).”
The Center for Rural Policy’s 90-page assessment identified two distinct groups that had been duly impacted by the war on drugs in Sonoma County.
One was “legacy cultivators that have struggled to get past the permitting process.” The other was “disproportionately criminalized BIPOC, especially Latinx, people with expertise across cannabis supply chains.”
The latter group, it was noted, lacks access to the county’s regulated weed industry.
“As in the rest of California and across the nation, wealthy, white stakeholders increasingly own Sonoma County’s licensed cannabis landscape whose investments in land and resources result in limited opportunities for small cannabis businesses,” the assessment says.
The Humboldt State researchers presented data tables and maps to support the inclusion of both those populations, and the county acknowledged both when it announced the equity grant program.
But the standards Sonoma County used for inclusion did not serve both equally, some now argue.
Its cannabis regulators, who work within the County Administrator’s Office, created two tiers of eligibility criteria. The second tier included 11 parameters, all of which would be used to determine the dollar amounts of awards. They included things like low-income status, size of operation, military service and participation in the foster care system — factors that might reasonably identify people who had faced significant hurdles in life.
But those factors didn’t come into play unless an applicant first cleared the first tier, and that one was defined narrowly: The applicant or one of his or her family members had to have been arrested and/or convicted of a cannabis-related crime.
Sonoma County’s cannabis equity program was meant to address racial disparities. Some say it made them worse Read More