The New Jersey Cannabis Regulatory Commission had touted on Oct. 15 how diverse the businesses being awarded vertically integrated and medical cannabis licenses are.
Except most, if not all, of those minority license winners were white women. In the following days, applicants of color would go on to claim that they had not received accurate points for being “minority” applicants in the scoring and award process.
Al Harrington was one of those Black-owned businesses.
Companies invest millions of dollars into compliance for the regulations, an indicator of how hard it is to win a license when they’re restricted, said Harrington’s application writer Jamil Taylor.
“It’s sad how they’ve structured the process, but that goes to show how valuable these licenses are,” he said. “They’re limiting vertical integration, but they’ve already given vertical integration to the majority white companies.”
Microlicenses, smaller businesses that could apply for cultivation and other aspects of the cannabis industry, would be open for all, but limited in the number of square feet to build and the amount of cannabis they could grow with a maximum of 10 employees.
Those licenses with vertical integration and access to making their own supply of cannabis are some of the most economically valuable ways to get into the cannabis industry — and to create generational wealth.
There’s an imbalance, Taylor said: “To be clear white women were not the targets of the War on Drugs,” he said.