On Feb. 3, during Black History Month, the state Cannabis Regulatory Commission sent out a celebratory tweet.
It didn’t go over well.
The comments section was immediately barraged by a host of people asking one fundamental question: How many Black people had been licensed to grow and sell weed?
The CRC has refused, multiple times, to release the specific number of licenses, claiming it has no data available to do so. At the same time, the state agency that regulates the industry is also dealing with a lawsuit that alleges fraud in the diversity certifications it uses to score license applicants.
Black and Hispanic populations in New Jersey and elsewhere bore the brunt of collateral damage in the War on Drugs. That the CRC either has no data to show, or worse, won’t share it, has frustrated state lawmakers, activists and minority business owners — many of whom are the very same people who were harmed by the drug war.