We have a speaker, Will Jones III, MPA, Director of Community Engagement and Outreach at Smart Approaches to Marijuana. He will discuss marijuana commercialization as social justice. Smart Approaches to Marijuana promotes an approach that neither legalizes nor demonizes marijuana and shuns dichotomies such as incarceration versus legalization. Please use the Q&A box to submit questions to the presenter. You may enter questions at any time, and the presenter will answer as many as he can during the Q&A session. Unfortunately, during the limited time we have today, the Q&A can, if you wish, spill over into the break, our 10-minute break. If you wish, you can stay. If not, take your break and head off to the workshops, which will begin at 2.35 p.m. Eastern Time, 11.35 p.m. Pacific Time. So we'll now start this 23-minute tape. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Will Jones. I am the Director of Community Engagement and Outreach at Smart Approaches to Marijuana. Really honored to be able to share with you all this afternoon just briefly a little bit about our organization. We're a non-profit policy organization. We work on marijuana policy. We're founded by Dr. Kevin Sebeck. He worked for the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations as a senior drug policy advisor, as well as Patrick Kennedy. And so we work just in the area of research and policy on marijuana, as well as we have a policy for that works with legislators at the state level, local, and national level in crafting marijuana policy in a way that's in accordance with the latest research and data and that protects public health moving forward. And that's really our goal with our organization is to make sure that policy is aligned with the latest research and the latest data as we're looking at the impacts that legalization and commercialization can have on public health. I have no relevant disclosures, as this slide says, and the learning objectives for this brief 15 minutes that we have is to summarize key data and research relevant to the impact of marijuana commercialization on minority communities, review past patterns and emerging trends of major investors in marijuana commercialization, and assess investor companies' public health influence on underserved populations. And I always tell people my goal when presenting this research and data is not to persuade anyone or tell someone how to think or definitely not how to vote or anything like that, but really to bring up issues and bring up data and research that are really pertinent, really important as we're moving forward in this area with marijuana policy in different ways in different states. These are some areas that may not be talked about as much. I always say it's one of the things that's a success for me is if at the end of a presentation someone said, hey, that's some data, that's some research that I hadn't thought of before, hadn't seen before, and I'm going to dig into that and really inform myself on that. And so that's the goal again, just so that we can be informed as we're making decisions on this, as we're moving forward with this in different capacities, with the organizations that we work with and what have you, that we can make an informed decision based on all the relevant data and research that's out there on this topic. So I'm going to be talking about marijuana policy, commercialization and its impact in minority communities. And there's three primary arguments, three core social justice arguments that I predominantly hear in this space. One is arrest and incarceration. Second area is business equity initiatives. So legalization, regulating would give entrepreneurs of color an opportunity to kind of be at the table and invest in the industry and then reinvesting in communities harmed by the war on drugs. So the tax revenue from legalization would be redirected towards underserved communities, and especially again, communities that have been harmed by the war on drugs. And so those are the three core arguments, and I kind of want to, I'm going to give a little bit of a brief history kind of on the commercialization, some of the big companies that are investing in legalization, and then briefly give just kind of an overview of some of the data that we're seeing and how these stated goals of legalization and commercialization, how they're actually holding up to what's happening in different states. So won't have time to dig deeply into that, but hopefully bring up some good points in data that can help us all as we're looking into this area. So like I said, they're going to start with a little bit of history of some of the major investors in legalization and commercialization right now, and start out with this quote, because it's so relevant, I think, to what has happened in the past, what is in communities of color, and I've got a slide coming up just showing my neighborhood. But this was the stated objective and strategy of big tobacco companies with their products in all of our lifetimes. You know, they said, we don't smoke that stuff. We just sell it. We reserve the right to smoke for the young, the poor, the black, and the stupid. They said this in the 90s, and we're still seeing the impact of that type of predatory marketing practices, disproportionately targeting vulnerable populations with products that are even more harmful. Frankly, you've seen that as well with cool cigarettes and things like that. This was how they marketed, because it was an addiction for profit industry. And now these same companies, unfortunately, and we've got a couple of slides coming up, have been investing heavily, hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, actually, in legalization and commercialization. And so it's just very important that we remember their past, and kind of the question