When the General Assembly authorized the state’s medical marijuana program, it instructed the licensure commission to “actively seek to achieve racial, ethnic, and geographic diversity when licensing medical cannabis growers; and encourage applicants who qualify as a minority business enterprise.”
Rather than seeking such a study or adopting race-neutral language that could have had a similar effect, the commission moved forward with regulations that didn’t mention race, only geographic diversity. Prospective licensees were then ranked through a blind evaluation of their applications; those awarded preliminary grower licenses were overwhelmingly headed by white men, and though minority equity participation in some companies is significant, none qualify as African-American owned.
The Legislative Black Caucus objected…sought a complete re-do of the process with a new commission, but that would have been far more unfair to the companies that had made investments based on their preliminary licenses — and would have kept patients waiting even longer for access to the drug.
Read more from the Source: Md.’s marijuana mess – Baltimore Sun
