Recreational marijuana has been legal in Illinois since Jan. 2020 and sales have soared.
March saw the state’s highest sales of cannabis yet. The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation reported that sales topped $100 million (in and out-of-state cannabis users spent $109,149,355.98 greenbacks on the leafy green drug).
But people of color like Deborah Dillon continue to be shut out of the legal cannabis trade. Gov. J.B. Pritzker and backers of the legalization law made promises that Illinois would use decriminalization to usher in a new era of “social equity,” reversing harms caused primarily to people of color by the war on drugs.
“This whole debacle is to the benefit of the incumbents and to the politically-connected and to the wealthy. There’s no effort, no real effort for social equity. At all,” Dillon said.
Her name was on 11 of the more than 4,500 submitted to the state, each seeking a shot at 75 lucrative licenses for a cannabis dispensary.
The licenses were supposed to favor so-called “social equity” applicants from distressed communities or who’d been impacted by the war on drugs and were to have been awarded May 2020.
Twenty-one applicants achieved a perfect score and earned a place in the lottery that will decide which entities won licenses and where. Dillon was not among them, although she said she came close.
And she still may have a chance.
The state still hasn’t held a lottery to dole out those 75 licenses. There are questions about the validity of the scoring process and frustrations that only “perfect” scores moved on. Only applicants with what Dillon called a “unicorn” – a majority interest in a dispensary who is a veteran and meets social equity criteria – received all points.
Rather than hold a lottery, applicants like Dillon were given opportunities to correct “deficiencies” in the paperwork.
Dillon said after the many hours of sweat equity she’s put into the project, it’s well worth her time, even if the process to amend the application’s deficiencies is so difficult, she said it was “like picking fly feces from a pepper.”
Meanwhile, Illinois is facing six lawsuits over the plagued process.
Pritzker’s cannabis control adviser Toi Hutchinson acknowledges “hiccups.”
“It’s been extremely challenging to try to dismantle what’s so incredibly, for lack of a better term, baked into the system. But I do believe that when this is all done we’re going to have the most diverse ownership in the country,” Hutchinson said. “We just have to get through the difficulties of getting this off the ground and getting through litigation and passing legislation and fixing and tweaking and making sure that we celebrate the fact that here in Illinois we don’t argue about whether we should do this, we argue about how much more we can do and how we have to…
Read More: Legislation Aims to Fix Stalled Equity Efforts in Illinois Cannabis