we should ask ourselves is, you know, are they going to do something differently if they're selling a new product? And that's why I have the second slide, and I always tell people, like, if you don't really remember my entire presentation, I do hope this image sticks in your minds. This is me and my daughter last summer, or the summer before last, and I went to get her some ice cream. This is not a liquor store. I did not take her into a liquor store. This is the closest convenience store to my house, and what I tell people is when I started working on this issue in Washington, D.C., the closest store to my house in any direction was a liquor store. I could go a little bit farther and get to a convenience store like the one you see here, but it's so covered with advertisements, as you see, for alcohol, tobacco, and the lottery that you can't even see, you know, inside the windows of these stores. And the reason I have that magical change question there is, again, if you don't remember anything else, this is the question I think that's very important for us to look into to research and answer, is if these same companies are allowed to sell marijuana, you know, in the coming years, do we have any reason to believe that they will do anything different than what they are still allowed to do today in minority communities? Because these pictures right here are not 150 years ago. This is today. If you go to those stores in my neighborhood, this is still what is allowed from a marketing, from a regulatory perspective, and so will these companies do anything differently if they're just selling a different product? And so, you know, from my perspective, and again, when I began working on this issue in D.C., there were campaigns that said things like legalization ends discrimination. And to me, if that is your understanding of, you know, that the complex issues of discrimination in our culture and systemic injustice are going to be dealt with through legalization, then, you know, that's at best a shallow and naive understanding of, you know, these deep issues that exist in our culture and in our society and our politics. And so from the perspective that I was coming from, it looked like, honestly, an appropriation of issues of social justice by companies that wanted to make billions of dollars off of it. And again, it almost seemed the way that history was repeating. We see that KUHL did this, partnering with organizations in minority communities to embed themselves and their brand in communities. We see the same thing now there on the right with some companies that are getting into the space of selling marijuana products, the same thing, hosting events in communities, getting that brand image established and partnering with advocacy organizations to do that. And, you know, really telling quote from Brown and Williams and a big tobacco company that they said is clearly the sole reason for B&W's interest in the Black and Hispanic communities is the actual potential sales of B&W products within these communities and the profitability of these sales. This relatively small and often tightly knit minority community can work to B&W's marketing advantage if exploited properly. I want to repeat that last phrase again, if exploited properly. And so really, I think that we need to be aware as we're moving in this area of marijuana legalization, commercialization, that there are companies and some companies, frankly, that sold cigarettes in the past that now are looking at this as an alternative product line. This is just why we kind of already talked about this and so I'm not going to dwell too long here, but those are some of the stores on the left there where you see Big D Liquor and Benning Heights Market, closest stores to my house. And what we're seeing, whoops, went the wrong way, in Colorado is some of the same type of things. We're seeing oversaturation in minority communities. This is from the Denver Post, from some research that they did, one cannabis business for every 47 residents in minority communities and in Colorado, more pot shops than Starbucks and McDonald's combined. So I would tell people to kind of just imagine walking down the streets, you see a McDonald's or Starbucks, replace that with a pot shop. That's the level of saturation that we're talking about and that's particularly heavy in minority communities. And just quickly, one of the things that we've seen in this space is that for legislators, it's more advantageous to move forward with commercialization instead of decriminalization because many people's support for legalization is to deal with the actual issues of social injustice, to deal with those issues of disproportionate targeting of people of color. The negative for legislators often is that if you decriminalize first, then some of the appetite for legalization goes away. And so that's why we had in places like New Jersey, where decriminalization was introduced for many years, Senator Scutari said, I don't want to do anything to jeopardize outright legalization. And so that's why we see policies that are fixated specifically on commercialization instead of focus on the social justice issues, which can be achieved through decriminalization, expungements, resentencing. Those are things that actually could deal with those issues through decriminalization. And so very briefly in the time that's left, just going to give a bird's eye view of some of the data that we're seeing from this area and some of the potential impacts of that. So arrest and incarceration, a report from the ACLU said that extreme racial disparities in marijuana arrests persist even in legalized or decriminalized states. In some, they found in places like California, arrests did not change or simply followed a downward trend that began before legalization. So there's