Illinois is set to hold a lottery before month’s end, deciding the first winners among the thousands of applicants that long ago submitted bids to open cannabis dispensaries under the 2020 law that made marijuana legal.
A lottery’s set for July 29, with another Aug. 5 and a third Aug. 19; successful applicants will win coveted licenses to collectively open another 185 cannabis dispensaries throughout Illinois.
“As far as I’m concerned, we want to make sure that they go as smoothly as possible, and so we’ve been working every day since this bill was passed really to try to set up the lottery so we get the results that we’re all expecting,” Gov. J.B. Pritzker said.
The bill the Democratic governor was referencing House Bill 1443, which he signed into law Thursday morning, that is intended to fix flaws with the original licensing setup.
Currently the only places that have been legally selling cannabis have been connected to licenses issued years before, when only medical marijuana was permitted. Those profiting from the industry are nearly all white men, despite Pritzker’s pledge that when Illinois legalized marijuana, the state would use the levers under its control to elevate people of color and those who’d been punished, and even sent to prison, when using and selling marijuana was a criminal activity.
Illinois was supposed to have awarded its first social equity dispensary licenses a year ago May.
Instead, lawsuits and criticisms of a flawed application scoring progress have put it on hold.
Those seeking limited state licenses to transport, grow and infuse cannabis have likewise been delayed for a year.
But Thursday, the state department of agriculture announced it is ready to award 213 licenses, 67% of which will go to applicants who are people of color.
CEO of Chicago-based cannabis company 11th Level Inc., Akele Parnell, was among those who learned that his team won a craft grow license.
“I’m super excited. It’s the culmination of months, no years, of hard work at this point. We had a small team, bootstraps, social equity, all that stuff,” he said.
Parnell says to him, social equity means giving people and communities harmed by the war on drugs what they need to flourish.
“That includes balancing any imbalances in access to resource and things that are a result of systemic racism, or inequalities in our economy. And so a social equity is meant to level the playing field and also account for that historical inequity in order to give people what they need in order to compete fairly in the marketplace,” Parnell said.
He said the delay in issuing the licenses worked out, given that it would have been a “nightmare” to have opened during the pandemic.
His team doesn’t have the license yet, but if it goes as expected he expects in five months to have a cultivation facility up and running in Rockford, where…
Read More: Has Illinois Fixed its Flawed Marijuana Industry Expansion? | Chicago News