New push for racial equality in marijuana trade

Black entrepreneurs who say people of colour are being shut out of the lucrative marijuana trade are joining forces to close the gap.

Real Action for Cannabis Equity, or RACE, launched Thursday in Boston, and its founders said the coalition will work to create more opportunities in the industry for minority owners.

Organisers said they're frustrated that all but two of Massachusetts' 184 marijuana business licenses have been issued to white operators. Voters in the state approved recreational marijuana use and sales in a 2016 referendum.

Across the US, black people have had difficulty entering the marijuana trade, often because they historically were targeted by anti-drug crackdowns that left them with criminal records.

In Massachusetts, black people were 3.3 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession in 2014 -- two years before legalisation -- despite using the drug at similar rates, RACE said in a statement.

Many communities are using those convictions to deliberately exclude people of colour as they license marijuana businesses, said coalition co-founder Richard Harding.

"On the municipal level, this is not unlike the Jim Crow laws or civil rights struggles of the past, whereby higher-level mandates for equity are being intentionally or irresponsibly ignored on the local level," Harding said.

RACE said discrimination persists even though the Massachusetts ballot initiative included mandates aimed at promoting equity for people of colour who were disproportionately prosecuted, criminalised and incarcerated during marijuana prohibition and the war on drugs.

"Statewide, the voters have clearly called for legalization to be carried forth in a manner that promotes equity, but on the municipal level, from Brockton to Cambridge to Western Massachusetts, equity is being sabotaged," Harding said.

"Fairness is not being achieved in the process, and it is certainly not being achieved in the result."
The state's Cannabis Control Commission, which regulates the industry in Massachusetts, told The Associated Press it's committed to an industry "which includes full participation from people of colour."