no clear data showing that there's a significant connection to reduction in arrests of African-Americans and definitely not in the disparities that we see in the rates that comes through legalization. This is from the ACLU and ACLU does advocate for legalization, but I think it's important to know, again, even organizations advocating for that acknowledge that there's not a real clear connection there. And really, I think part of why we see this is that there is a mixed metrics, especially in the medium when you're talking about this. So if you look at specific arrest rates for things like patrol searches, this is NBC News, you will see significant reductions after legalization. It's natural that after you legalize, there will be some reductions in marijuana arrests. However, if you're looking at this from a real evaluation of are we making progress in terms of metrics of what is this doing in terms of inequalities that we see towards people of color in the criminal justice system, we see that, for example, in Colorado, overall arrests of African-Americans have actually increased since legalization and have not gone down to the same levels. They've not decreased yet to the pre-legalization levels. And again, it's too soon to say, and I'm definitely not going to say that's because of legalization, but we can say that there has not been a significant reduction. There's been an increase. And again, there's a lot of research that needs to continue to go on to determine why that is. We have a couple of theories and hypotheses that we're working on, but the fact is they haven't reduced. There's more African-Americans that are being arrested in Colorado after legalization than before. I'm going to quickly go through some of these slides. They're just showing the same thing, breaking it down a little bit more. Not going to dwell too much on this, but just to show the data is there. This is from the Colorado Department of Public Safety where we're pulling the data. And all the data in the slides that are coming is mostly from reports from state governments. So on view arrests are more likely. And just briefly, people often say, well, why are arrests more likely after legalization? One of the things, and this is from personal experience, I would say is that if you're an individual or if you're an individual officer or department that enforces the law with bias, just because marijuana is legal, that doesn't change your bias. And so you will still find ways to implement your bias, whether that's saying that the person has too much marijuana on them, they're using it in a place that they shouldn't be using. There's various reasons. And as a Black man, I've been pulled over for no reason. Just driving while Black is what we call that. And so with legalization, there are still ample opportunities. And my biggest concern is that legalization doesn't hold anyone accountable, doesn't remove people from positions of power that have been enforcing the law with bias. It creates a new industry. But the existing structure that allows the enforcement of the law in biased ways still exists. Alcohol is responsible for twice as many arrests as all other drugs combined. And so the fact that something's legal is not going to mean that law enforcement will not find ways to enforce the law in tangential ways around that. And again, another example in New York was Eric Garner, who was allegedly selling cigarettes when he was murdered by the police. Cigarettes are perfectly legal. So again, that shows, I think, the deeper issues that need to be dealt with in terms of criminal justice reform, policing reform, but legalization, as we're seeing from the data, doesn't actually deal with that, unfortunately. Also, the other major concern that we can have is with the school-to-prison pipeline, because it's still illegal for children, if you're under the age of 21. And so there again is another big issue. We saw in Colorado that actually, while it did decrease 5% for white youth, it actually increased 35% for Latino youth and 58% in the years following legalization in Colorado. So really some data that we need to look at and research and evaluate. Some more data about adult arrests, but just because of time, I'm not gonna go through that. So in Massachusetts, we're seeing the same thing, that overall arrests actually of African-Americans increased after legalization. There was no decrease. And actually in 2020, though, in every state, it shows us there was significant reduction in arrests. That's because that's when COVID hit. When we look at the incarcerated population, we kind of see the same patterns as well. And again, this is a very big overview, but in D.C., our prison population was decreasing for several years. Colorado, same thing. In that first out of Alaska, they had a relatively steady prison population. First dotted line you see is when legalization happened. And in D.C., our prison population began to increase. Colorado, you see the same thing. In Alaska, it stayed steady after that. And again, this is not to say that legalization causes an increase, but in every state that you look at, there's no significant decrease in the prison population after legalization's passed. So we can kind of conclusively say that it's not reducing the prison populations. Is it increasing that? Again, we have to look at the research and data to look more into why that is happening. The interesting thing and where those question marks are beneath Colorado and Alaska is they actually did pass some legislation afterwards that was specifically targeted at criminal justice reform. In Colorado, it had something to do with parole violations. In Alaska, it had to do with first-time offenses like shoplifting and different things. You couldn't be incarcerated for that. And they saw significant reductions