For a city that celebrates its love of weed with an annual festival, Boston is moving at a snail’s pace with instating recreational marijuana dispensaries. Though voters approved recreational marijuana nearly two years ago, City Hall officials decline to put a timeline on when and where shops will open.
An attorney working with Massachusetts marijuana businesses told The Boston Globe that delays are probably a result of the Cannabis Control Commission, which works to approve licenses for businesses, not prioritizing the licensing of testing labs — the commission has said they are moving with care, even if it means missing deadlines for retail sales.
It’s reasonable for a commission tasked with something as important as establishing a new drug industry to take the job seriously. But the rate at which the commission is missing deadlines, and the amount of money the state could have made that has been lost along the way, is becoming excessive.
What benefits are there for holding the licensing process up for years, when the public has already voted that they’re in favor? Access to recreational marijuana is something that the voters clearly want, but the administration appears to not have an incentive to push forward in a timely manner. If anything, the state is losing money while officials drag their feet.
Officials who managed the campaign for the 2016 ballot question are saying the state has lost out on $16 million in potential cannabis taxes simply due to the commission’s inefficiency. Boston residents are aware of just how many things this money could have gone to — the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority doesn’t have the means to address both its broken infrastructure and poor timeliness, and the Boston Public School District is grasping at straws to deal with decreased enrollment, which causes a decline in state aid.
It’s irresponsible of city officials to delay this any further. Nevada and California approved non-medical laws the same time Massachusetts passed Ballot Question 4 in November 2016. But while Massachusetts is still waiting for its administration to even negotiate “community agreements” with marijuana companies, retail shops have been open in Nevada since July 2017 and in California since January 2018.
As the commission looks into which businesses it will license, it has “totality” guidelines in deciding who gets to open a dispensary, allowing for arbitrary decisions. Discrimination in the licensing process isn’t necessarily inevitable, but it’s more inevitable with vague guidelines.
At the very least, the fact that some communities have been disproportionately affected by the war on drugs should be taken into consideration. In several neighborhoods, officials must decide between two applicants who have applied to be in the same area — hopefully, they will favor companies with entrepreneurs from communities that have been historically oppressed by the criminalization of marijuana.
Making small reparations for communities that have been historically impacted by the war on drugs and acknowledging how this has impacted minorities won’t make the damage go away, but it should be part of the conversation.
Recreational marijuana will be a booming industry when dispensaries are rolled out. It would be an injustice to lower-income communities to put them at a disadvantage in the licensing process, as is the case with the city’s liquor licenses.
The majority of Boston’s liquor licenses are held by businesses in wealthy communities like Back Bay and the North End, while minority neighborhoods like Dorchester, East Boston and Jamaica Plain have historically been awarded fewer licenses and are thus limited economically. We can only hope that the administration has learned from the mistakes they’ve made in inhibiting underserved communities.
People of color should not be serving decades in prison for selling marijuana while white, upper-class business owners are chosen by the government to benefit from a booming new industry. White people should not be making money for doing the same thing that has resulted in the disproportionate incarceration of people of color.
