The regulators tasked with launching New Jersey’s recreational marijuana market say they’re working to ensure multi-state operators and deep-pocketed out-of-towners don’t corner the cannabis market here.
Dianna Houenou chairs the New Jersey Cannabis Regulatory Commission (CRC), a state agency created to establish industry standards after voters gave lawmakers the go-ahead to legalize recreational weed last February.
“These practices are happening all across the country. We know it’s happening here in New Jersey as well,” Houenou said. “There are a lot of fears being expressed about New Jersey’s adult-use industry being dominated by multi-state operators, boxing out New Jerseyans and tokenizing people just for a leg up into the industry and then siphoning all the economic value away from those tokenized people of color or women or veterans.”
She added: “It’s something that we at the CRC have done a lot of thinking around, about how we can help mitigate that.”
As the Garden State’s marijuana market ramps up, Cabrera and other minority applicants are feeling frustrated and excluded from the process. Beyond feeling like an underdog beside corporate competitors, these “canna-preneurs” say plenty of obstacles block their business dreams, from jockeying for a limited number of cultivator licenses to losing money on overhead costs as the start of the state’s recreational sales continually gets postponed.
There are even barriers built into the application itself, with applicants asked to show financial capacity or prior experience selling marijuana in a retail environment — qualifications few applicants besides already-established businesses would have.