in their prison populations after passing legislation that was actually targeted at criminal justice reform. And so one perspective that I think that we have to be aware of, and that's very concerning for me, is that it seems as if legalization is stealing the oxygen from the room from more productive legislation. If we care about these things, reduction of incarcerated populations, reduction in arrests of people of color, things like that, legalization is stealing the oxygen from the room from reforms that have actually shown in the same time period that legalization did nothing or maybe there's an increase. They show in the same time period that they're much more effective at addressing these deeper issues. Just another California, same thing. Their prison population continued on the same trajectory. There was a slight increase if you see there in 2017, right after they legalized and then it continued on this prior trajectory. So again, that's a very high overview of what we're seeing there. With business equity initiatives, we're seeing kind of unfortunately some of the same things that many of the promises that have been made in terms of opportunities for entrepreneurs of color are not being upheld. So we're seeing, for example, legal marijuana made big promises for social equity and fell short. The president of the Minority Cannabis Business Association said, time is really up on selling your business stream as a social justice movement. In places like Illinois, which said they had the most equity-centric legalization legislation that was passed in the first state to pass it by a legislator a year after they had legalized, there were still no entrepreneurs of color in Chicago that had a license. And again, we could dig it, if more time could dig into why that is, but just to say that headline after headline is showing that this is a repeated pattern in state after state after state that has done this. Nationally, I think it's still less than 5% ownership by entrepreneurs of color in the cannabis industry. And so again, this shouldn't be a talking point. One way to look at is, if this is the primary reason for legalization, this isn't being upheld. Again, if we wanna say we wanna achieve that, after legalization has happened, that's a different discussion, but to say this is the reason to do it, and then it's not happening, that is problematic. Again, when we're looking at the data, the research, the headlines of what's happening. And again, this is in every state that has legalized since then. And it's the same existing problems, like for example, in this article in Politico, despite the application's high score, this is a minority application, it was disqualified based on a scrivener's error, a minor inconsistency in two parts of the application. So again, this is just to say the issues of systemic injustice, they still exist and the bias is still there. And so unfortunately with legalization, those deeper issues don't go away. There's almost just a new frontier for them to be applied to. The systemic bias is now applied to cannabis related issues in this space. Reinvesting in communities harmed by the war on drugs. Again, same thing, it sounds great. We haven't seen really any data from states that have been able to actually achieve that. It often gets redirected into general funding or different political games where the money gets rearranged so that there's not an actual tangible higher amount that's getting sent into communities harmed by the war on drugs as of yet. I know some states are still working on trying to make that happen, but as of yet, that hasn't happened. Just very briefly gonna show you also in less than a minute, a video from Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez. She is an advocate for legalization as well, but I think she has a very valuable perspective and insight in terms of the data of what's actually happening, where she says it's actually compounding the racial wealth gap. And again, she advocates for legalization, but she's aware of what's actually happening in this space. Compounding the racial wealth gap right now based on who is getting the first mover advantage. According to an industry trade publication, 73% of cannabis executives in Colorado and Washington are male, 81% are white. In the state of Massachusetts, just 3.1% of the marijuana businesses in the state were owned by minorities, and just 2.2% were owned by women. Is this industry representative of the communities that have historically bared the greatest brunt of injustice based on the prohibition of marijuana? Absolutely not. It doesn't look like any of the people who are reaping the profits of this are the people who were directly impacted. That's correct. And so again, I think she puts it well there. And again, this is just kind of a thing where we have to again, acknowledge our own history in this area. If revenue from the lottery, for example, or tobacco, if that revenue could be redirected to communities that have been harmed in the schools on, my side of the city should be the best in the city, but they're not, even though we see this type of massive predatory marketing still allowed today. Eight times as many liquor stores in communities of color in Baltimore, for example, than in white communities. And so again, with all of this, the system has not been changed yet in terms of the way that cannabis is sold. It has not been changed yet. And so we haven't seen either any change with where cannabis is legal, where there's kind of been a redirection of wealth or redistribution of wealth from taxes or anything else like that. This is my final slide. And just to give a little bit of a touch on how it's personal for me, my great grandfather and my great uncle were the first to sit in desegregate schools in Washington, DC. And I can say that was a hard thing to do. And I contrast, they didn't get a lot of money for doing, they didn't get any money for doing that. And it's curious to me how individuals, like John Boehner today is getting $24 million if marijuana is legalized at the federal level. It's just curious to me how kind of this contrast of how businesses have been able to successfully, independent of the data of what's actually happening, but has been successfully able to frame their business interests as a social justice issue. And so again, for me, it's really important that we actually investigate, look at the data, look at the research of what's actually happening and be honest about who's gonna be benefited by commercialization, who is currently benefiting from that and separate kind of promises, campaign promises of legalization, I would say, separate that from the data of actually what's happening. And I think we owe it to ourselves to be informed on this issue as we move forward in this very important space. That is my time. And I actually gone 20 minutes. So I'm not sure that we still have time for questions. I guess we'll see what the organizers, if there is still time for questions. If not, it's been really a pleasure and honor to share with you this afternoon. This is my contact information, happy to dig deeper. I know I gave a very big overview of all those topics. So to dig deeper with anyone or continue the conversation on anything that I presented. So thank you again so much for your time. Thank you. It is now 12 to 31 Eastern time. The workshops begin in four minutes. So you can take your break. However, for those of you who want to not take your break, we do have only five minutes to address questions to Mr. Jones. Things have run over. Let's see. There's so many questions, I'm not sure. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, yeah. And thank you everyone for the questions. I'll try to go through some of them very quickly. The first comment was very interesting about Quebec. I actually lived there for four years. I think Canada has a completely different landscape in terms of regulating, even cigarettes, for example. If you see their cartons for cigarettes there, they have pictures of like disease, lungs, or mouth cancer, different things like that. They take a whole different approach. They also have universal healthcare there. So I do agree that looking, I say this very often, my position is not that it's impossible to do these things in a correct way. But when we look at the things that make the United States unique in terms of different policy issues we do see some problematic issues. I think Vermont, it would be the closest to that in terms of having, it's legalized, but a very strict regulatory system. I don't think there's any allowed for any advertisement and things like that. But that would be, I think Vermont might be the closest to something like Quebec, but still not very much. It's still very different with the unique things that we have here in the US. And then Alison Jones and I'm not Dr. Jones. So I did want to clear that up as well. Do you have any data regarding racial breakdown of changes in support for legalization or not? Great question. And I don't actually have data for every state. I do like know for DC when we voted on legalization and I should update myself on some of the other states, but the sector of the city that was most against legalization was my side of the city. So African-Americans actually had the highest opposition. It was the other side of DC, Georgetown and other places that had a significantly higher margin, I think 10 to 20% higher percentage voting for legalization than when you're looking at demographics within African-Americans, particularly in Ward seven and eight, which is where I live and work here in DC. And again, though, I'm not familiar with every state on what that breakdown would be, but I do know that's what it was here in DC. One minute left, Mr. Jones. We have another symposium tomorrow folks on this very same topic. We'll give you one more minute. Yeah, please do. If anyone wants to follow up my email, please do that. One other great question I thought though was why do you think some rates of black white arrests have arisen after legalization? And kind of like I said there in the presentation, the heart of we're talking about systemic injustice and inequality. And so if the heart of that isn't dealt with holding individuals accountable that enforce the law with bias, they can still find a way to do so. And so I think that may account for some of that. Also again, alcohol is responsible for twice as many arrests as all other drugs combined. So when you have more people using a substance that does give you an altered mental status like alcohol, like marijuana and other drugs for some individuals that gives them a higher chance to encounter law enforcement. They may do something they may not ordinarily do. That's another possible reason. And then it also gives ample reason in terms of what we saw in DC. So possession skyrocketed for African-Americans, 80% of these arrests were for African-Americans, but it was for possession and use of marijuana in places where you weren't supposed to use it. And we saw, I think, over 100% increase in that. And so again, I think part of it is if you don't deal with the underlying issues of systemic injustice and discrimination and enforcement of the law, then those bad actors can still find a way to enforce their bias, unfortunately, for whatever reason that may be. Thank you so much. Audience, please go to your workshops and thank you for stimulating, sitting in for a stimulating morning. Bye all. Thank you.

marijuana commercialization

social justice issue

arrest and incarceration

business equity initiatives

racial wealth gap

cannabis industry